Kelli: Hello friends! Welcome back to Queer Girl Book Club. For our first QGBC pick of 2022, Emily and I read Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body by Megan Milks. This book is a wild ride and I’m super excited to get into it, but first, a content warning: we will be discussing the book’s extensive exploration of disordered eating, so if that’s something you are uncomfortable with, maybe skip this one. Also: spoilers to follow!
Note: This book follows several trans characters pre-transition. For the sake of clarity, we’ve decided to refer to these characters using the names and pronouns the author uses for them in whichever section we are discussing.
With all that said, my first question has to be about the book’s format, because it’s what sets Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body apart from a lot of other things I’ve read. First of all, there is a pretty big split in the book between the first half and the second. We are dropped into 16-year-old Margaret’s world at the beginning of the book, where we learn about the current state of her life in third person perspective. Then, within this first half, we get several Baby Sitters Club-esque mysteries, told by Margaret in the first person, which take place a few years prior. The second half of the novel is set almost entirely at Briarwood, a rehab facility for young people (mostly girls) with eating disorders, and this is all told from… help me out Emily, what’s that perspective called where the reader becomes the subject?
Emily: Second person.
Kelli: Thank you. Anyway, I felt like I should explain all that for people who haven’t read the book just so that y’all don’t get lost during this discussion, but the question I’m trying to ask is: how did this work for you?
Emily: Honestly, while I enjoyed the book as a whole, I felt like the structure was a little uneven. I felt like Milks sort of created rules for the narrative in the first half of the book, and then when we get to Briarwood, those rules are abandoned and we’ve kind of got an entirely new structure that feels like … I don’t know … Not what we signed on for. I know this is a hot take, but I generally enjoy second person, and while Kelli, you describe it as the reader becoming a subject, I would argue that this is actually rarely the case at all. While the book refers to “you,” throughout this section, I think readers read this and understand that the person doing these things is not them but rather a narrator who does not feel comfortable speaking about these things in terms of “I” and “me,” and so they’re using “you” to distance themselves from the things that are happening. When used in this way, I think this can be very effective, and the second person aspect is not what I had a problem with in the second half of the book.
Kelli: This is a great point, and a helpful way of explaining the purpose of this device, which I do think works here, though in some other books I’ve read I’ve found it distracting. Here, it’s marking a clear separation for Margaret in terms of her life and the way she sees herself, so what you’re saying about a subject using second person to distance themselves from an experience makes sense.
Bart… we have bad news
Emily: For one, I was really enjoying the Babysitters Club sections of the first half of the book. I thought it was really cool how mundane Margaret’s present-day life as a 16 year-old seemed in contrast to the wild and fantastical things that happened in her past as part of the Girls Can Solve Anything Club. It’s also probably not a surprise that I loved the Babysitters Club sections because I read the BSC growing up and I’m still a huge fan of those books. Also notable that Kristy Thomas, the leader of the Babysitters Club, is clearly a lesbian, and here we have another lesbian character who is also the leader of a similar club. But ANYWAY. I digress.
Aside from missing the BSC sections, I think what really disappointed me about the second half is that there were some problems set up in the first half that were never fully addressed in the second half. Her friendships. Her sexuality. Those are the two really big ones. A lot of that felt like it got abandoned (until the letter at the end, which we can talk about). I don’t know. How did you feel?
Kelli: I mostly agree with you, I think. I was onboard while reading it, and I also definitely favored the style of the first half and the contrast between Margaret’s past and present storyline. I, too, was curious about how things went with her friendships and her sexuality, and I think I was expecting more closure on that stuff after Margaret left Briarwood, which we didn’t get. I would have happily read a longer book if it meant getting those questions answered in a satisfying way that felt true to the rest of the book.
I also really enjoyed the Babysitters club sections, which reminded me also of like, the Mary Kate and Ashley detective books that I read as a kid. I kind of loved that all of a sudden there’s a teacher doing experiments to transform herself into an actual butterfly, and we just sort of accept this as a fact of this universe. When that happened, I felt like the world of this book was expanding out in front of me and it could go in so many different directions, and it felt really exciting. We don’t ever get clarity on how much of the Girls Can Solve Anything sections actually happened and how much of them were the sort of fantasies we engage in when we’re younger and playing with our friends, but even as we move into the second half of the story we still have supernatural things happening, so I’m more inclined to take all the magical stuff at face value.
I will say that I didn’t mind some of the rules being abandoned once Margaret gets to Briarwood, because that’s kind of where things stop making sense in Margaret’s life, where the person she was before—one who cared about rules and felt confident in her decisions and her leadership abilities—disappears. Towards the end, she literally has to find her way through a senseless labyrinth, which is kind of what the entire second half of the book feels like, and also what “real life” feels like. This might be a generous reading, and I’ll say right now that for me, it does not extend to the final chapter of the book, which—again—we’ll get to later.
Emily: Yeah, for me, I do feel like the scene with the senseless body labyrinth went on for a bit too long. Like when things are that nonsensical, there’s a certain point where you gain nothing more for reading more of it. I got the idea. I understood right away what this journey meant symbolically for Margaret. I mean, she was journeying through a literal disordered body. So if I could go through and edit this book (I can’t. In my dreams), I would say “cut this, take out this letter. Have a real ending.” BUT MORE ON THAT LATER. What else are we talking about?
Kelli: I have to say that I wasn’t expecting this book to be quite so much about eating disorders, though it totally highlights that in the Goodreads description so I must have just hyper-focused on the gayness and the mysteries and forgotten everything else, lol. But I was surprised by how in-depth the novel goes here, exploring not just Margaret’s illness but some of the other people she meets at Briarwood as well. What did you think of the way this book handles EDs?
Emily: I actually related to a lot of this book personally, including the ED section. I have never been anorexic or bulimic, but I guess I have been what could be diagnosed as “EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified).” And I think, like Margaret feels in this book, when you’re not like, super thin to the point of dying and you’re not NOT eating, you do feel like, “Well I don’t really have a problem. I’m kind of a poseur when it comes to eating disorders” or whatever.
Kelli: Yeah, I think that was one of the most interesting parts about this book for me. I have been lucky enough to never have any personal experiences with disordered eating, but I obviously have friends who have, and I was curious about that particular part of Margaret’s experience—and so many of the other people at Briarwood, it seems. The feeling that you’re a poseur, almost like imposter syndrome over how “bad” or “sick” you are. I think that goes hand in hand with the shame associated with most mental health disorders thanks to Society™ but I hadn’t ever read about it through this specific lens, and I found it fascinating and devastating. This section definitely echoed Girl, Interrupted (which the author lists in the acknowledgement sections as a big inspiration), which was a movie/book I loved as a teen, lol. This element of competition among people—especially women or people socialized as women—who are ultimately all in need of help in their own ways.
Emily: I also understood the feeling of not wanting to get better, even though you wish you wanted to get better. As someone who deals with a whole list of mental health issues, I’ve felt that so many times. Like “I know I should get over x,y,z and I would feel better if I could get over x,y,z, but what feels even better than that is just still doing what I’m doing now and not addressing the problem because that would be scary/uncomfortable.” That’s the simplified way of explaining it, but I think this book gets into the complexities of that in a way I think a lot of people who have mental health issues will understand.
Of course, as someone who grew up in the 90s, I also identified with a lot of that stuff as well, even though I was younger in the 90s than this character was. But you’re even younger than I am, so how did you feel about the 90s stuff?
Kelli: Well, we discussed this briefly, but I am not super well-versed on the work of Tori Amos, and listening to “Caught a Lite Sneeze” after reading this book, I was like, yeah… not sure about that one. I was a huge Fiona Apple fan in high school though (still am) so that part I for sure identified with—and really just the parts where Margaret was driving around in her car, listening to music and thinking very deeply about the songs she was hearing. Music feels so personal and important at that age, and I liked how the music was incorporated here, even if it wasn’t necessarily music I listened to myself. As for making mixtapes, I was doing the exact same thing but they were CDs instead, so definitely felt that. I’m part of the last couple years of the Millennial generation before everyone in high school had a smartphone (I didn’t have one, OR unlimited texting, until college; feel sorry for me). So yeah, overall I’d say that stuff worked for me.
We have now reached the part of Queer Girl Book Club where we talk about queer stuff! This book is pretty fucking gay. How did you feel about the different relationships going on here, the queerness and later the more-specifically transness of the novel? I guess this is also where we can get into the ending.
Emily: Yeah… so there’s a lot here. I don’t even know where to begin. I guess let’s start by talking about Margaret’s body because that’s such a huge part of the story. Margaret is extremely uncomfortable in her body, not just because she feels like she’s too “fat,” but also because she worries she’s not really a girl in the way she’s supposed to be a girl. A lot of the talk surrounding her disordered eating goes back to this idea that it’s feminine to not eat and she would feel more like a girl if she was smaller. So then of course when she meets Ian at Briarwood, she has a hard time understanding why he’s* there because eating disorders are supposed to be a “girl thing.” It’s almost like “Damn, this one thing that I thought made me a girl? It might not make me a girl.”
Kelli: Right. And Ian also provides an interesting contrast because later in the novel we learn that Ian also transitions (in the final chapter, she’s Lana)—but even during their time at Briarwood, he talks about how gender is bullshit. At one point Ian says “Maybe I’m gay. I don’t know. It’s more like I don’t like being a guy,” to which Margaret responds (in her head), “How can he say things like that, secret things?” I appreciate that Margaret is figuring out transness in a way that feels realistic, especially for the time in which this is set. The internet was barely a thing, and for teenagers from small towns in the 90s without any exposure to queer culture, the idea or possibility of not being the gender you were assigned at birth might not have occurred until later in life. Margaret didn’t hit puberty and suddenly think “oh shit I’m not a girl”—it took a lot of time and living and struggling to figure it out. Which sucks, and I hope it gets easier and easier as we move into the future. But I valued reading about this experience.
Margaret was also deeply uncomfortable with the idea of queerness in general, or that she might be queer, to the point where extremely obvious things were not obvious to her. Like her crush on Gretchen, or Gretchen’s crush on her. She manages to convince herself that Gretchen’s secret gay best friend is actually her boyfriend, and that they’re having an elicit romance under wraps because the friend group hates him. This is one of the parts of the story that I would’ve liked to get closure on, but Gretchen goes off to Catholic school and Margaret doesn’t really hear from her again. Later, Margaret has a similarly unresolved experience at Briarwood with Carrie, but they take it a step further and actually make out with each other. Margaret then freaks out and backs away. I felt really sad for her in both of these instances, because it was almost like she was being willfully obtuse about her own sexuality. What did you think?
is this gay? jw
Emily: I agree, and I think it’s really interesting to see how she ended up sabotaging both relationships. Like, with Carrie, after they make out, Margaret goes around thinking that Carrie is being cold to her and ignoring her. And she gets really self-conscious about it, and then Carrie is outright like, “You rejected me.” I also really identified with Margaret comparing her body to Carrie’s, especially when they were getting close to each other, and her self-consciousness about the fact that she was the “bigger” one. I think as women, we’re told that part of our femininity is being the small one in the relationship. And so when you’re in a relationship with another woman and you’re not the small one, again, it’s another chance for Margaret to examine herself and think, “Am I really a girl?” I never personally struggled with my gender identity, but I have struggled with body image and comparing my body to other women and attaching value to myself based on that comparison. And when you’re in a relationship with a girl and you’re also dealing with body issues, that body comparison stuff can be really confusing.
But yeah, I want to talk about Gretchen too, because I thought the way their friendship ended was so sad. And while, okay, maybe they were never going to end up riding off in the sunset together as lovers, it would have been nice to see that relationship reconciled in some sort of way. I know maybe that’s not how shit happens in the real world. But people also don’t lose their bodies in the real world, so. Come on, book.
Kelli: One hundred percent agree on both of these points.
Speaking of “come on, book,” let’s talk about the ending. After the disordered body labyrinth, the Briarwood section comes to a close and we get a last chapter, which is a letter Margaret writes to Carrie. Years have passed—we get the impression that Margaret is maybe post-college, or somewhere around there. Margaret now identifies as trans, though we don’t get a specific gender identity or pronouns, so I guess I’ll refer to Margaret as ‘they/them’ when discussing this section.
I think we both agree that this is the weakest part of the book. It’s a bummer, because I was really digging it up until this point, even if I agree with you that the journey inside the body was a bit longer than it needed to be. I also want to make it clear that I think it’s fucking great for Margaret that they’ve figured out they are trans, and the fact that the book ends with them acknowledging that is not at all what my problem is. My problem is that this last chapter reads like an academic paper about the thesis of the book, and it feels more like it’s coming from Milks than from Margaret.
Emily: Yes, in fact, for a letter supposedly addressed to Carrie, it does little to speak directly to Carrie and her relationship with her. There were some good points made, but a lot of it read like “let me explain to you why I wrote this book,” which I didn’t need. I got why she wrote the book. As I mentioned earlier, I would have liked to read more about the character and how they resolved things rather than focusing on the why behind the story.
Kelli: For sure. And at the end of the letter, it’s like, “You were right. This world is bullshit. I wish you were still in it.” Which means Carrie died, which… I want to know more, please. I want to know more about everything, and like I said earlier, I would’ve gladly read like a hundred more pages of this book if it was moving at the pace and in the style of almost every part other than the final chapter. This felt like an afterword, and if it had been, I’d be like, “cool, that was enlightening.” But it felt kind of like when you’re at an art show and you read the artist’s statement and it takes away some of the magic that comes with figuring out something for yourself. For a book that puts so much emphasis on mysteries, it left very little to the imagination at the end.
Is there anything else you wanted to talk about before we do our ratings?
Emily: Not particularly! Just for the record, I like “Caught a Light Sneeze”!
Kelli: This is the millennial divide.
Emily: I guess so.
Kelli: So, even though I feel like we did quite a bit of ‘this would be better if’-ing, I am giving this book four stars. I really admire it for a lot of reasons, and I had a blast reading it, which is impressive for something that goes to places as dark as this goes. It’s weird AF a lot of the time and I was surprised and delighted and never quite sure where it was going to go. I’m super down for whatever Megan Milks writes next.
Emily: Yes. Agreed. I also gave it 4 stars for basically the same reasons. So what you said.
Kelli: Twins! What are we reading next time?
Emily: Well, Kelli, I’m glad you asked. We’re reading Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho. It’s a collection of linked stories about two friends. And, well, I know at least one of them is gay, so yay for that!
Kelli: I can’t wait! Thanks for joining us, y’all. See you in March.