I’m Hungry is a comic, restless, semi-autobiographical-feeling coming-of-age novel about a young part-Chippewa poet in Fargo in the mid-1970s. The protagonist begins as Julie, an aspiring poet, waitress, hustler, daughter, lover, survivor and observer; over the course of the book she increasingly calls herself Bazil, taking on the name of a male relative and making it part of her writerly self. The title comes from the simplest, most bodily truth in the novel: hunger for food, sex, language, money, story, recognition, Indigeneity, women, men, danger, art and life. The epigraph already frames the book’s tone: “Don’t ask me. I know it’s only hunger.”
The first chapter, “Silver Swoop,” begins in Fargo in 1975. Julie is wheeling her bicycle with a low tire when she is stopped by a much older New York lawyer in an immaculate suit. He stares at her with unnerving intensity and declares, “You are stunning.” He tells her, “I am harmless,” which of course immediately makes him suspicious. She is a young poet who has come to Fargo “to get famous,” works at Red’s Saloon, lives cheaply above Frederick’s Flowers, writes poems in a gloomy apartment, and survives on leftovers, peanut butter, pickle sandwiches and tips.
The lawyer becomes obsessed with her. He appears at Red’s, tips her fifty dollars, asks for rides, dates and access. She is hungry and poor enough to be tempted, and fascinated enough to continue. He is ridiculous, predatory, exuberant and oddly tender. He tells her he is “married in name only,” a phrase she naively misreads as meaning something tragic or technical rather than simply adulterous. They begin a sexual relationship. The sex is not very good, but his delight in her body is intoxicating. Still, he is also invasive and theatrical, full of gestures, money and entitlement.
