An honest, funny, neurotic, and totally gross love child of Mindy Kaling and Mary Roach.Mara Altman’s volatile and apprehensive relationship with her body has led her to wonder about a lot of stuff over the years. Like, who decided that women shouldn’t have body hair? And how sweaty is too sweaty? Also, why is breast cleavage sexy but camel toe revolting? Isn’t it all just cleavage? These … cleavage? These questions and others like them have led to the comforting and sometimes smelly revelations that constitute Gross Anatomy, an essay collection about what it’s like to operate the bags of meat we call our bodies.
Divided into two sections, “The Top Half” and “The Bottom Half,” with cartoons scattered throughout, Altman’s book takes the reader on a wild and relatable journey from head to toe–as she attempts to strike up a peace accord with our grody bits.
With a combination of personal anecdotes and fascinating research, Gross Anatomy holds up a magnifying glass to our beliefs, practices, biases, and body parts and shows us the naked truth: that there is greatness in our grossness.
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Forget that old fake news about sugar and spice. With wit and candor, Mara Altman tells us what girls are really made of — and it’s a hair-raising revelation.
I love how Gross Anatomy delightfully reveals Mara Altman’s upbeat and life-affirming obsession with the human body—our lovelinesses and not-so-lovelinesses. Lots of people will soon feel far more body-positive because of this book.
The author’s interviews with experts and research into clinical/psychological studies are engrossing. It is written to be accessible, maybe at around a fourth grade level, and I do not know what the reasoning for this is. The author has a master’s in journalism, so it must be intentional. Also, it irritated me when the author repeatedly changed her physical appearance, ostensibly for her husband, and then became upset when her husband did not express that he preferred her prior to whatever physical change she had made.
Gross Anatomy from Mara Altman is both a laugh out loud collection of personal essays as well as an “I didn’t know that” collection of lessons about the female body, and to a large extent bodies in general.
Each essay conveys her own battles, mostly internally, with some aspect of inhabiting a body that is only partially under her control. Once the stage is set she shares the results of the research she did, mostly interviews with experts. The key to the success of these essays is the way in which she moves smoothly into the research portion without leaving behind the personal aspects. Her comments about what an expert says helps keep in our minds that this is about living comfortably in our bodies and not simply a collection of interesting facts and research. That grounding in the personal is where this volume excels.
I would recommend this to anyone who would genuinely like to know some whys and hows of our bodily functions. Presented both humorously and compassionately, Altman makes these usually unmentionable topics prime fodder for your next dinner party, well, maybe after the meal has been completed.
Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads.
Gross Anatomy is a charming, deeply-researched, whole-hearted embrace of our imperfections, the things that women don’t talk about because we feel they mar our societally imposed notions of femininity. But after reading Mara Altman’s exploration of her body (and ours) you’ll feel more comfortable with yourself, from head to toe.
Mara Altman treads bravely where most humans dare not go: into the slippery, icky, mushy corners of the collective human bod. She comes out triumphant, concluding hilariously that not every aspect of our bodies needs to be worshiped, purified, and/or plucked. Sometimes bodies are just plain odd. I read this while shrieking, laughing, and eating a bagel — as we bodies do.
Gross Anatomy anoints Mara Altman at once the Mary Karr of sweat, the David Sedaris of head lice, and the Frank McCourt of nudist resorts… What more could you ask for in a book?