Alexandra Kleeman is coming to Symposium on Friday, September 25th at 5:30pm in celebration of her debut novel “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine,” released on August 25th. Kleeman, a Brown alum, is currently a degree candidate for a PhD in rhetoric at UC Berkeley. A writer of fiction and nonfiction, she has been published in The Guardian, Guernica, and Tin House.

A brief synopsis: A woman known only by the letter A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality show called That’s My Partner! A eats (or doesn’t) the right things, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials—particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that only exists in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a news-celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up his local Wally Supermarket’s entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.

Meanwhile B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C’s pornography addiction, and becomes indoctrinated by a new religion spread throughout a web of corporate franchises, which moves her closer to the decoys that populate her television world, but no closer to her true nature.