“It’s humbling how many brilliant minds are in the world and I want to see conversations expand. This impulse is one of the various reasons she left academia, where both the barriers to entry and the strictures of expression seemed to isolate knowledge in the hands of a privileged few. When I point out the book’s seemingly democratic spirit, Vorona Cote quickly agrees. When the author references the persistent lack of stories about young girls of excess, for example, she explains that “the ranks of Too Much girls have hardly thickened, even if the atmosphere has softened.” It’s this kind of diction, full of both meaning and warmth, that fills the book’s pages and beckons the reader closer-these are long-shared understandings finally put into words.
The book’s complex ideas feel accessible and engaging-like having a great conversation with a super smart friend. While Too Much is intellectually rigorous, it doesn’t read like an academic text. I credit my academic training with that particular structural decision: clarify your argument…and your key terms early so that your reader has a roadmap for the rest of the text.” “If I’m going to lob it at readers on every single page I owe it to them to define it fully and to explain the thinking behind that definition. Being “too much” begins as a vague cultural concept that “can refer to nearly anything,” but it becomes weaponized against people-primarily women-whose “dispositions, embodiments, sexualities, disabilities, and so forth are disconcerting or uncomfortable to behold.” Very clearly defining the “too much” concept “seemed especially necessary because I made up a freaking term,” Vorona Cote tells me.
Too Much weaves its way through the myriad ways women can be deemed to be “too much” for this world, but Vorona Cote’s first order of business was defining the meaning of the phrase. “And I’m particularly interested in the stories that we tell ourselves and what stories make us anxious and why.” It was those stories, particularly ones about unwieldy women who refused to live within confines carved by patriarchy-that inspired Vorona Cote to write her debut book Too Much: How Victorian Values Still Bind Women Today (out from Grand Central Publishing on February 25.) “I tend to think about things in terms of narrative,” she says. She grew up on classic literary tales about girlhood such as Anne of Green Gables and Jane Eyre, and then studied literature in college and graduate school. Rachel Vorona Cote has always been fascinated with stories. Rachel Vorona Cote, author of Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today (Photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)
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