A review by naridhi
What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold

5.0

As long as there have been women my mother told me... There have been ways to punish them for being women.










The stories of the martyrs—the awful ways women died—I read these over and over, hearing them in my mother’s voice, seeing in my brain so clearly the men who did the torturing and the killing, the men who told their stories, and the men who turned them into art, carving their flesh into marble, painting the rivers of their blood.
I saw images of their bones, preserved in wax and set on altars, transformed from women into relics.
I recited their names in my head, the virgin martyrs, at night with the lights out
All virgins, all martyrs, all saints.
All tortured. All ruined. All dead.










When i was fourteen my mother told me there was no such thing as unconditional love
"Love for a woman " She said "is always conditioned on her beauty and sex"
I thought about the virgin martyr saints. I thought about the men who had loved them,who killed them.
I thought about my mother and my father, and about my father and his first wife Judy. Her words were a warning, a gift, a benediction.
And I nodded. I believed her.









“There’s no unconditional love between people,” Ruth says. “That kind of love flows one way, like a dog to its master.
“When someone loves unconditionally, they’re saying, “I am your dog. You are my god. That’s who unconditional love is for—dogs and their masters, fools and their gods.”









I turn to go and look back to see the girl slipping the box of tampons furtively into her bag as though she's stealing it, even though i saw her pay for it already









Her voice was brusque, like she was angry
She said" people don't change, Nina. Remember that.








What if they stood up, the Dissected Graces from their beds, the relics from their altars, the wishbone dolls from their boxes? What if they rose and walked, a horde of beautiful zombies? What if they went together to Saint Teresa, shook her gently to wake her from her dream, and helped her down from the pedestal onto which she had been placed?
What if they decided not to be beautiful dogs?
What are they then, this horde, these women, if they are not the fawning lovers of their god? Who are they, free of the conditions they have accepted like layers of chains?
Wake now, beauties. Rise and look around. Shake off the chains. Give up the ghost of love.
















“But what are they?” I asked again.
“They’re the Dissected Graces.”
I had no idea what that meant, but it made perfect sense.

“They’re anatomical models, of sorts,” Mom said. “They were sculpted by Clemente Susini. The idea was that medical students could study these instead of corpses. They wouldn’t rot, they didn’t stink, and, of course, they were beautiful.they look almost alive. The color of their skin. Their expressions.”

“Their coffins look like beds,” I said, “the way their heads are on pillows.”

“Yes,” Mom said. “Look at the way they’re posed. Everything is purposeful, Nina. There are no accidents.”

I saw their open hands, their gently curved fingers. I saw their soft thighs, the hair curled between them.
“If they were just for learning about the body, they wouldn’t need long hair and jewelry,” I said.
“Right,” Mom answered. She sounded pleased, like I was a dog who had performed its trick just right. “But here we have the intersection of love and death again. Of beauty”—she gestured to the figure’s sweet face—“and gore.” Her hand pointed down to the flayed-open chest, the erupting intestines.
“Eros and Thanatos,” I murmured.










Description doesn't do any justice to the story
Which is much more than a teenage girl going through heart break
Its about getting to know your own body
About patriarchy, about the power dynamics in the society, the difference between the genders
The hypocrisy of it all.
It is about coming to teams with harsh realities
Its about how to devalue the ridiculous notion of minute by minute ever fluctuating social relevance and likability

This book is criminally underrated.