Part memoir (or memwah), part history, part feminist awakening, all suspended together in a gelatinous harmony that works…sometimes

If there is anything that saved this book, it is the writing itself. The book cycles from lyrical, to grotesque, to simple and poignant, but the prose never strays from its easy lyricism, flowing down the page as easily as a glissade of the its namesake dessert sliding down your throat.

That being said, this is not a particularly fun book. I thought, from its cover, its description, simply from the fact that it’s about Jell-O (what I see as one of the more comical foods) that this book was going to be funny. And though it did give me an occasional chuckle

“Even a Jell-O Salad can be radical if made from a sex-positive standpoint”

It was overall just overwhelmingly dour. It is a well crafted memoir, spanning 3 generations of women all encountering a host of traumas not uncommon to their eras, but it lacked a certain levity and balance I was expecting.

There were very few positive moments documented alongside the molestations, illnesses, addictions, and eating disorders, and deaths. In that respect, it felt incomplete—the dramas of a life rather than a real, fleshed out one. At least I certainly hope for the authors’ sake as well as her mother and grandmothers’ that there were more moments of levity in their lives than it seems from this text.

There is also, as one could probably parse from it’s title, or description, or even the image on its cover of a Barbie doll eerily encased like a hunk of canned fruit in the center of a Jell-O mold, a book about women. About generations of women, specific women, and—if one is to take the book at its word—women as a whole. This is where I think this book has to be taken with a grain of salt. Its sweeping denouncements and presumptions about society, womanhood, and how “the curse is patriarchy” often feel melodramatic. In its desire to be bold and unflinching, the book ends up lacking a layer or two of nuance. For although every trauma expressed in this book is deep, often heart-wrenchingly so, there is little mention of the inherent privilege possessed by its subjects, a series of rich, white women who, though facing their own Sisyphean ordeals, never wanted for financial support or faced bigotry beyond sexism.

But all that aside, I enjoyed this book. I enjoyed the way it weaves stories together—the personal with the history of Jell-O itself and the town of LeRoy, the so-called LeRoy girls who inexplicably suffered Tourette’s-like fits and, according to the author’s mother,

“embody the disappointment of a life in which satisfaction stems wholly from a well-manicured lawn, a well-manicured hand, well-behaved children; checking and savings accounts well balanced and safe; a perfect Jell-O salad, so light and clean and wholesome.”

It is a bold story that starts and ends with America’s most unsettling (both literally and figuratively) dessert; like the classic shape of its titular dish, this book comes full circle. It is vivid and dark and heart-wrenching, and now I know WAAAAY too much about Jell-O.

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