Too Much

How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today

By: Rachel Vorona Cote

Narrated by: Suehyla El-Attar, Rachel Vorona Cote

Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, "Too Much spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much" (Esmé Weijun Wang).

A weeping woman is a monster. So, too, is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess - belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps - but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without.

Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object, and other frank books about the female gaze, Too Much encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses - emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey.

This audiobook will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much".

©2020 Rachel Vorona Cote (P)2020 Grand Central Publishing

Critic reviews

"Rachel Vorona Cote's debut is a whip-smart fusion of cultural criticism and deeply compelling personal narrative, packed with insights on everything from wedding bands to mental illness. Exploring all the many ways women have been bound and limited throughout history and into our current moment, Too Much is ultimately a joyful, satisfying, and educational celebration of women and their beautiful excesses." (Julie Buntin, author of Marlena)

"Readers whose tastes run from George Eliot to Lorde will embrace the book's feminist message." (Publishers Weekly)

"A fascinating exploration of how literature and pop culture have constructed (and exploded) our expectations of modern womanhood, this book is as gloriously defiant as the women it profiles. It's a necessary read for anyone who's ever wondered whether her 'muchness' is too much." (Robin Wasserman, author of Mother Daughter Widow Wife)

Or, how to earnestly love life, with Examples.

At my house we are deep in a Ramona revival. My mom loved the whole series, I did, my son did and now the next generation is getting on board. I may have had more examples if sincere, non ironic love of life and an understanding that the rules were made up than the author did -- my childhood included a great deal of hard science fiction including among other tidbits that world building could go different -- children could sue their parents for divorce and still have the resources to survive to become adults themselves, as one example.

Go to the library, using this book as a reading list. Swing by the science fiction section and round out for great examples. Read with sympathy the many examples that many of us had to endure as well.

From The Yellow Wallpaper to '07 Britney

Part memoir, part study of how Victorian gender norms still permeate society today. Cote draws from examples in literature and in popular culture, running the gamut from "The Yellow Wallpaper" to Britney Spears's 2007 public meltdown and controversial conservatorship. These case studies make Too Much interesting and enjoyable to read even as it addresses weighty topics. Cote is also incredibly candid, drawing from her personal life to guide the narrative — her path in academia, her failed marriage, other personal struggles. If you've read other books in the feminist/gender studies genre, or if you've been a woman existing in the world, I'm not sure that any of these insights will surprise you or feel particularly new or enlightening. But Too Much is still a good addition to the body of work, and Vorona Cote brings a fresh and candid voice as both scholar and memoirist/essayist.

So glad this was recommended to me!

The narration is engaging and dynamic, with the narrator employing various tones and affects to convey varied perspectives of the book's chapters. The author's analysis is incisive and solid. Would be fantastic reading material for a women's studies or gender studies course.

~*ESSENTIAL*~

Too Much is, hands down, the most important book I’ve read in years, and I cannot recommend it enough, not just to my fellow “too much” bodies, but to all audiences as a case study for witnessing (in both generously personal and well-wielded academic terms) how cultural customs of subtle and overt gendered social violences are embodied, re-crafted for their time, and passed down as strict scaffolding over the top of descendant bodies (which Cote is very clear to flag and honor in terms of visible and invisible privileges, racial experiences, and sexual orientations, among other identities she seeks to include.) For me, Cote’s book shared validation and solidarity after my own decades of “calm down,” “lower your voice,” “don’t make a scene,” and a myriad of exponentially more painful, manipulative strictures. It’s not you, Too Much seemed to say to me with every gesture towards Cote’s well-wrought critical genealogy of inherited gendered confines, and it’s not *just* you, Too Much seemed to say to me with every honest, vulnerable, clever, and often wickedly witty moment of Cote’s thoughtful personal narrative. If you seek an “easy read” or “cute, feel-good memoir/ sagely wisdom after personal quest” book, while those narratives are wonderfully important, Too Much is not for you. However, if you, too, are at your wit’s end in a world where equal pay is STILL controversial, where convicted rapists get out of jail because they miss steak, where sexual predators get to be President, Presidential Candidates, and Supreme Court Justices but the most experienced politicians in the country lose out for the same offices because they are women; if you, too, are actively exhausted by the heinous double standards applied to women-identifying persons (and quadruple standards applied to women of color and trans women) and cannot fathom why we know more about the ocean and the moon than we do about treating female bodies for PCOS and endometriosis and you just want to see clearly how centuries of social trauma have stacked the deck against women, Too Much is with you and for you. Go forth.

Boring and basic

This is the most insufferable piece of feminist critique I've read in a really long time, the author gives lip service to intersectionality and focuses solely on able bodied white women. As a disabled woman, listening to an abled person use medical trauma undergone by their mother as some sort of point of pride was disgusting.