59 pages • 1 hour read

Homesick for Another World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

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“Malibu”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“Malibu” Summary

The protagonist and narrator of “Malibu” is an unnamed man with bulimia living near Los Angeles, California. To collect unemployment benefits, the man has to fill out a form showing all the jobs he’s applied for. Since he’s not really looking for work, he makes up a phone number and uses it for all the made-up jobs he puts on the form. Later, he tries calling the number just to see who might answer, and in this way he meets Terri, a member of the Chumash tribe who lives in Lone Pine and says she wants to get pregnant “so she’[ll] have something to think about all day” (37). Although the narrator warns Terri that he has acne, a rash, and bad teeth, the two make a date for dinner the next day.

The narrator’s only family member is an uncle he sometimes calls when he feels desperate. The uncle is also unemployed but receives disability benefits. The narrator asks to borrow money from his uncle, but the uncle refuses and tells him to get a job. On the day of the narrator’s date with Terri, the uncle announces that he plans to leave everything he has to the narrator, as long as he promises to send his ashes to space. The narrator asks if he can scatter them from the top of a mountain instead, and the two men travel to Malibu to scout locations. Distracted by the thought of his date with Terri, the man quickly finds a spot and describes it to his uncle, who seems unsatisfied but agrees.

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The climax of the story is the narrator’s encounter with Terri. Initially, he is disappointed by her appearance: she is shorter and heavier than he expected, and she has acne across her nose. He imagines fixing her teeth and forcing her to diet and believes that she’ll be grateful for any sexual encounter, but he is consumed by insecurity about his own body as well, standing in a shadowy corner and asking her if she can see his pimples, then retreating further into the shadows when she says that she can. When they start having sex, he sticks one finger, then two, then his entire fist in her mouth. She resists at first, then stops and lets him force his fist down her throat. After they have sex, they eat together; then, the narrator throws up and goes home. He lies to his uncle about how wonderful the date was, but the uncle is suspicious.

“Malibu” Analysis

The unnamed man and his uncle are connected through the twin motifs of consumption and excretion. The narrator’s binging and purging mirror his uncle’s habit of “always eating something and dumping out the colostomy bag right after” (39). At times, these behaviors are explicitly connected: “I ate the cheesecake and my uncle at the carrot cake. We watched the end of a movie called While You Were Sleeping. My uncle emptied his colonoscopy bag, and then I sent that cheesecake down the toilet” (42). The juxtaposition of these images of excretion—through the colostomy bag and bulimic behaviors—connects the narrator to his uncle, even as he tries to distance himself emotionally.

Although the unnamed narrator can recognize the disordered nature of his uncle’s eating habits, he does not recognize the harm in his own bulimic behaviors, and may in fact seek to share them with others. The fact that his bulimia becomes a part of his sexual encounter with Terri also suggests how deeply the eating disorder has taken over his life: the only way he can connect intimately with this woman is by hurting her in the way he has been hurting himself. The narrator’s complicated and violent encounter with Terri emphasizes two of the core patterns of this collection: Disgust with another person is often a displaced form of disgust with oneself, and disgust and desire are closely related and often occur in tandem.