Half Serving

Born in Germany to a Ukrainian single mother and raised in a household where money was scarce and love was measured in calories, grades, and the numbers on a scale, the protagonist carries these inherited patterns of control and deprivation into adulthood.

Now a writer who hasn’t written a single line in months, she leads a precarious existence in Berlin. She moves from sublet to sublet, drifts through tinder dates, ghosts some for no real reason who turn out to have deserved it, fluctuates between overeating and undereating, privation and purging, scams e-commerce sites (and occasionally her employers) and frantically turns to Google for answers to her life’s questions. Stability consistently eludes her while every new experience is punctuated by memories of what came before.

With sharp wit and unfiltered honesty, Half Serving explores how trauma inscribes itself on daily life and how one might, despite everything, forge a life out of the fragments of a difficult past.

»I found Half Serving so insanely moving. It’s a novel that really hurts, but in a good way.« Caroline Wahl

»This book pulls the plug on you. The things Elisabeth Pape writes about, and how she writes about them, make you sad, furious – but also happy. She finds an unmatched, laconic and self-deprecating tone with which – despite having all reason to be furious – she emphasises the universal power of hope. A wonderful work of the new class-conscious literature.« Christian Baron