Appetites
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In Appetites, Caroline Knapp confronts Freud’s famous question, “What do women want?” and boldly reframes it, asking instead: How does a woman know, and then honor, what it is she wants in a culture bent on shaping, defining, and controlling her desires? Knapp, best-selling author of Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs, has turned her brilliant eye towards how a woman’s appetite—for food, love, work, and pleasure—has become a battlefield. She uses her own experiences with anorexia as a powerful exploration of what can happen when we are divorced from our most basic hungers—and offers her own success as testament to the joy of saying “I want.”Provocative, important, and deeply familiar, Appetites beautifully—and urgently—challenges all women to learn what it is to feed both the body and the soul.
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Caroline Knapp. Appetites
Prologue
Introduction
Chapter 1: Add. Cake, Subtract Self-Esteem
Chapter 2: The. Mother Connection
Chapter 3: I Hate My. Stomach, I Hate My Thighs
Chapter 4: From Bra. Burning to Binge Shopping
Chapter 5: Body As Voice
Chapter 6: Swimming Toward Hope
Epilogue
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Table of Contents
Praise
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I was very, very good at it. I grew smaller and smaller and smaller over time. I stopped menstruating. I began wearing jeans inherited from a friend’s twelve-year-old brother, who’d outgrown them. I literally ached with hunger: My stomach throbbed with it; my ribs dug into my sides when I tried to sleep at night. I took painstaking note of these changes—how visible and pronounced my bones became, even the tiny finger bones; how my abdomen curved inward, a taut, tight “C”—and I found each one of them both profoundly compelling and inexplicably satisfying. I could not express what I’d been feeling with words, but I could wear it. The inner life—hunger, confusion, longings unnamed and unmet, that whole overwhelming gamut—as a sculpture in bone.
Today, I eat. That in itself is a statement of triumph, but the road toward a more peaceful relationship with food—which, of course, means a more peaceful relationship with my body, myself, my own demons—has been long, circuitous, and (would that this weren’t so) full of company. It’s hard to think of a woman who hasn’t grappled to one degree or another with precisely the same fears, feelings, and pressures that drove me to starve, even harder to think of a woman who experiences the full range of human hungers with Renoir’s brand of unfettered delight. Satisfying hungers, taking things in, indulging in bodily pleasures—these are not easy matters for a lot of women, and I suspect my own troubled relationship with food merely reflects the extreme end of a long continuum, and one venue among many others.
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