Appetites. Caroline Knapp

“[P]rofoundly insightful, compassionately perceptive. . . [Knapp] was an exceptional analyst of the female zeitgeist, one whose astute cultural observations and ruthless personal revelations leave a legacy that will resonate with women for generations to come.”

—BOOKLIST

“Explor[es] in passionate detail what it feels like to be female. . . . [Knapp] uses her own experience with anorexia to talk about how American culture suppresses and perverts feminine desire.”

—ORGANIC STYLE

“Eloquent. . . a skillful blend of memoir and social commentary.”

—BOOKPAGE

“. . . More than one woman’s tragic story; multitudinous interviews with women with eating disorders, excerpts from classic feminist texts and sociological statistics lend credence and categorize the book under cultural studies as much as self-help. . . . Though Knapp admits it’s ‘easier to worry about the body than the soul,’ she hopes creating a dialogue about anorexia will enable all women to nourish both.”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Her beautiful prose is bolstered throughout with nice anecdotes from research material and the author’s personal experiences. An eloquent voice that will be missed.”

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

“In lucid, effortless prose, Knapp explores the personal and cultural influences around appetites such as food, shopping, and sex and a woman’s drive for recognition and fulfillment.”

—LIBRARY JOURNAL (STARRED REVIEW)

“Appetites is a wise, compassionate, and important book about a subject that touches all of our lives. Knapp synthesizes thirty years of important thought on food, body image, and female identity and gets even more deeply inside these issues. Her writing is frank, personal and true. Appetites is an invaluable contribution to the literature of women’s inner lives.”

—BETSY LERNER, AUTHOR OF FOOD AND LOATHING: A LAMENT

“How very sad to have lost brave Caroline Knapp, and how glorious to see her evolve whole lifetimes in the few years she was given. Read this book if you want to know why it is that women dismantle their bodies in search of—and in flight from—their souls.”

—KATHRYN HARRISON, AUTHOR OF SEAL WIFE

“Caroline Knapp chose searingly difficult subjects, and wrote about them with such grace that the horrible became eerily beautiful. . . . Her generous honesty and gifted writing leave something that is a valuable legacy.”

—THE SEATTLE TIMES

“In her earlier works of cultural criticism Knapp began to explore a style that wedded memoir and sociology, the personal with the political. Although those books were successful, Appetites takes her idiosyncratic method to a new level.”

—THE BOSTON PHOENIX

For Herzog And for Roxanne, Zoë, and Hallie

ALSO BY CAROLINE KNAPP

DRINKING: A LOVE STORY

PACK OF TWO: THE INTRICATE BOND BETWEEN PEOPLE AND DOGS

ALICE K’S GUIDE TO LIFE: ONE WOMAN’S QUEST FOR SURVIVAL, SANITY, AND THE PERFECT NEW SHOES

PROLOGUE

APPETITE BY RENOIR

THE WOMEN LINGER at the water’s edge, and they are stunning in the most unusual way: large women, voluptuous, abundant, delighted. They lounge along the river bank, they lift their arms toward the sun, their hair ripples down their backs, which are smooth and broad and strong. There is softness in the way they move, and also strength and sensuality, as though they revel in the feel of their own heft and substance.

Step back from the canvas, and observe, think, feel. This is an image of bounty, a view of female physicality in which a woman’s hungers are both celebrated and undifferentiated, as though all her appetites are of a piece, the physical and the emotional entwined and given equal weight. Food is love on this landscape, and love is sex, and sex is connection, and connection is food; appetites exist in a full circle, or in a sonata where eating and touching and making love and feeling close are all distinct chords that nonetheless meld with and complement one another.

Renoir, who created this image, once said that were it not for the female body, he never could have become a painter. This is clear: there is love for women in each detail of the canvas, and love for self, and there is joy, and there is a degree of sensual integration that makes you want to weep, so beautiful it seems, and so elusive.

INTRODUCTION

APPETITE IN THE WORLD OF NO

ONCE UPON A TIME, in a land as different from Renoir’s world as Earth is from Jupiter, I weighed eighty-three pounds. I was twenty-one years old, five-foot-four, and my knees were wider than my thighs. My normal weight is about 120 pounds, and the effort to pare off thirty-seven of those—more than one third of my body—was Herculean, life-altering, and, I believe, exquisitely female.

In Renoir’s world, a woman’s appetites are imagined as rich and lusty and powerful, the core of the female being celebrated as sensual, deeply attuned to pleasure. In my

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