Appetites. Caroline Knapp
many women—appetites had a nearly opposite meaning, the body experienced as dangerous and disturbing and wrong, its hungers split off from each other, each one assigned multiple and contradictory meanings, each one loaded and fraught. This disparity eluded me at the time; had I seen a Renoir painting, I would have thought: Feh, fat women, and turned away in fear or contempt, perhaps both. For three years, I ate the same things every day: one plain sesame bagel for breakfast, one container of Dannon coffee-flavored yogurt for lunch, one apple and a one-inch cube of cheese for dinner. I ran: miles and miles, a stick-figure with a grimace. I was cold all the time, even in summer, and I was desperately unhappy, and I had no idea what any of this meant, where the compulsion to starve came from, why it so drove me, what it said about me or about women in general or about the larger matter of human hungers. I just acted, reacted.
Nearly two decades ago, at age twenty-four and hovering near ninety pounds, I started to see a therapist, a specialist in eating disorders, who began to broach the subject of appetite in ways that baffled me for a long time. The word disturbed me—my associations went straight from food to loss of control to fat—but when he used it, he struck a broader chord, hints of Renoir in the undertones, as though describing a more complicated, possibly even gratifying matter of passion and sensuality and psychic hunger instead of a strictly physical issue of food. He’d use the word in strange contexts; when he questioned me about joy, for instance, or worried aloud about whether I was having enough “fun” in my life. I don’t recall many specifics from those early meetings, only that such references seemed to hold a key of sorts, a code that one day might decipher or at least reframe the various struggles and tangles that had brought me to his office in the first place. What gave me delight? What fully engaged me, turned on all the senses? These seemed to be appetite’s pivotal questions in his framework—they had to do with what a person really hungers for, with what makes one feel truly fed—and like the stubborn and recalcitrant patient I was, I found them annoying for many years, as though he were missing the point instead of illuminating it.
This spring, the therapist and I began to finish our work together, not because I’m “done” or “cured” or conflict-free but because I’ve finally (or so we hope) gotten the point. Appetite is the hook on which all my ancillary struggles have hung, the ocean from which all internal rivers (my own, those of so many women) have sprung. Appetite is about eating, certainly, and that’s a piece of it that defines life for many women, a piece I, too, know well, but it’s also about a much broader constellation of hungers and longings and needs. It is about the deeper wish—often experienced with particular intensity and in particularly painful ways by women—to partake of the world, to feel a sense of abundance and possibility about life, to experience pleasure. At heart, it’s about our distance from the women in that Renoir painting, and about our abiding, often poorly articulated hunger for what they appear to have: joy, peace with body and soul, bounty.
I have probably grappled with the matter of appetite my whole life—a lot of women do; we’re taught to do battle with our own desires from a tender age, and reinforcements are called in over time on virtually every front—but if I had to pinpoint a defining moment in my own history, I’d go back twenty-three years, to an otherwise unmemorable November evening when I made an otherwise unmemorable purchase: a container of cottage cheese.
Innocuous as it sounds, this would actually turn out to be a life-altering event, but the kind that’s so seemingly ordinary you can’t consider it as such for many years. Certainly, I didn’t see anything remarkable happening at the time. I was nineteen years old, a junior at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, vaguely anxious, vaguely depressed. I was also, less vaguely, hungry. This was 1979, Thanksgiving weekend. I’d gone home to see my family, then returned to campus the next day to write a paper. My roommates and most of my friends were still away, I didn’t especially feel like slogging over to the campus cafeteria to eat by myself, and so I put on my coat and walked up the block to a corner grocery store, and that’s what I bought: a small plastic tub of Hood’s cottage cheese and a solitary package of rice cakes.
Cottage cheese, of course, is the food God developed specifically to torture women, to make them keen with yearning. Picture it on a plate, lumpy and bland atop a limp lettuce leaf and half a canned peach. Consider the taste and feel of it: wet, bitter little curds. Now compare it to the real thing: a thick, oozing slab of brie, or a dense and silky smear of cream cheese. Cottage cheese is one of our culture’s most visible symbols of self-denial; marketed honestly, it would appear in dairy cases with warning labels: THIS SUBSTANCE IS SELF-PUNITIVE; INGEST WITH CAUTION.
I didn’t know this back then, which is important to note. Naturally thin, I’d never given my weight much thought before, and although I knew plenty of women who obsessed about their thighs and fretted over calories, I’d always regarded them as a rather alien species, their battles against fat usually unnecessary and invariably tedious, barely a blip on my own radar. I, in turn, had very little personal experience with cottage cheese. I’d never bought cottage cheese before, I’m not sure I’d even eaten cottage cheese before, but on some semiconscious level, I knew the essential truth about cottage cheese—it was a diet food—and on some even less conscious level, I was drawn to it, compelled to buy it and to put it in the mini-refrigerator in my dorm room and then to eat it and nothing else—just cottage cheese and rice cakes—for three consecutive days.
And a seed, long present perhaps but dormant until then, began to blossom. A path was laid, one that ultimately had less to do with food than it did with emotion, less to do with hunger than it did with the mindset required to satisfy hunger: the sense of entitlement and agency and initiative that leads one to say, first, I want, and then, more critically, I deserve. So as inconsequential as that purchase may have seemed, it in fact represented a turning point, the passage of a woman at a crossroads, one road marked Empty, the other Full. Not believing at the core that fullness—satiety, gratification, pleasure—was within my grasp, I chose the other road.
I stayed on that road for a long time; three days of cottage cheese and rice cakes became three years of anorexia, then three more, and the attendant battles around nourishment and pleasure would linger long after my weight finally stabilized, making their presence felt, albeit less extremely, in arenas well beyond the realm of food: in relationships, in questions about exercise, in matters of material indulgence, in just about any area, really, where longing can bump up against constraint. How much is too much? How much is enough? How hungry am I and, more to the point, for what? For what? These questions have dogged me like gnats, flitting into view whenever hunger announces itself, whenever it begins to rap on the door and demand a response, which it invariably, insistently does.
The why here—why I chose to starve, why appetite itself became so colossally complicated—is a big question, much of the answer idiosyncratic and personal. There is always a family at the center of an eating disorder, and I had a characteristically complex one at the center of mine, dominated by a set of brilliant, inhibited, often unhappy parents whose marriage was riddled with ambivalence (on my father’s part) and frustration (my mother’s). They were loving and generous people, but also reserved to the point of opacity, and their expressions of affection were so coded and veiled I wouldn’t learn to decipher them until I was well into my thirties. Before then, I often felt mystified and apart and anxiously insecure, a kid who’d get dropped off at summer camp and never feel quite certain that I’d actually be retrieved at the end of the six weeks. My siblings, an older brother and a twin sister, seemed to have had a more innately secure sense of familial belonging, the result of a style that meshed with the family style, perhaps, or a kind of internal wiring that left them more apt to feel understood than unmoored. I lacked that. I suspect I felt personally responsible for my parents’ quiet unhappiness and reticence, the bad kid who’d somehow poisoned the air we all breathed, and I felt compelled from an early age to compensate, as though my right to stay needed to be earned: I was quiet, shy, clean, perfectionistic. I got A’s. I scrubbed the kitchen without being asked. My earliest memories, no doubt born out of the most intricate combination of family dynamics and brain chemistry, have to do with a sense of thwarted connections and emptiness, of a yearning for something unnamed and perhaps unnamable.
That sensation actually may date back to the very first days and weeks of life. I weighed four pounds, eleven