Appetites. Caroline Knapp
where I spent my first two weeks, basic needs attended to but probably not a great deal more. During the next several weeks, at home, part of my care fell to a nurse my parents had hired to help out, and as family legend has it, she determined early on that my sister was the healthy, vital one while I was sick and weakly. Apparently driven by some kind of twisted Darwinian logic, the nurse acted on this conviction by diluting my formula and increasing the strength of my sister’s. My mother, who subsequently would refer to her simply as “sadistic,” discovered this after a few weeks and fired her on the spot, and while I’m not sure how much weight to give to these early experiences, the stories feel resonant to me, threads of hunger and uncertainty about the concept of satiety woven into my life’s fabric from the very beginning.
It would be tempting, and quite convenient, to end the story there—early experience sets the stage; the kid who never quite felt fed at home ends up having difficulty with the concept of feeding later in life—but if all it took to become anorexic were complicated parents and an inadequate ancillary caretaker, the vast majority of humans would be on that road. Starving, like all disorders of appetite, is a solution to a wide variety of conflicts and fears, or at least it starts out resembling a solution: Something feels perversely good, or right, or gratifying about it, some key seems to slide into place, some distress is assuaged, and the benefits of this are strong enough to outweigh whatever negative or painful feelings are aroused, such as shame, confusion, or physical hunger. This is very seductive stuff, the beckoning of demons, and I think it’s bigger than family, the allure at once more all-encompassing and more specific to time and place.
That cottage cheese foray took place in a context of enormous promise and enormous anxiety, for me and for women in general. A year shy of graduation from an Ivy League college, I was facing a landscape of unparalleled opportunity, doors nailed shut to women just a decade or two earlier having been flung wide open. That year, I was thinking about moving to Arizona to live with a boyfriend. I was thinking about applying to medical schools, or Ph.D. programs in literature, or the Peace Corps, who knew? I was contemplating questions my own mother hadn’t dreamed of at my age—whom to sleep with, where to live and with whom, what kind of future to carve out for myself, what kind of person to be—and as blessed and wonderful as all that freedom may have been, I suspect I found it terrifying, oppressive, even (though I couldn’t have articulated this at the time) slightly illicit, as though the very truth of it somehow contradicted a murky but deeply-held set of feelings about what it meant to be female.
Into this, cottage cheese and rice cakes, which felt strangely alluring from the very start. I didn’t begin to starve in earnest for quite a while after that purchase, several years, but I did spend a long time dabbling, an amateur scientist conducting experiments on the side, and even these initial flirtations with restraint had a seductive effect; something about the deprivation felt good, purifying almost. I lost some weight that fall and winter, my junior year, but I was only vaguely aware I was doing this deliberately. Mostly, I recall a detached feeling of curiosity, a pull to know more. What if I skipped dinner? What if I didn’t eat anything during the day, drank only coffee? I wonder how that would feel.
It felt . . . interesting, little tests of will that gave me glimmers of things I seemed to covet: a quiet sense of strength, a way to stand out, the outlines of a goal. At night, I’d often go with friends to a bar near campus where the waitresses served oversized baskets of buttered popcorn along with pitchers of beer. I’d determine not to eat the popcorn, not even a single kernel, and I found this oddly pleasing, this secret show of resolve. Others would reach into the basket, grab handfuls, ask the waitress for more. I’d sit back from the table and smoke a cigarette, a little surprised and a little proud to find I could exercise such restraint.
I ate less and I grew thinner. People noticed, as they invariably do. “Oooh, you’re so skinny!” they’d say. Or, “Oooh, you’ve lost weight!” I’d raise my eyebrows and shrug, as though I hadn’t really noticed. “I have? Huh.” But inside, that little kernel of pride sprouted, watered by the attention and by what I understood to be envy; without even trying very hard, I could do what others tried and failed to do. So many women lived and died by the scale, self-worth dictated by it. To me, it was just a game.
Anorexics are masters of exaggeration; they take a certain satisfaction in going the average woman one better, internalizing her worst fears and then inflating them, flaunting them, throwing them back in her face. Food had never been one of my big preoccupations, but I’d certainly witnessed its centrality in other women’s lives, and in some rudimentary way I understood that this excruciating focus on size and shape—the fleshy curve of a hip, the precise fit of a pair of jeans—communicated something more complicated about the larger matter of female appetite and its relationship to identity and value, a notion that a woman’s hunger was somehow inappropriate, possibly even grotesque. I saw how quietly tyrannized women could be by food and weight, how edgy they’d get when confronted by choices. I heard the high, anxious voices, the weighing of longing against deprivation, the endless, repetitive mantra: “Oh, I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t.” Decoded, the imperatives here were clear; we all live with them. Size matters. Control of size (of portions, of body, of desire itself) matters. Suppressing appetite is a valued ambition, even if it eclipses other ambitions, even if it makes you crazy. I paid attention. I lost five pounds, then another five. Message absorbed, amplified, and then (“How do you stay so thin?”) duly rewarded. Other women might struggle with hunger; I could transcend it.
Starving, in its inimitably perverse way, gave me a way to address the anxiety I felt as a young, scared, ill-defined woman who was poised to enter the world and assume a new array of rights and privileges; it gave me a tiny, specific, manageable focus (popcorn kernels) instead of a monumental, vague, overwhelming one (work, love). Starving also gave me a way to address some nascent discomfort about my place in this newly altered landscape, a kind of psychic bargaining over the larger matter of hunger; permitted, at least in theory, to be big (ambitious, powerful, competitive), I would compensate by making myself small, fragile, and non-threatening as a wren. Starving also capitulated, again in exaggerated form, to a plethora of feelings (some handed down from my family, almost all of them supported by culture) about women in general and women’s bodies in particular, to the idea that there’s something inherently shameful and flawed about the female form, something that requires constant monitoring and control. And, of course, starving answered whatever long-standing feelings of yearning and emptiness and sorrow I’d carted off to college in the first place; it deflected all that longing into one place, concentrated it like a diamond. Food, over time, became a terrible, powerful symbol—of how much I wanted on the one hand and how certain I was that I’d never get enough on the other—and my denial of food thus became the most masterful solution. I’m so hungry, I’ll never get fed. If that is one’s baseline understanding of the world (and I suspect it was mine at the time), starving makes sense, controlling food becomes a way of expressing that conflict and also denying it. Your needs are overwhelming? You can’t depend on yourself or others to meet them? You don’t even know what they are? Then need nothing. At a time when I felt adrift and confused and deeply unsure of myself, starving gave me a goal, a way to stand out and exert control, something I could be good at.
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,