| Title | : | Appetites: Why Women Want |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1582432260 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781582432267 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 |
| Publication | : | First published April 15, 2003 |
Appetites: Why Women Want Reviews
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By the middle of Appetites, I wanted to quote every single word Caroline Knapp wrote. In this memoir, she addresses three of my favorite topics: feminism, eating disorders, and sexuality. Knapp integrates these issues by sharing her own battle with anorexia and analyzing hunger through a psychological and sociocultural lens.
Knapp can write. Her writing style is so vivid, so passionate, and so powerful that you can't help but admire her strength, even as she exposes herself and makes herself vulnerable. She hones in on the idea of appetite and how women struggle to fulfill their varying hungers. By defining "appetite" early in the book, she strides forward and discusses how women's desires lead them to focus on pleasing men, how it causes people in contemporary society to value materials instead of themselves, and how the pressure to appease the patriarchy and its expectations can contribute to eating disorders. Here's a passage that pertains to internal and external satisfaction and how society shapes our perception of happiness:
If only we lived in a culture in which internal measures of satisfaction and success - a capacity for joy and caring, an ability to laugh, a sense of connection to others, a belief in social justice - were as highly valued as external measures. If only we lived in a culture that made ambition compatible with motherhood and family life, that presented models of women who were integrated and whole: strong, sexual, ambitious, cued into their own varied sources to explore all of them. If only women felt less isolated in their frustration and fatigue, less torn between competing hungers, less compelled to keep nine balls in the air at once, and less prone to blame themselves when those ball come crashing to the floor. If only we exercised our own power, which is considerable but woefully underused; if only we defined desire on our own terms.
Appetites isn't a memoir in the typical sense. Instead of centering the book on herself, Knapp supplements her analysis of feminism and eating disorders with anecdotes from her life. She uses her experiences as a springboard to discuss how anxious parenting styles can affect self-esteem, how emptiness or a need for control can lead to an eating disorder, and most importantly, how to heal from a war with one's own burning hungers.
Even though Knapp dives deeply into the intricacies of desire and how the world contorts our cravings against us, she ends Appetites on a hopeful note. She reveals how she used rowing to recuperate and how thinking about bigger issues lessened her self-absorption. While I would describe this book with words like painful, poignant, and piercing, I would also use words such as compelling, influential, and mind-changing. Here's a paragraph toward the end of the book that describes what really motivates our desires:
Being known. This, of course, is the goal, the agenda so carefully hidden it may be unknown even to the self. The cutter cuts to make the pain at her center visible. The anorexic starves to make manifest her hunger and vulnerability. The extremes announce, This is who I am, this is what I feel, this is what happens when I don't get what I need. In quadraphonic sound, they give voice to the most central human hunger, which is the desire to be recognized, to be known and loved because of, and in spite of, who you are; they give voice to the sorrow that takes root when that hunger is unsatisfied.
Highly, highly recommended for anyone even remotely interested in feminism, eating disorders, psychology, or sexuality. If I could I would buy anyone interested a copy of Appetites and send it straight to their home, because this is a book worth reading. Writing this review on my birthday is probably one of the greatest gifts I've experienced yet, and even though Caroline Knapp has passed away, I hope she knows just how much of an impact her ideas will have on society as time passes. -
This book was very important to me. I'm extremely grateful I read this; it said a lot of things I needed to hear. Caroline Knapp, a former anorexic, delves into why women believe they need to deny themselves those things they desire, and why they shouldn't feel like they should. Women need to not only get in touch with their appetites, but what those appetites are, why they are there. Why do women feel the need to starve themselves? Why do some steal, others shop, others cut, others purge? She goes into all of this, where it might come from, and maybe how to fix it, even if it's just a little bit. This really helped me realize that I had an eating disorder; it also pointed me in the right direction before it became something too serious. I am grateful to Caroline Knapp and to my professor who required us to read it. I would recommend this to any woman who has felt the need to deny herself something because she didn't think she deserved it (be it food, sex, or other things), and to men who want to understand better how a woman's mind works and where some of our insecurities come from.
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It's unfortunate that this book gets pegged as an "anorexia memoir"--even by a blurb on the cover, because it's also/instead a fantastic analysis of some particular flavors of cultural misogyny, both external and internalized. That said, Knapp does an amazing job of weaving in her personal experience to make most of what she says even more engaging.
Combining memoir and analysis can get tricky--oftentimes authors tend to overgeneralize, or get too caught up in the particulars of their own story to make any general critiques at all, but Knapp walks the line in a particularly graceful way (her writing reminds me of bell hooks' Wounds of Passion). I'm only halfway through, but this is one that I will read again and again, and should be on any feminist's bookshelf. -
One of the best books of feminism I've ever read. My copy keeps on getting loaned out to friends, who have almost all then bought copies of their own for re-reading. Really, really smart, gripping, and emotionally absorbing.
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Second time I have read this book. The first time it was life altering the second time it served as a progress check up and how to proceed in the new year. Loved it the first time and loved it again!
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Pain festers in isolation, it thrives in secrecy.
A remarkable, enlightening summary of women's hunger: the craving for something that's just out of reach and the lengths some women will go to fulfill their desire.
While the author is consistent with the examples of food, shopping, and sex; the information in this book can apply to really any aspect of a woman's life, I believe. With shared personal experience and stories of others, this book explains how some women have a complicated relationship with their appetites, why they choose to punish themselves for it, and why doing so is counterproductive. I also appreciated the ending, not to spoil but her hoping her newborn niece finds the honor her appetite deserves was the heart touching moment necessary to close such a tense read.
As a person currently struggling with my "appetite," it was nice to read a little insight into my own issues from a broad perspective. I don't own this book, I borrowed a copy from my library, but I'm considering buying my own copy so I can annotate my favorite lines- like the one above. Anyway, would recommend even if you haven't struggled with seeking fulfillment, I think a lot of people can benefit from the contents of this book. -
my mind wizard recommended this to me and i was suspect, as i am not and have never been anorexic. this book blew me away - it's not so much about anorexia but about what women do to themselves to fill the emptiness that permeates their lives. the theme of hunger is not just about food but about the insatiable needs of love, understanding, respect, good relationships, meaningful work. you might starve yourself, gorge yourself, shop until you're drowning in debt, chainsmoke, be promiscuous, dedicate your life to your job, etc, and it's all just a symptom of the overarching problem of wanting. it's a slow read, but probably because you have to let it sink in. i hadn't read anything so intellectually stimulating since college and i keep recommending it to women i know who will find some truth in at least part of the book. the death of the writer (of lung cancer) before APPETITES' publication is truly sad.
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I had such high hopes for this book after reading
Drinking: A Love Story, but I was disappointed. The writing is flowery and self-indulgent. The theme is important but somehow underdeveloped, despite chapter after chapter of rambling on. It would be nice if more actual research had been included rather than most paragraphs starting off with "I think." Is this book a memoir, a social commentary, or a research study? I can't really tell, and if it's trying to be all three, it doesn't work. As it stands, this book would have been better off as an essay, after cutting out about 3/4 of the content, in which the author is essentially repeating the same point over and over again after running it through a thesaurus to find different flowery words to use. -
If you are a woman, this book is a must-read. Knapp's dissection of a woman's appetites both illuminated many of the patterns I had noticed in myself and my female friends -- in the way we speak about ourselves to each other, and the way we speak about each other. It also helped me dissect my relationship with my mother. During the time of the pandemic, when many of us hunger for many things that we can simply not fill, the desire to be fed is more demanding than ever. It makes me look forward for breaking out of my endless cycle of self-analysis and actually changing my life once I am able to.
I can't recommend this highly enough, both in terms of content and in terms of Knapp's beautiful writing. -
Fascinating subject! Knapp took what seemed to be a simple topic of the desire to eat and relates it to our struggles with mothers, men, loneliness, and our universal need for pleasure. I've already lent my copy out ...
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everyone should read this book
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Unlike
Drinking: A Love Story, this book is not captivating and gets lost in a series of wandering passages of ungrounded moralizing. Whereas Drinking was an intensely personal gripping story of how alcohol nearly broke her spirit, Appetites suffers from the fact that her addiction to food ... or lack of food as it may be ... was never as strong. Thus she has far less source material to work with, and she covers up for that absence by generalizing, postulating, moralizing, and taking digressions to discuss other things such as compulsive shopping that are interesting asides but do little to advance the central story.
In short, this memoir appears to be an attempt to capitalize off the success of Drinking but with inferior material that more often than not misses the mark. -
The most intellectually stimulating book I've read in a while. It should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand our modern, consumerist culture. I think so many women, including myself, have felt that they want more than this society can offer us. We get stuck in a trap, repeatedly trying to fill this hunger with external pursuits like shopping, drinking, work, dieting, binge eating and overall perfectionism. And yet, it doesn't work! We must go inward, to ask ourselves what we really need and want in our lives. That is the overall message of Appetites.
How sad that Caroline Knapp passed away in 2002. After reading Appetites, I found myself wondering what she would have had to say about the state of the world today. We have lost a gifted writer and social commentator. -
I want to assign this book to my younger self and then to all her friends. It touches on appetites of all sorts, from hunger to desire, and how the ways in which femininity is reinforced or policed can constrict women's appetites. The sections on motherhood and modeling intimacy or restraint felt particularly poignant as well.
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I have always had issues with weight and body image. This book was one of the most helpful and insightful to me. I wept through the first chapter because I kept hearing myself described - and I didn't feel crazy because of it.
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"You can't worry about Appetite (joy, passion, lust, hunger) when you're worrying about appetite (frosting, fat grams)."
Knapp does a phenomenal job of linking the ways that women come to want and desire in ways that hurt us. She talks about mothers, the body, and sexuality, and how the way that young girls grow up in relation to these. When witness our mothers as their daughters, we see if they are able to fully indulge or not, how much their hunger costs them, how much they actually want or can even allow themselves to want. Or when sexual education does not teach girls and young women to know their bodies and feel entitled to their own sexual appetites, the disconnect is confusing in an age where women have more sociopolitical freedoms than ever before. Some of my favorite quotes about this are:"When you hear nothing about the body, you stop listening to it, and feeling it; you stop experiencing it as a worthy, integrated entity."
"We did not learn how to feel or experience our bodies [...] Instead, we learned how to look at them, to pair sexuality with desirability, to measure the worth of our bodies by their capacity to elicit admiration from others. [...] To be sexy is to be found sexy, to be permitted to want, you must first be wanted."
"Permission is not the same as agency; the ability to say yes is not the same as the ability to say yes, with him but not with him, or yes, like this but not like that."
Knapp describes our desire as being inextinguishable. In a culture of consumerism, there is always a new goal, a new yearning, a new hunger. Capitalism uses emotional deficiencies that are encouraged in women who are dissatisfied to urge us to buy more, shop more, and want more tangible substitutions for what is missing emotionally. She talks about how in infancy, "feed me" expresses something beyond a physical need for food and also begins to mean "love me, take care of me, show me that the world is a safe place, heed my will." I liked how she used these concepts to talk about the consequences of feeling "a sensation of being too full of emotion, too hungry, too needy, too large for their own bodies, and an attendant compulsion to release those feelings and to punish the self for having them in the first place." We starve and we binge and we cut and we have sex with people who do not treat us well to compensate for the too much-ness of it all. Many times I had to put down this book just at the overwhelming seen-ness I felt when Knapp explored appetites. 4/5
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This is the book I needed someone to give me a long time ago, when I first struggled with my needs vs. being full vs. being empty vs. wanting and longing. What I thought I learned long ago and again and again as I age I could finally understand well enough through this book to actually heal and know that there is nothing wrong in wanting, or in how I have tried to navigate unmet longings. This book was an experience to read, the type of book that I ached and angered through, stopped, said I'd never finish, then picked it up again. It was fulfilling in the ways it needed to be. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is not yet sure what it means to be feminine or a woman or long for something that is certain to hurt over and over and no matter how hard you seem to work for it or fashion yourself into the right shape can never be yours by no fault of your own. I recommend this book for anyone who has also fought loss with emptiness only to find it left you lonely rather than strong. I recommend this book for anyone who has been told that what you hunger for is inappropriate or wrong, that you need to apologize for not just what you want, but who you are. I recommend this book to everyone.
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Caroline Knapp writes so eloquently (if a bit redundantly) about the conflicting appetites of women. Her willingness to explore her own struggles (with eating disorders and alcoholism) is matched only by the quality of her interviews with other women. She gives name to so many emotions and feelings and beliefs shared by women, it's as if she is speaking for our collective soul. Even if you are one of the lucky ones who has not experienced such turbulence, you will immediately understand and recognize a friend or family member in the stories she tells. The poignancy of the battles described is only underscored by the fact that Ms. Knapp was lost too soon, to cancer, in her early 40s. I read her books and wish I could talk to her, ask her her opinion and advice. I guess these are the next best thing.
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I had no plans on reading this, and it wasn't on my reading list. I finally had the experience of being utterly sold on a book by an enthusiastic bookseller—in Korea! Apparently, this volume is popular in Korea for reasons that are miserably clear.
I definitely didn't resonate with everything in this memoir; in fact, I actually think the experience it describes is even narrower than the author makes it out to be. Still, the writing is striking and honest and beautiful, and there were some parts of it that I reluctantly connected to. I devoured this book very quickly, tugged along by the excellent writing and disarming, almost embarrassing, honesty.
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this is a fairly brilliant book. i have to read it again to give it five stars, but honestly, anything by this author is worth picking up.
this book talks about the story of one woman's struggle with eating and appetites, and also the cultural phenomenons that play into women not being "fed". it has been said before, but it is said eloquently and beautifully in this book. i am so sad caroline knapp passed away - she was such a great writer (and person). -
About 20 years post-publication, much of the book feels dated, especially the content that is anecdotal ( which feels like the majority of the second half). But this book is redeemed by Knapp’s strong writing about her own personal experiences, filled with insight and candor.
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Imagine a world where women are not taught to be preoccupied with their bodies and looks and suppressing their needs and desires. Just imagine...
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“At a time when increasing numbers of women were demanding the right to take up more space in the world, it is no surprise that they’d be hit with the opposite message from a culture that was (and is) both male-dominated and deeply committed to its traditional power structures.
Women get physically larger, and they’re told to grow physically smaller. Women begin to play active roles in realms once dominated by men (schools, universities, athletic fields, the workplace, the bedroom), and they’re countered with images of femininity that infantilize them, render them passive and frail and non-threatening.” - Caroline Knapp, Appetites
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This book punched me in the heart. I love a feminist-focused study of society, but this one in particular spoke to me deeply. I found out after I finished it that this was published posthumously, as Knapp passed away in 2002, and knowing it was her final work affected me in a way I didn’t expect.
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All at once, Appetites is a memoir about Knapp’s struggle with anorexia as well as a feminist analysis of society and sexuality. This might sound like too much to pack into 220 pages, but it was incredible and balanced expertly. If I could, I would add about 20 quotes, but how about instead I just encourage you to read it. Read it and reflect on how our society stomps on women and has outrageous expectations that drive us to restrict our power. I refuse to allow this, and I hope you do too.
💜💜 RIP Caroline Knapp 💜💜 -
"Once upon a time, a "good day" for me meant eating fewer than 800 calories in a twenty-four-hour period: case closed, well-being measured by its absolute inaccessibility. Today, a good day might mean several different things. It might mean that I start the day sculling along the river near my home, an activity that makes me feel competent and strong and alive. It might mean that I put in a solid day's work, that I spend some time laughing on the phone with a friend, that I eat a good meal, that I curl up at night with the two beings I love most in the world, one human and one canine. A good day usually means successfully resisting my worst impulses, which involve isolation and perfectionism and self-punishment; it means striking some balance, instead, between fun and productivity and connection. Finding my way toward good days, and toward a more sustaining definition of well-being, has meant creeping, gradually and often painfully, in Renoir's direction, a sixteen-year crawl toward a kind of freedom to be filled."
"During this time, I used to walk home from work along a strip of shops and restaurants on the east side of Providence, a deliberate route that took me out of my way and past a great deal of food. I'd pass women with armloads of groceries. I'd see couples hunched over hamburgers through the windows of a cafe. I'd walk past a delicatessen and a bakery and a Dunkin' Donuts, I'd smell spiced meats and freshly baked bread and the heavy sweetness of honey glaze, and I'd feel virtually transcendent, resisting this bounty while others surrendered. Nothing. No appetite: not for me.
The insidious thing is that this felt like a kind of triumph, victory echoed in the deep steady pressing throb of physical hunger, the stomach pulling inward, inward, inward. That hunger was like air to me, I needed the assurance of will it gave me, and I measured its effects with the quiet astonishment of a scientist whose radical experiment is actually working."
"The expression here doesn't just trigger a woman's own private denigration about weight and skin and hair; it also externalizes it, gives it a body and a face, provides a constant visual slap to reinforce the internal one. 'Look at me,' the goddess says. 'You're so fat compared to me. You'll never have hair like mine. You'll never be so desirable.' As Wheelock professor Gail Dines puts it, "To men, the look says 'Fuck me'; to women, it says, 'Fuck you.""
"This is what's insidious about consumerism: It's not that it encourages us to shop but that it encourages us to forget, not that it sparks need but that it dilutes it, shrink-wraps it and flings it into the handiest and most tangible containers."
"I knew for many years that my mother made me angry, that whatever its origins, the distance between us made me edgy and restless and full of bile. What took me much longer to unearth until I reached back toward times like that August afternoon in Providence, was the deep current of sorrow beneath that anger, a yearning for connection so acute it defied ordinary words; voiced, it would have come out as a howl, the longest and loneliest keening...to throw all the blame in her direction would be as one-dimensional and simplistic as to point the finger solely at culture or the media. But I do think my relationship with her left me with a particular kind of emptiness, a sorrow-laced brand that's by no means unique to me. The wounds of childhood, deep and pre-verbal and way beyond the grasp of memory, are like footprints covered by new snow; they get hidden with time, sealed over, the traces of felt anguish difficult to perceive, even harder to access. And so the sorrow behind hunger tends to be acted out, described in symbol and code instead of nouns and verbs, a woman's body and behaviour communicating what words can't quite capture."
"He chipped and chipped; the rock grew smaller by degrees, which is something that happens not in moments of blinding insight or revelation but in much more gradual and less dramatic ways: baby steps; tiny moves in this direction or that; experiments that seem so petty and small it's almost embarrassing to claim them as victories."
"I pictured that tiny infant, nursing hungrily at the body that created and sheltered her and will now guide her into the wider world, and I said a prayer for her, I prayed for change. I whispered to the universe, Let her be filled." -
I found this book incredibly resonant. Female body issues are rampant in our culture, but Knapp's work is the first time I've seen various compulsions linked under the heading of "appetite." Anorexia, alcoholism, bingeing, compulsive shopping, cutting, promiscuity - Knapp asserts these should be addressed as one base issue: females for the first time have the freedom to indulge their appetites, yet the societal message still casts indulgence as unfeminine. This dissonance, she argues, causes women to feel that their vast hunger - for love, acceptance, food, ambition - will never, can never be satiated. Poignantly and personally written, "Appetites" attempts to face the despair of being an appetitive woman, the struggle to feel "full," and potential peace in recognizing that a sense of emptiness may be an inherent part of the human condition.
"I've watched women do battle with that notion my whole life: agonizing about asserting themselves at work, or debating about whether they 'deserve' a raise, or struggling to subdue the chronic press of worry about other people's feelings, or fighting the urge to apologize for things most men would never think to apologize for (bumping into a chair, overcooking a meal, the weather). This is learned behavior. There is not a shred of compelling evidence to suggest that such impulses are biologically based, that females are genetically more caretaking and less self-seeking than males, that we're hard wired to be accommodating, that we have less natural hunger or aggression. You observe, you follow, live and learn."
"As a journalist in Providence, I was particularly drawn toward stories about women's issues: I wrote about discrimination, abortion, violence against women. I wrote about women's health, sexism in the media, cultural imagery. I even wrote about women (other women) with eating disorders. And quietly, privately, I starved myself half to death. There you have it: intellectual belief without the correlary of emotional roots; feminist power understood in the mind but not known, somehow, in the body."
"This is a textbook example of what some feminist scholars call the 'missing discourse of desire' among and in regard to adolescent girls. Girls of my generation did not - and girls for the most part still do not - receive a lot of honest information about the body, particularly the female sexual body and the subject of its arousal. This is an old taboo, culturally and academically. Freud never explored the subject of female sexuality, dismissing it in his infamous phrase as 'a dark continent.' Most major theories of adolescent development have ignored it, as though sexual feelings don't play much of a role in the lives of girls. Even feminist theorist have tended to steer clear of the subject, and the silence on all fronts has been both deafening and deeply disconnecting. The French philosopher Michel Foucault first popularized the idea that discourse about sexuality can significantly shape sexual experience, noting that the language and tone we use when we talk about sex, the things we hear (or equally important) do not hear, have a direct impact on the way we register, interpret, and respond to our own bodily feelings. When you hear nothing about the body, he suggests, you stop listening to it, and feeling it; you stop experiencing it as a worthy, integrated entity."
-Caroline Knapp -
I am going to have this book by my side until my death.
Caroline Knapp's stellar book 'Appetites' revolves around the concept of female "appetites": how societal conditioning, childhood experiences of hunger, and traditional gender roles shape and restrain them; how in a male-dominated world, their appetites often get defined by the needs and demands of men; how women are never really encouraged to indulge their hunger; and most importantly, how these unfulfilled, suppressed, hidden appetites materialize in different ways, often resulting into perpetual self-punitive behaviors.
What I love the most about this book is the insight it provides into the psyche of someone struggling with their appetites.Throughout her essays, Caroline largely focuses on explaining the inner working of women, even as she seeks to explicate how larger, wider social environments and conditions affect and shape their idea of hunger.
Undoubtedly, her powerful writing complements and reinforces the message. Caroline exposes her vulnerability with so much power and compassion that her writing doesn't fail to touch your soul. Read this paragraph, for instance:
𝐈 𝐬𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐲 𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭, 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬, 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞-𝐚𝐧𝐝-𝐚-𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐟 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬. 𝐈𝐧 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐭, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐈 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚 𝐨𝐧𝐞-𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐡 𝐬𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝𝐝𝐚𝐫 𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐲 𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐬, 𝐬𝐢𝐱𝐭𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬, 𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐬𝐨 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐥𝐮𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐝 𝐢𝐭 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐩. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐈 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐬𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐚 𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐲 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐚 𝐬𝐚𝐮𝐜𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐚 𝐬𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡. 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐈 𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐛𝐲 𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐧𝐢𝐛𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐛𝐢𝐭, 𝐞𝐝𝐠𝐞 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐲 𝐞𝐝𝐠𝐞, 𝐬𝐨 𝐬𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐭𝐰𝐨 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐞. 𝐈 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐢𝐭, 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐭𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞. 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤, 𝐝𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬, 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝, 𝐨𝐫 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐈 𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐭, 𝐨𝐫 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐲 𝐈 𝐦𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐟 𝐈 𝐡𝐚𝐝𝐧’𝐭 𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐧 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫.
I love how she describes the body as a medium of expression, something working as a fill-in to communicate the underlying emotions that are at the core of every person's appetite and which often get disregarded or remain unrecognized. And I also love how she writes about her eating disorder with compassion and understanding---and hope. The idea of faith is further strengthened in the final chapter where she also questions the possibility of being able to have our hunger satisfied, of experiencing fulfillment, the desire that is central to the concept of the human appetite.
To say that this book has provided me with the ultimate answers relating to my appetite and its fulfillment wouldn't be a complete truth. This book has, in fact, opened up a new sphere of exploration and has helped me form the necessary questions to recognize and to understand my appetite. And this, I feel, is what makes this book so special---and meaningful---to me. Highly recommended. -
Appetites was a particularly insightful commentary and memoir on the feeling many women (including myself) experience on a daily basis: a yearning hunger for something to fill us up. Make us feel whole inside. I thought the way Knapp combined different appetites apart from the physical was fascinating, like a hunger for a strong mother-daughter connection, or compulsive shopping. I also thought she successfully articulated her own experiences within the context of post second-wave feminism, while trying to make a larger point about the forces driving women to act the way they do in regards to eating, sex, shopping, alcoholism etc. While I do completely understand that this book was based on her own experiences, and how she mentioned her decision to exclude these aspects in the beginning, I was disappointed by the prominence of white womanhood. Yes, this is a memoir. But if you're going to talk about "why women want," I think you also need more than an aside in the beginning to discuss the crossroads of race and class in a meaningful way and truly encapture the myriad of ways women want. It wouldn't have to be all-encompassing, but I wish when she mentioned the stories of certain friends she perhaps had those friends talk about their intersectionality. I found this book relatable in the sense that I do ardently agree that there is a universal experience of womanhood that involves wanting something more than society offers and self-sacrifice, but I guess I (selfishly) wish it was catered more to my needs (though the dearth of biracial literature makes this all but impossible).
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This is a must-read for every American woman who ever has had an unhealthy relationship (calculate THAT percentage...), and every man who cares about such a woman.
Caroline Knappy brilliantly and compellingly tells not only her own story of anorexia, but comprehensively outlines our societal and cultural pressures that launch little girls into wobbly adult orbits around food, sex, shopping and other substances. She gives us hope that we can, at last, put ourselves at the center, without guilt or shame.
Excerpts:
"Appetites, which are selfish and self-serving and aggressive, are scary for many girls, particularly those who've been brought up to believe that such qualities are unfeminine and inappropriate...."
"... woman's relationship with hunger and satisfaction acts like a mirror, reflecting her sense of place in the wider world. How hungry, in all senses of the word, does a woman allow herself to be? How filled? How free does she really feel, or how held back? Feeding, experiencing pleasure, taking in, deserving - for many women, these may not be matters of life and death, but they are certainly markers of joy and anguish...."
I was so saddened to realize, half way through reading this book that Knapp died in 2002, and can't help but wonder what she would have to say about the state of things today.
