Scary-good book

[Guest guest]

Hi, Group!

For those of you who enjoy reading anything and everything you can find about IE and related subjects, I'd like to recommend a book I've had for some time and put down after reading about a third of it, and am now starting again. I know why I put it down: too hard to read when I was "using" food. It's Caroline Knapp's "Appetites: Why Women Want." Knapp was anorexic and this is her attempt to to understand her eating disorder. I am finding it so compelling, I'm marking the margin on nearly every page. Consider this:

"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." (p. 3)

Or this:

"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 . . ." (p. 6)

I've never starved myself (at least for very long), but substitute "dieting" or "restricting food" for "starving" in the second quote, and Knapp speaks directly to my past experience.

I suspect this book is similar in some ways to Hirschmann's "When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies" that Latoya has recommended (and I've just started reading), in that Knapp feels that the denial of what we "really" hunger for, and what women are told it is shameful/wrong/disgusting/unfeminine to want, is at the root of disorders of appetite. Fascinating. I know this is true for me. Both my father and my first husband (not coincidentally, sigh) overtly tried to shame me out of my appetites, and good little girl that I was, I complied. Or tried very hard to.

Knapp's book is not to be confused with Geneen Roth's similarly titled "Appetites: On the Search for True Nourishment," which I just finished, and also loved, for different reasons. Those of you who don't agree with Roth's "inner journey" approach to her eating disorders will not like Roth's book. Roth is a more nurturing author than Knapp (at least so far as I can tell). I always feel "safe" with Geneen Roth; with Knapp, I feel like maybe I'm teetering on the edge of a cliff, which is sort of her literary profile anyway. Or was. Knapp died at age 42 of lung cancer.

Anyway, just had to share my enthusiasm for this new-old book.

Cheers!

Laurie