Appetites Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - ADD CAKE, SUBTRACT SELF-ESTEEM

  Chapter 2 - THE MOTHER CONNECTION

  Chapter 3 - I HATE MY STOMACH, I HATE MY THIGHS

  Chapter 4 - FROM BRA BURNING TO BINGE SHOPPING

  Chapter 5 - BODY AS VOICE

  Chapter 6 - SWIMMING TOWARD HOPE

  EPILOGUE

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR APPETITES BY 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 world—a place that unquestionably still exists, that’s inhabited with varying degrees of intensity by all too 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 ounces at birth, more than a pound less than my sister (she weighed in at six), and was dispatched immediately to an incubator, 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 demo
ns, 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.