Product Description

"The smartest anorexia memoir ever written and a fascinating journey along the torturous pathways of female desire."--Salon

With a new discussion guide

What do women want? Did Freud have any idea how difficult that question would become for women to answer? In Appetites, Caroline Knapp confronts that question and boldly reframes it, asking, instead: How does a woman know, and then honor, what it is she wants in a culture bent on shaping, defining, and controlling women and their desires?

Knapp, best-selling author of Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs, has turned her brilliant eye towards how a woman's appetite--for food, for love, for work, and for pleasure--is shaped and constrained by culture. She uses her early battle with anorexia as a powerful exploration of what can happen when we are divorced from our most basic hungers--and offers her own success as testament to the joy of saying "I want."

Provocative, important, and deeply familiar, Appetites beautifully--and urgently--challenges all women to learn what it is to feed both the body and the soul.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20394 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-24
• Released on: 2004-04-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
The final and remarkable book of best-selling author Caroline Knapp underlines her gift of leveraging her life experiences into provocative lessons. On the surface, Appetites may appear to be about eating—-complete with Knapp's unflinching account of her anorexia. In fact, Knapp is writing about how every woman can decipher her hunger and loneliness by connecting with her desire to experience pleasure. She illuminates the ways in which cultural taboos about women who desire create vulnerability to disorders of appetite including food and alcohol addictions, compulsive shopping and promiscuous sex. In this expansive view, "one woman’s tub of cottage cheese is another woman’s maxed-out Master Card." Readers will nod in recognition as the author seamlessly weaves autobiography and anthropology, describing her family of origin, profiling women of appetite and countering what she calls "the culture of No!" that curbs and disguises women's desires. Knapp gets to yes by urging readers to ask: "What gives me delight and fully engages me?" Knowing that 42-year-old Knapp died of lung cancer makes this question all the more poignant. Such questions suggest Knapp’s brave and generous legacy. --Barbara Mackoff

From Publishers Weekly
What looks like a consciously altruistic effort to encapsulate one woman's entire life into lessons for the benefit of womankind may be just that: after divulging every gruesome detail of her spiral into anorexia and subsequent self-discoveries in this memoir, Knapp died of lung cancer last June at age 42. Similar in tone to her previous Drinking: A Love Story, this work is candid and persuasive enough to reach many women with analogous problems. But it's 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. Knapp hypothesizes that the feminists who came after the revolutionary 1960s, herself included, were stifled rather than empowered by the overwhelming choices before them. They gained "the freedom to hunger and to satisfy hunger in all its varied forms." Unfortunately, writes Knapp, size-obsessed fashion magazines and other social messages contradict a woman's right to desire, contributing to the rise in eating disorders and other illnesses. Knapp observes an aspect of the backlash against the feminist movement: when "women were demanding the right to take up more space in the world," they were being told by a still patriarchal society "to grow physically smaller." 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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Two questions seem inextricably linked with the female psyche: what do women want (the age-old Freudian conundrum) and why do they want it? What is it about the feminine perspective that leaves women with a relentless hunger that cannot, or at least not easily or commonly, be satisfied? Knapp used her own bout with anorexia as the cornerstone of this profoundly insightful, compassionately perceptive examination of the nature of women's appetites, not only for food (or, as in her own case, avoiding it) but for sex, love, possessions, career. In a society obsessed with appearance and acquisition, control and contentment, success and sexuality, how a woman learns to define and defend her appetites can be a lifelong struggle between internal demons and external demands. Knapp, who died of lung cancer at age 42 shortly after finishing this book, 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. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Sorrow and Satisfaction
More pragmatic than Kathryn Harrison, more emotional and romantic than Naomi Wolf, Caroline Knapp had the rare ability to lay bare her most elemental struggles as a woman of her generation, expanding the personal to a breadth of understanding that encompasses us all. I read her earlier book, "Drinking: A Love Story" years ago--largely in an effort to understand my own mother's alcohol addiction; confronted with issues of my own, I recently sought out this volume again, and was surprised and shocked to learn that Ms. Knapp had died, just after completing "Appetites". It came, however, as no surprise to me that she would have turned her attention to a broader scope of hunger and addiction, as I myself--and every woman in my immediate family--has battled both disordered drinking AND eating patterns. I devoured most of the book within 2 or 3 days--then spent over 2 weeks navigating the final chapters, as I was reduced to tears at the close of almost every paragraph. I found myself spilling copious quantities of ink both underlining and adding margin notes, so familiar was the language, the experiences she chronicled. I was particularly moved and impressed by the fashion in which she used intensely personal material as a starting place for a more scholarly investigation of the subject matter at hand; the book, which reads like a memoir, is nonetheless exhaustively researched and supported with extensive footnotes. I recommend it passionately to anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by choice, exhausted by freedom, shamed by a hunger that seems insatiable.

This book is food for any hungry heart
An amazing, amazing book that not only opens a woman's eyes but acts as a support and reassurance that the never ending sorrowful hunger pains many woman feel are felt by so many and are something we need to embrace and nourish as a society. Caroline Knapp is an exsquisite writer who can touch and change lives dramatically just by sharing her story and wisdom through her perfectly written words.

A Searing, Soulful Look at Women's Deepest Urges
Oh, Caroline Knapp will be missed.
"Appetites" is a powerful and profound exploration of her battle with anorexia in her twenties. She weaves the stories of other female bulemics and anorexics throughout her own-and also of other women with deep obsessions and cravings that lead to such behaviors as promiscuity, alcoholism, spending wildly, and shop lifting. What are they really hunger for, she asks. Love, acceptance, security? She writes with grace and force. The reader confronts these issues with her, but she eases them into the debate. And then he or she is engaged.
Knapp explores the emotional, psychological, and cultural reasons that drive American women to such behaviors. She has a softer, gentler voice than most feminists and she does not indict men for the most part. But she does blame society. It's interesting-most pop psychologists would diagnose some of the behaviors she describes as examples of an "obsessive compulsive disorder" (anorexia is a manifestation of it in many cases). Yet she doesn't use that term once in the book-in many ways, she digs even deeper for the causes than simply a diagnosis. She analyzes what triggers the disease.
I would recommend this book for most women, even if you haven't had an eating disorder. We all have appetites. I wouldn't recommend it for most men, except those who like women issue books or know someone who is anorexic.