Thomas's Reviews > Appetites: Why Women Want

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.