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f_amiliar_happine_ss's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
"Starving had been about what I could do to my body, sculling about what I could do with it."
Glad I picked this up on a whim, quite an insightful and comforting experience.
Throughout this book it is explained why some women might struggle accepting their appetite, how far they'll go to punish themselves for it, and why it's better to just make peace with what you desire. While physical appetite is often mentioned, the author being a recovered anorexic, food isn't the only craving women tend to suppress. With the example of shopping, Caroline goes over how decades of misogyny and consumerism still effect women to this day, and how sex can be used negatively to fill an emotional void.
Reading this helped me reflect on my own struggles; honoring my human desires, finding healthier (and less counterproductive) coping mechanisms, and how my issues may effect those around me.
Appreciated this book and I plan on picking up similar titles.
Glad I picked this up on a whim, quite an insightful and comforting experience.
Throughout this book it is explained why some women might struggle accepting their appetite, how far they'll go to punish themselves for it, and why it's better to just make peace with what you desire. While physical appetite is often mentioned, the author being a recovered anorexic, food isn't the only craving women tend to suppress. With the example of shopping, Caroline goes over how decades of misogyny and consumerism still effect women to this day, and how sex can be used negatively to fill an emotional void.
Reading this helped me reflect on my own struggles; honoring my human desires, finding healthier (and less counterproductive) coping mechanisms, and how my issues may effect those around me.
Appreciated this book and I plan on picking up similar titles.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Eating disorder and Mental illness
Minor: Addiction and Self harm
valhecka's review against another edition
2.0
So: I'm nonbinary, bi/pan, and chronically ill in a manner that is inextricably related to how I interact with food. Also, it's 2018 and everything is on fire. This was published fifteen years ago (when I was fourteen, not yet ill, and a girl). I am wildly not the target audience.
There were portions - many - that seemed like perseveration: discussions of embodiment and want became litanies of quoted self-loathing from a sort of imagined universal Woman. Fascinating on a dispassionate analytical level, but of questionable efficacy in drawing the problem. It felt circular, or spiraling.
The last chapter and the epilogue are of great value.
There were portions - many - that seemed like perseveration: discussions of embodiment and want became litanies of quoted self-loathing from a sort of imagined universal Woman. Fascinating on a dispassionate analytical level, but of questionable efficacy in drawing the problem. It felt circular, or spiraling.
The last chapter and the epilogue are of great value.
kalbooks's review against another edition
I skimmed through this book and read different sections more carefully (because it was recommended to me and I wanted to try it out but was hesitant given my eating disorder experience) and found that it wasn’t what I was looking for in terms of content about eating disorders. As someone in eating disorder recovery, I felt like it simplified what is a very complex disorder. I understand that this book is about why women want in a more general/sociological context so it probably would speak to others (and I know it has) it just wasn’t my cup of tea.
rarling's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting things to think about. Much of the info was anecdotal. Lots of statistics used without context.
fragilelikejas's review against another edition
4.0
"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:
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
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
kyr_6592's review against another edition
4.0
Over time, the old system simply fell apart, eroded, became to stultifying and oppressive to maintain, and I recall the sensation of watching this happen, knowing I no longer had the will or energy to starve or the commitment to self-destruct but not really knowing how to live differently, how to make choices, how to define and respond to hunger.
The freedom to choose, in other words, means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.
Neediness is bad, hunger is bad, the body is bad, it all causes confusion, mayhem, heartbreak, anguish.
But this is how body-loathing works; hatred of the flesh gets embedded in the heart, constraint (or lack of it) becomes fused with identity.
Constitutionally incapable of knowing solace
Something is missing: that’s as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely or solid used to be. This, I think, is the coarse grit at the bottom of the ocean, the floor beneath appetite’s sea: simple human sorrow.
And the story of appetite becomes, essentially, a story of substitutions, or a chain of substitutions, in which each failed attempt to fill emptiness leads to another attempt and another: longings in search of replacements, forever attaching themselves to things, to people, to behaviors which then take on lives of their own, become organizing principles, fragments of hope that always promise transcendence over pain and longing and always disappoint.
You try things, and some of them backfire, and some of them lead you nowhere at all, and some of them make you stronger ... And so it goes, the pace of change glacial and the effects rarely dramatic. If you are fortunate and sufficiently supported, you move incrementally onto slightly different terrain, a landscape that inch by inch grows less harsh.
Willingness is grist for the mill of insight—it’s what gets you off the sofa, out of your own head, out of the paralysis of obsession long enough to view the self in different lights, and to begin filling in the narrative, or coaxing it in new directions. Willingness is also the antidote to helplessness and, as such, the kernel of a kind of faith. You take one baby step, then another; you leap off this tiny cliff and that one; you keep it up long enough, and somewhere along the way you begin to understand that moments of emptiness and despair can be survived, that pain can be offset by pleasure, that fear can give way to safety.
All I’ve really done is build myself a more spacious cell with slightly prettier things in it: nicer furniture that neatly dresses up the same internal structure.
eliserey's review against another edition
5.0
This book is much more than an "anorexia memoir"; it weaves together eating disorders and other appetites (drinking, shopping, sex, etc), and then connects these physical appetites to the ultimate human appetite for love and connection.
There is something reassuring in the way that Knapp embeds women's struggles with appetite in the broader cultural context: in a time when women are endowed with seemingly unlimited choices but often lack the necessary sense of entitlement to make said choices, physical appetites become a metaphor for women's deepest desires – and their underlying fears that these desires are unattainable.
Although Appetites doesn't paint a rosy view of the politics surrounding women's bodies, it left me with a sense of hope: maybe the feeling of being unmoored, of never truly being fed, is a fundamental part of being a woman, or simply of being human.
There is something reassuring in the way that Knapp embeds women's struggles with appetite in the broader cultural context: in a time when women are endowed with seemingly unlimited choices but often lack the necessary sense of entitlement to make said choices, physical appetites become a metaphor for women's deepest desires – and their underlying fears that these desires are unattainable.
Although Appetites doesn't paint a rosy view of the politics surrounding women's bodies, it left me with a sense of hope: maybe the feeling of being unmoored, of never truly being fed, is a fundamental part of being a woman, or simply of being human.
jeffreyp's review against another edition
5.0
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.
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.