Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  Behaviors that appear disparate and unrelated—compulsive shoplifting, self-cutting, bulimia—nonetheless share a profound reliance on symbols to communicate what words cannot. Suzanne’s history of stealing—stealthy, bizarre, provoking both satisfaction and guilt—says something about a central feeling of deprivation, one she can’t quite describe in ordinary words or address by ordinary means. “I’ve never been able to explain it in a satisfying way,” she says, “but the word ‘deprived’ gets at it: some feeling of missing something, and of being really pissed off about that. The feeling is about being entitled to have it at that very moment, even if ‘it’ turns out to be a stupid lipstick or a candy bar.” Janet’s self-mutilation—violent and needful—communicates an opposite sensation, which is a basic lack of entitlement, and a deep distress at feeling unentitled. When she describes the mindset that leads to a cutting episode, she uses the image of a balloon: “It’s as though my whole body is so swollen up that it’s about to burst, literally about to explode, and the only way to relieve that feeling is to cut. Bleed it out.” The swollen sensation, of course, is about emotional rather than physical weight: “Need, want, anxiety, I don’t know—feelings, the whole nine yards, you name it,” she says. “I think cutting is probably a lot like throwing up. The compulsion is huge—to just to get rid of it, get rid of whatever the hell you’re feeling because it’s unbearable.” Kathleen, who is well aware that her bulimic episodes have less to do with food and weight than they do with emotion, would agree. Vomiting, she says, is always preceded by the sensation that she is “holding too much inside,” that she needs to “get it out,” and that—at least at that moment—there’s “no other way to address it.”

  Transcribing the interviews with these women, I was struck by the use, by all three, of the word it. Suzanne is “entitled to have it.” Janet is compelled to “get rid of it.” Kathleen needs to “get it out.” It is no doubt shorthand; the word may refer generally to the galaxy of feeling that surrounds female appetite, to the blend of longing and constraint that underlies it, but I suspect it also refers to that ocean of sorrow, to a woman’s awareness of its depth and her horror at the volume of need it inspires. All three women come from troubled backgrounds, histories punctuated by maternal loss and failure. Suzanne grew up as the ordinary girl in a family of beautiful sisters, her mother a woman who highly valued appearances, who lavished her other daughters with pretty things, and who left Suzanne feeling “like a mistake, a blob, an object of contempt.” Janet’s mother was an active alcoholic who alternated between periods of neglect and periods of raging, bitter resentment toward Janet, her only child, whom she referred to as “a pariah who sucked me dry.” Kathleen’s mother was more generally erratic and withholding; she favored Kathleen’s brothers, her attitude toward Kathleen was critical and belittling, and she had a violent, unpredictable temper.

  How bearable were the losses of childhood? How tolerable the hunger? How laced with confusion or rejection or hurt? And then: How deprived, how unentitled, how full of sorrow and self-hatred did the essential self become? The answer to these questions—and the difference between those who steal compulsively or cut themselves or force themselves to vomit and those who engage in less extreme versions of cruelty to the self—is essentially one of degrees. Suzanne grew up with both a particular sensation of hunger—a girl who never quite felt full enough, never quite felt as worthy of being fed as the others—and a particularly clear mode of expressing it: Take what was never given to you, take it in a way that mocks the happy, open exchanges of ordinary consumerism, take it in a way that says, essentially, Fuck you; I got ripped off, so I’m going to rip you off in return. Janet and Kathleen use different vehicles to express the same 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.

  There is anger in all these behaviors, certainly: rage at the mother who ripped you off, rage at the mother who inspired so much need and failed to meet it, rage at the self for needing anything at all. But underneath the anger is the most powerful sadness, too: the sadness of children who feel unloved and unlovable, who blame and hurt themselves because of it, who remain speechless in its presence, who engage, instead, in a pantomime of sorrow, a shadowy acting out that can be seen everywhere if you look through the right lens. On the day I met Janet, in an ordinary Starbucks filled with ordinary men and women, I overheard a young woman behind the service counter complaining to a co-worker about the buttermilk-cinnamon rolls: They were “too good,” she said; she’d already eaten two, which was “two too many.” She hissed, “I’m such a pig.” Several tables away from us, a pair of high school girls were putting on makeup, passing a compact back and forth, worrying over their lips, skin, hair. “I look like shit,” one of them said, and snapped the compact closed. Before meeting Janet, I’d seen an anorexic jogger, a woman I see almost every morning while I walk my dog—skeletally thin, she runs in rain and snow and heat, her face drawn and tight, her legs so heartbreakingly thin her Lycra tights literally bag at the knees.

  Women wanting to eat and slapping themselves for giving in. Teenage girls mastering the art of negative self-scrutiny. A skeletal body forcing itself to run and run. An arm with more scars on it than you can count. This is endlessly sad, this steady, quiet pummeling of the self, women borne along on a river of unwept tears. What does it feel like to lose control in a shopping binge or an eating binge? Desperate, panicky, frightening, to be sure, but then, way beneath those sensations, is an ancient, aching emptiness, a gaping hole so vast you think it could kill you, a longing for comfort that you know, even as you buy and eat and eat and buy, cannot be filled with food and objects. What does it feel like to lose yourself to an obsession with a man who treats you badly? Again, scary and consuming and profoundly destabilizing, but there, too, is the desperate, driving sadness that comes from feeling unloved, the longing it evokes to be fixed, to be held and needed and valued, to be proven lovable at last. And what does it feel like to starve? I have to reach quite hard to get at the sorrow there, for my primary emotional memories have to do with anxiety and isolation and a kind of cold leaden endurance. But starving is a state of sorrow, it is necessarily so, if only because it feels at the time like the only available option, the only possible way to cope, the only way to express how empty and hungry and fearful you truly feel, the only way to make yourself known.

  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.

  All children will experience rage and helplessness and the terrible pain of unmet need. The luckiest among them, the ones cared for by mothers who were sufficiently attuned and responsive enough of the time (“good enough” mothers, in analyst D. W. Winnicott’s phrase), will learn to manage these feelings, to develop a sense along the way that there is some intrinsic goodness and safety and care in the world. If you grow up with the feeling that the source of this goodness exists within you—if your mother’s care and attunement has been sufficiently internalized, if it has sparked the confidence that your needs can be safely communicated to and reliably met by someone else—then hunger becomes bearable, rage and helplessness easier to tolerate. You feel, in a word, safe, known, or at least able to be known. If, on the other hand, that early attunement and comfort eluded you, if you never internalized that sense of safety and recognition, then hunger becomes more problematic, rage and helplessness move closer to the surface, the ocean
grows wider and deeper.

  The pantomime begins when the hunger overwhelms, when it exceeds the organizing capacities of language. When words fail, you fall back on the body, you permit its behaviors and compulsions and urges to say what you feel and need, to explain the inexplicable. And so a woman closes her hand around a candy bar. She draws blood on the delicate skin of her arm. She inserts a finger into her throat. Hidden in the symbolically recast worlds of things and body parts and food—worlds, not coincidentally, that are assigned particular meaning to women in our culture—is an entire language of female sorrow, one that serves as a substitute for ordinary language and also reveals a kind of despair about ordinary language, as though there are no words, have never really been words, to describe how we feel.

  The philosopher Hegel posited desire as a lack, an absence, an idea also developed by Lacan, who described desire as a longing for something previously experienced as pleasurable or gratifying and then lost. An inherent part of desire, both believed, is a fundamental sense of incompleteness, something missing, some early division that was never quite repaired, and whether that “something” is a buried memory, or a lost experience of love or recognition or safety, or a never gratified wish for such an experience, it haunts us, tugs at the psyche’s sleeve, creates an eternal loop of hunger in which every new incarnation of want (that man, that apartment, that pared-down body) is yet another stand-in for the more visceral absence. 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.

  This is not a particularly cheerful philosophy—it suggests that human beings are essentially sorrowful creatures, wounded, eternally fated to seek fulfillment from dislocated and impossible sources—but a dash of Hegelian despair can be a useful thing, a check against consumer culture’s blaring strains of false promise, and also fodder for a deeper kind of acceptance. To know that hunger is an essential part of what it means to be human, that it’s possibly epic and anguished and intrinsically insatiable, is at least to muffle the blare, to introduce a sense of proportion.

  And yet proportion is hard to hold onto, and may be particularly hard for women. During an interview on National Public Radio’s The Connection, conducted following the publication of her 1999 book, The Whole Woman, feminist Germaine Greer described something she sees with increasing frequency: the weeping woman, the woman stopped at a traffic light with tears streaming down her face, or exiting a stall in the ladies’ room with red-rimmed eyes, or slumped in her seat at the movie theater, clutching a handful of Kleenex. The weeping is always private, indulged on the sly, and Greer sees the sorrow behind it as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual one, a reaction to the lingering understanding among women that despite several decades of social change, the world remains largely indifferent, disdainful, even hostile to their most defining qualities and concerns.

  Women weep, Greer believes, because they feel powerless, and because they are exhausted and overworked and lonely. Women weep because their own needs are unsatisfied, continually swept into the background as they tend to the needs of others. They weep because the men in their lives so often seem incapable of speaking the language of intimacy, and because their children grow up and become distant, and because they are expected to acquiesce to this distance, and because they live lives of chronically lowered expectations and chronic adjustment to the world of men, the power and strength of a woman’s emotions considered pathological or hysterical or sloppy, her interest in connection considered trivial, her core being never quite seen or known or fully appreciated, her true self out of alignment with so much that is valued and recognized and worshipped in the world around her, her love, in a word, unrequited.

  In a nod to the diminishment of outrage that began to take hold in the eighties, Greer told her interviewer, “We tried to mobilize women’s anger. We spent years telling women to get in touch with their rage, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s just not enough rage to go around. Women don’t get angry enough. What women do is get sad.”

  This sentiment stayed with me for a long time. I was driving from Boston to Rhode Island while I heard it, to visit a friend for the weekend, and I spent much of the trip thinking about the steady press of sorrow in a woman’s life, the feeling of discord that may run through her days, the singular loneliness of living in a world that emphasizes and rewards so many qualities that may run counter to her central humanity: independence instead of interdependence; distance instead of closeness; self-seeking instead of cooperation; the external world instead of the internal world; glamour and wealth and celebrity instead of kindness and generosity and warmth. I thought about the private pain of women, expressed with so much wordless anguish: the anorexic, isolated and terrified and working so relentlessly to starve away her own hunger; the shoplifter, trying to compensate for what she never had with a Clark bar; the self-cutter, lashing at her own skin instead of out at the world; the bulimic, hunched over a toilet bowl, retching out a river of need. I thought about thwarted connections—a girl’s from her mother, a woman’s from her culture—and then I did something I almost never do: I pulled my car over to the side of the road, and I sat there, and I wept.

  6

  SWIMMING TOWARD HOPE

  FAITH, AGENCY, AND THE REACH FOR SATISFACTION

  FOR THE LAST FEW YEARS, when people have asked me what I’ve been working on, I’ve trotted out an ironic little capsule statement: “Oh, a book about women and appetite—you know, anxiety, guilt, self-hatred, alienation, and sorrow.” The response has worked, at least insofar as it’s seemed to freak people out and grind further questioning to a halt (I hate talking about my work in mid-project), but I got tired of repeating it after a while, largely because the answer sounds so dark and cynical, more so than I actually feel. Appetite—naming it, satisfying it—is a monumental struggle for many women, a long-distance swim against a current of painful feeling, but I don’t think I could have tackled the subject if I didn’t feel the presence of some other current, moving in an opposite direction, if I didn’t feel some hope.

  And so for all my dark irony about the subject of appetite, and for all my conviction about the number of obstacles a woman may face as she slogs toward satisfaction, my desk is also littered with little totems of hope: scraps of paper, interview notes, folders and computer files, offerings from women who have swum against that current of pain and finally made it to another shore, new altars of desire built on the banks.

  Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, a fifty-one-year-old Episcopal minister, inspired the first of these folders, which is labeled “Spirituality.” Margaret and I first met on a Sunday afternoon in autumn, just after she’d returned from a weekend in the country with her son, ten-year-old Sam. Her counters were strewn with goods—fresh corn, late-summer tomatoes, strawberries, oranges, pita bread—and when I walked in, she was bustling about in a faintly distracted way, cheerfully purposeful. The weekend had been good: While away, Margaret began to think in earnest about buying a horse, which is a childhood dream, and she fairly glowed with the idea, her smile so authentically radiant it seemed to color the whole room.

  There was something wondrous about this picture, a woman smiling in her kitchen. Twenty years ago, Margaret used to steal into grocery stores like a thief. She’d fill her cart with lemon crullers and loaves of bread, and then she’d shut herself in her car and begin to eat, vast quantities, one doughnut after another, she’d eat until she ached. She lost a good decade of her life to the obsession with food, dieting, bingeing, loathing herself through all of it, and so to see her now, amidst strawberries and a full life and a flowering dream, was akin to a miracle: This was an image of possibilit
y.

  And an image of hard-won change. The path here, to hope, is rarely sudden or dramatic, the fixed self—new-and-improved-and-sated-at-last—never as neatly achieved or fully realized as we might like it to be or as consumer culture suggests it can be. Hope is about willingness and persistence and faith; it’s about personal and social shifts so incremental they’re often hard to discern; it’s about daily human struggle, in all its banal and brutal glory. On the day we met, Margaret ushered me into her living room and spent some time talking about that struggle: her relationship to food; the despair that led her to Overeaters Anonymous in the early eighties; her long, finally successful effort to make peace with her appetite, which she subsequently detailed in a memoir called Holy Hunger. She is not casual or cavalier about food today—no one I know who’s dealt with a full-blown eating disorder has ever fully reclaimed that particular gift of lightness—but she does know the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger, she does catch herself when she starts obsessing about food and rationalizing about when to eat and what and how much, and she has learned how to eat sanely, how to take care of herself, how to set the obsession aside, making some room for joy.

  This conversation segued almost seamlessly into talk of Margaret’s prayer life and her relationship with God, the development of which was and still is conjoined to her recovery from food addiction, both cause and effect. I tend to dissociate just a tad when people start to talk about God and prayer—having had little in the way of a religious education myself, my own sense of the spiritual is profoundly vague, and so I usually react with a feeling of detached envy when people describe their spiritual lives, and also bafflement, as though they’ve stumbled upon something literal and deeply consoling but also alien to me, a ghostly presence that I can’t quite make out. And yet the bafflement eased in the presence of Margaret’s clarity, and the sense of shimmering serenity beneath it. She described believing in the existence of a kind of love that can’t be satisfied by people, places, or things, and a need both to feel that love and to offer it in return. This love, which she understands as the love of and for God, is bigger and more encompassing than anything the concrete earthly world has to offer, and although it can be elusive and fleeting, she does find it in moments of prayer, which are often so intense they literally make her weep, so vivid is that feeling of love and so palpable her sense of connection to it. And in the aftermath of these moments, she feels an enormous proportion and calm, the inevitable frustrations and disappointments of daily life not only surmountable but also acceptable, as though they reflect an emptiness that can, finally, be filled.