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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Caroline Knapp's final book is both the smartest anorexia memoir ever written and a fascinating journey along the tortuous pathways of female desire.
May 22, 2003 | The late Caroline Knapp was not Everywoman, but there were enough women -- and men -- who felt that her writing spoke directly to them to put her first book, the memoir "Drinking: A Love Story," on the bestseller list. Her second book, about the relationship between people and dogs, did nearly as well. Her third, "Appetites," published now, a year after she died at 42 from complications arising from lung cancer, may seem like the culmination of her writings just because it is the last one we'll have from her. But the scope of the book, its effort to root out all the ways that women's desires get twisted, thwarted, redirected and obliterated, using her own youthful bout with anorexia as a case in point, suggests that "Appetites" was a keystone work for her.
It's also a heart-rending one, because despite the manifest intelligence and sensitivity of Knapp's writing -- this is quite possibly the smartest and deepest anorexia memoir ever written, and it's also more than just a memoir -- she only occasionally manages to grasp the source of the agonies she details so well. It's as if she's trying to describe a yard behind a tall fence, a scene she can only catch glimpses of by jumping as high as she can. There's a flash of the other side here, and again there, but often she's just telling us about the fence. Yet you can't help but think that Knapp almost made it over that barrier, and that if she had been given a few more years she would have arrived in full.
In "Appetites," Knapp sees eating disorders as one in an array of screwed-up responses to the fears stirred up by women's cravings: for food, yes, but also for sex, love, recognition and power. She touches on everything from compulsive shopping to obsessive love affairs to self-cutting, but self-starvation remains for her the most eloquent acting out of that fear. In her early 20s, during a period of flux in her life, Knapp subsisted on a daily diet of one plain sesame bagel, a carton of coffee-flavored yogurt, an apple and a one-inch cube of cheese. At the lowest point in her illness, she weighed 83 pounds, about 40 pounds less than her normal weight.
After years of therapy, Knapp did recover, though she confesses that she never entirely shook the tendency toward "weighing, measuring, calculating, monitoring" her eating and exercise habits. (She also wrestled with alcoholism later on, as she recounted in "Drinking: A Love Story.") And as the author well knows, she has plenty of company in that self-scrutiny, even among women who have never suffered from full-blown eating disorders. "It's hard to think of a woman who hasn't grappled to one degree or another with precisely the same fears, feelings and pressures that drove me to starve."
There are several theories about what causes anorexia, but they tend to break down into one of two categories: Either the illness is triggered by a culture that demands slenderness in women while remaining profoundly ambivalent about womanhood itself, or it's a reaction to a particular kind of family dynamic -- overprotective, rigid, suffocating. Knapp doesn't subscribe to either theory; she believes that more than cultural factors are at work, and her own family doesn't match the classic profile. She does, however, feel that both elements contribute to anorexia, which, "like all disorders of the appetite, is a solution to a wide variety of conflicts and fears." Or rather, "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."
Knapp's ability to articulate the haze of neurotic thinking helps lift "Appetites" above the run-of-the-mill anorexia memoir. She writes of "the strange solace of starving -- the cocoon of safety it seemed to offer: in my own blind terror, anorexia beckoned, the memory of those early sensations of mastery and control seemed to promise exquisite relief." And also of the anorexic's "proud sensation that I was somehow beyond ordinary need" and "coolly superior" to other women. She describes the less pathological, commonplace version of feminine body-loathing as "slithering, poisonous, laced with self-contempt ... it can hit like a slap, a reflexive, often wholly irrational jolt of self-disgust that rises up from a place so deep it feels like instinct."
