Appetites: Why Women Want

Knapp (1960-2002) investigates how women know and honor what they want in a culture determined to shape, define, and control women and their desires. She looks at how women's appetite for food, love, work, and pleasure is shaped by culture, drawing on her own early experience with anorexia to demonstrate the impact of a woman being cut off from her basic hungers. There is no index. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Washington Post

Like Knapp's earlier work, Appetites is beautifully written, and her cultural insights, though not always original, are powerfully rendered. The images of her waiting all day for the moment when she will permit herself a piece of apple and cheese for dinner are stark and affecting. — Liza Featherstone

Caroline Knapp is the author of Appetites: Why Women Want and the best-selling books, Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs. She died in June 2002 at the age of forty-two.