Appetites

The New York Times

Appetites displays the same unflinching analysis she used to analyze her battle with alcoholism in Drinking: A Love Story. — Jillian Dunham

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

Publishers Weekly

What looks like a consciously altruistic effort to encapsulate one woman's entire life into lessons for the benefit of womankind may be just that: after divulging every gruesome detail of her spiral into anorexia and subsequent self-discoveries in this memoir, Knapp died of breast cancer last June at age 42. Similar in tone to her previous Drinking: A Love Story, this work is candid and persuasive enough to reach many women with analogous problems. But it's more than one woman's tragic story; multitudinous interviews with women with eating disorders, excerpts from classic feminist texts and sociological statistics lend credence and categorize the book under cultural studies as much as self-help. Knapp hypothesizes that the feminists who came after the revolutionary 1960s, herself included, were stifled rather than empowered by the overwhelming choices before them. They gained "the freedom to hunger and to satisfy hunger in all its varied forms." Unfortunately, writes Knapp, size-obsessed fashion magazines and other social messages contradict a woman's right to desire, contributing to the rise in eating disorders and other illnesses. Knapp observes an aspect of the backlash against the feminist movement: when "women were demanding the right to take up more space in the world," they were being told by a still patriarchal society "to grow physically smaller." Though Knapp admits it's "easier to worry about the body than the soul," she hopes creating a dialogue about anorexia will enable all women to nourish both. (May 1) Forecast: The bestselling success of Drinking and Knapp's death last year will certainly spike interest in this affecting book. Counterpoint plans a 75,000 first printing and ads in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Bloomsbury Review and the Women's Review of Books. Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

Caroline Knapp led a short, troubled life, and she wrote as insightfully and searingly about the troubles young women have today as anyone has. Knapp wrote a funny but heartfelt column in the Boston Phoenix for years that was the first thing many readers turned to each week. She struggled with anorexia and alcohol abuse, and she wrote the much-admired books Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two: The Intricate Bonds Between People and Dogs. Her problems with eating and drinking supply the impetus for this last, posthumous book (she died of cancer in 2002). Here she puts her own issues with food and drink in a larger philosophical context, the problem of how women struggle to deal with all of their desires and human appetites. Knapp isn't a true believer, convert or doctrinaire thinker of any sort. She boldly and sensitively fuses her own experiences, her observations and her reading. Some of her remarks are memorable, and some thoughts launch more rambling lines of reflection. While this is a brief book, it isn't a self-help text, easy to skim or use for quick life tips. A bright female college sophomore I asked to read this found it truthfully described and thoughtfully interpreted young female lives as they are often lived today. Some chapter titles: Add Cake, Subtract Self-Esteem; I Hate My Stomach, I Hate My Thighs; From Bra Burning to Binge Shopping; and Body as Voice. Not for everyone, but perhaps exactly what some young women might be looking for. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Perseus, Counterpoint, 210p. notes. bibliog., Ages 15 to adult.
—Daniel Levinson

Library Journal

The hopeful celebration of Knapp's niece's birth in the epilog of her quest for an understanding of "why women want" belies the tragic fact of the author's death from cancer a year ago at the age of 41. In her previous work, Drinking: A Love Story, the author exposed her harrowing battle with alcoholism, and here she reveals her all-consuming struggle with severe anorexia, baring without a shred of solipsism her starvation tactics, strained relationship with her mother, and search for a love that could fill her hunger. In lucid, effortless prose, Knapp explores the personal and cultural influences around appetites such as food, shopping, and sex and a woman's drive for recognition and fulfillment. Countless statistics, interviews with women from diverse backgrounds, and quotes from experts in a variety of related fields are woven into a seamless narrative that rarely bends to sentimentalism. As a personal account of recovery and a provocative study of women in American society, Appetites is highly recommended.-Prudence Peiffer, Ctr. for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Final memoir from the late Knapp (Pack of Two, 1998, etc.), this one recording her decades-long struggle with anorexia. As she did in Drinking: A Love Story (1996), the author makes connections among different kinds of addictive behavior, be it self-starvation, getting blind drunk, or compulsive shopping. But rather than narrowly focusing on the behaviors, Knapp delves into the question of appetite as a symbol: why women suppress their "wants" in the first place. At 19, a junior at Brown, she began the spiral into anorexia. After spending Thanksgiving with her family, she returned to the campus to write a paper, but was too anxious and depressed to walk to the student cafeteria for dinner. Instead, Knapp purchased a container of cottage cheese and some rice cakes, stretching the small meal over the next three days. That purchase, she writes, "represented a turning point, the passage of a woman at a crossroads, one road marked Empty, the other marked Full. Not believing at the core that fullness--satiety, gratification, pleasure--was within my grasp, I chose the other road." What caused this choice? Knapp explores her relationship with her mother (somewhat distant, but not terrible by any means); media messages (women do internalize these messages, she notes, but not all of them become anorexic, so the media by itself isn’t entirely to blame); and cultural trends from the Me Generation to the extravagant dot.com dreams of the ’90s. After years of therapy, the love of her celebrated canine, rowing, and a solid romantic relationship, she finally chose to re-enter the world. Knapp concludes by saying that contemporary women live during a time when they may be psychically liberated, able tohave careers and make reproductive choices, but are not socially supported; for all the rhetoric, women still do most of the housekeeping and parenting. Her beautiful prose is bolstered throughout with nice anecdotes from research material and the author’s personal experiences. An eloquent voice that will be missed. First printing of 75,000. Agent: Colleen Mohyde/Doe Coover Agency