Description

I've withheld returning this book to the library because I want so desperately to remember the writing.  This is the best depiction of my childhood I've ever read.  I have also grappled with the desire to write about my mother from a place holstering no blame.  This is the essence of recovery in writing: Caroline Knapp's Appetites.

"The why here - why I chose to starve, is a big question, much of the answer idiosyncratic and personal.  There is always a family at the center of an eating disorder, and I had a characteristically complex one at the center of mine, dominated by a set of brilliant, inhibited, often unhappy parents whose marriage was riddled with ambivalence.  They were loving and generous people, but also reserved to the point of opacity, and their expressions of affection were so coded and veiled I wouldn't learn to decipher them until I was well into my thirties.  Before then, I often felt mystified and apart and anxiously insecure.  My siblings seemed to have had a more innately secure sense of familial belonging, the result of a style that meshed with the family style, perhaps, or a kind of internal wiring that left them more apt to feel understood than unmoored. I lacked that.  I suspect I felt personally responsible for my parents' quiet unhappiness and reticence, the bad kid who'd somehow poisoned the air we all breathed, and I felt compelled from an early age to compensate, as though my right to stay needed to be earned: I was quiet, shy, clean, perfectionistic.  I got A's.  I scrubbed the kitchen without being asked.

My mother inherited no such gene [taste of luxury and fine things].  She never took much interest in womanly things, particularly appearances; she was whipsmart, painfully shy, bookish, and solitary as a girl.  Maternal love, in her experience, was deeply entwined with judgment, and her own interests lay in realms her mother seemed either to disdain or to judge harshly.  This made for a lot of powerful conflicts, literal and psychic.

I imagine a young woman feeling deeply agitated without always knowing why, conflicted about her own desires and wants, which she wasn't quite sure she was entitled to in the first place, and ashamed of her own needs, which she herself could barely acknowledge ... How does a woman who's been raised to table her own needs, to sublimate her own desires and strivings into the care and feeding of others, to swallow her own disappointments, communicate to her daughter the very feelings of authority and entitlement that she herself lacks?

Kim Chernin, from The Hungry Self writes, 'in coming of age and entering the world, she is in danger of calling up [her mother's] envy and resentment, and even worse, more painful and disturbing to consider, she is now in a position to remind her mother of her own failure and lack.'  She sees this dilemma as central to eating disorders, a woman's attack on her own body hiding 'a bitter warfare against the mother: it's the guilt we feel and the hidden anger we can't express.'"