Kate Zambreno

Caroline Knapp died last year at the age of 42 from lung cancer one month after her diagnosis, and it's difficult to read her posthumously published "Appetites: Why Women Want" without being poignantly aware that she was unconsciously near the end while so close to fully realizing herself. This sad sweet fact also makes you aware of this thing called life and those who make it richer by relentless self-examination. Part of Knapp's brilliance, besides her elegant and smart style, was how she bravely transformed her private obstacles into witty and lucid epiphanies for her readers, from her Alice K. column for the Boston Phoenix to her 1996 memoir "Drinking: A Love Story," chronicling her battle with alcoholism. "Appetites" draws from an earlier period of her life, when she struggled with anorexia in her early twenties while first a bright honors student at Brown and then a talented cub reporter. But this book transcends the subject of eating disorders to tackle a more universal theme, the complex seesaw of female desire and want, of a hunger that can't be satisfied by food or sex or shopping. Knapp asks the big philosophical questions, on agency and the anxiety of too much freedom, the ways in which daughters rehearse their mothers' pasts, and how culture is to blame for women's relationship to their bodies but not the sole demon. "I literally ached with hunger: My stomach throbbed with it; my ribs dug into my sides when I tried to sleep at night," she writes about her anorexic skeletal frame. "I could not express what I'd been feeling with words, but I could wear it. The inner life--hunger, confusion, longings unnamed and unmet, that whole overwhelming gamut--as a sculpture in bone." Knapp interweaves her story with those of her friends, as well as thoughts about the feminist canon, advertising, our diet-sick culture, as well as traumatizing family dynamics, to deeply examine what it means to be truly fed, in both body and soul. What more can be said than that this is an important book, and I wish that there could be more of them.

Appetites: Why Women Want

By Caroline Knapp

Counterpoint/Perseus Books, $24, 210 pages

(2003-06-04)

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