Appetites - Softcover

Knapp, Caroline

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582438080 ISBN 13: 9781582438085

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2011

Synopsis

In Appetites, Caroline Knapp confronts Freud’s famous question, What do women want?” and boldly reframes it, asking instead: How does a woman know, and then honor, what it is she wants in a culture bent on shaping, defining, and controlling her desires? Knapp, bestselling author of Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs, has turned her brilliant eye towards how a woman’s appetite for food, love, work, and pleasure has become a battlefield. She uses her own experiences with anorexia as a powerful exploration of what can happen when we are divorced from our most basic hungers and offers her own success as testament to the joy of saying I want.”
Provocative, important, and deeply familiar, Appetites beautifully and urgently challenges all women to learn what it is to feed both the body and the soul.

About this title

Review:

The final and remarkable book of best-selling author Caroline Knapp underlines her gift of leveraging her life experiences into provocative lessons. On the surface, Appetites may appear to be about eating—-complete with Knapp's unflinching account of her anorexia. In fact, Knapp is writing about how every woman can decipher her hunger and loneliness by connecting with her desire to experience pleasure. She illuminates the ways in which cultural taboos about women who desire create vulnerability to disorders of appetite including food and alcohol addictions, compulsive shopping and promiscuous sex. In this expansive view, "one woman’s tub of cottage cheese is another woman’s maxed-out Master Card." Readers will nod in recognition as the author seamlessly weaves autobiography and anthropology, describing her family of origin, profiling women of appetite and countering what she calls "the culture of No!" that curbs and disguises women's desires. Knapp gets to yes by urging readers to ask: "What gives me delight and fully engages me?" Knowing that 42-year-old Knapp died of lung cancer makes this question all the more poignant. Such questions suggest Knapp’s brave and generous legacy. --Barbara Mackoff

About the Author:

Gabra Zackman knows romance. Her clever and “thrilling romantic caper” (Library Journal) Bod Squad series was inspired by the more than one hundred romance and women’s fiction titles she has narrated for audio. She divides her time between her native New York City and Denver, Colorado.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1582438080
• ISBN 13: 9781582438085
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224