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Appetites

By Caroline Knapp

List Price: $14.95

December 27, 2011 | Paperback | 5.6 x 8.25, 224 Pages | ISBN 9781582438085
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“With signature tenacity and grace, Knapp’s posthumous offering... tackles at its very root the question—the conundrum—of women’s desires.” —ELLE

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, best-selling 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 Caroline Knapp

CAROLINE KNAPP is the author of Alice K’s Guide to Life as well as the bestselling books, Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and died in June 2002 at the age of 42.

Praise

“With signature tenacity and grace, Knapp’s posthumous offering… tackles at its very root the question—the conundrum—of women’s desires.” —ELLE

“This searing examination of the love-hate relationship women have with their bodies is a poignant portrait of hunger in its various forms—and an important part of the writer’s brilliant legacy.” —Glamour

“Riveting… a tribute to her strength.” —O, the Oprah Magazine

“Buttressed by legitimizing statistics and a gamut of eyewitness testimony, this book hurts like the truth, and it’s a painful relief to read it in great gulps.” —Bust

“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.” —Library Journal Starred Review

“Profoundly insightful, compassionately perceptive… [Knapp] was an exceptional analyst of the female zeitgeist, one whose astute cultural observations and ruthless personal revelations leave a legacy that will resonate with women for generations to come.” —Booklist

“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… 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.” —Publishers Weekly

“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.” —Kirkus

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