Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
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 to have 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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Two questions seem inextricably linked with the female psyche: what do women want (the age-old Freudian conundrum) and why do they want it? What is it about the feminine perspective that leaves women with a relentless hunger that cannot, or at least not easily or commonly, be satisfied? Knapp used her own bout with anorexia as the cornerstone of this profoundly insightful, compassionately perceptive examination of the nature of women's appetites, not only for food (or, as in her own case, avoiding it) but for sex, love, possessions, career. In a society obsessed with appearance and acquisition, control and contentment, success and sexuality, how a woman learns to define and defend her appetites can be a lifelong struggle between internal demons and external demands. Knapp, who died of lung cancer at age 42 shortly after finishing this book, 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. --Carol Haggas
Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
