Appetites

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.

Caroline Knapp is the author of Appetites: Why Women Want and the best–selling books, Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs. She died in June 2002 at the age of forty–two.