Appetites

the long version

What do women want? Did Freud have any idea how difficult that question would become for women to answer? In Appetites, Caroline Knapp confronts that question 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 women and their desires? In this, her final book, completed shortly before her death last June, she turns her eye toward how a woman's appetite--for food, for love, for work, and for pleasure--is shaped and constrained by culture. She uses her early battle 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."