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Appetites: Why Women Want | 
 enlarge | Author: Caroline Knapp
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 684292
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.6
ASIN: B000H2N9Y0
Publication Date: March 31, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
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
Book Description
"Where are the lines between satisfaction and excess, between restraint and indulgence, between pleasure and self-destruction? And why are they so difficult to find, particularly for women?" (from Appetites) 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, the best-selling author of Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs turns her brilliant 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." 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 Essential reading for every woman August 1, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I read this book as part of a feminist psychology class and I LOVED it. It is so enlightening and revealing.
It is about anorexia, but as a reader you often forget this because it-- unlike most books on eating disorders-- focuses on the psychology of women and how society impacts women's desires and sense of entitlement.
I DEFINATELY recommend reading this book... there is no doubt that it will change the way you think about your wants and needs and make you question what society has been telling and teaching you all your life.
 Great Book July 17, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Overall a great book if you don't want a completely factual account of women and dieting. It can be self-indulgent, ego-centric, and sprawling but the author's personality is likable and sympathetic so I enjoyed learning about the more personal side to this. There are other more factual books I would reccomend, though, like Women and Dieting Culture: Inside a Commercial Weight Loss Group or Hunger: An Unnatural History.
But good book overall and I'd reccomend it.
One More in the Name of Love November 14, 2006
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Alice Walker once wrote, "Art unfailingly reflects its creator's heart. Art . . . comes from a heart open to all the possible paths there might be to a healthier tomorrow." Caroline Knapp's artistry was in writing and publishing her internal dialogues. This book appears to reveal her heart, a heart that was open to considering new and different possible paths to a healthier tomorrow. She may not have had all the solutions to the issues she raised in her excellent book, but I admire her tremendous courage to express her frustrations clearly and to think aloud to try and understand the motivations and causes for her behaviors. She expressed her best estimates of how she might improve her circumstances. This book is an excellent look at one [...] woman's cognitive thought processes about why she thought she was the way she was, and how she thought she might overcome her perceived problems. Whether you agree with her or not as to the causes of her issues and their possible solutions, if you read this book, you will learn something very valuable about the strong, and sometimes controlling, reasoning processes that likely flow through many women.
Throughout this book (and her books 'Pack of Two' and 'The Merry Recluse') she discusses her difficulties with communicating with her mother, her father, her significant others, professors and people in general. She discusses how she did not believe that her parents communicated well with each other in key areas. She watched her mother silently accept roles that she was not certain her mother should accept. She saw her mother accept treatment from her father that she thought her mother should have responded to differently.
When a woman chooses to attach her soul to another person's soul, and also agrees to "be silent to" or condone parts of the other person's philosophies or actions she believes to be in error - that prolonged, and potentially neverending, acquiescence can negatively effect her psyche. That degree of unceasing internal mental contradiction in major areas may manifest itself in either serious mental dysfunctions or physical ailments.
It is more healthy for a woman to express her objections, even if those objections are not addressed and remain outstanding, than to be silent. Women must overcome any discouragement they receive from their family, friends, and significant others, discouraging them from expressing the ideas they think may lead to possible solutions. They should not always defer to the people closest to them because women often have the best access to the most accurate information about themselves. And even when their suggested solutions may not be better than the current course, when they raise their objections, it gives their community notice of issues that likely deserve alternate responses and further reconsideration.
Thank you Ms. Knapp, not because you had all the right answers, but because you set a great example of a woman fighting resiliently to help herself and others, even when that self-examination was revealing and sometimes humbling. Even when she could not find sufficient motivations for herself, she worked toward and wanted other women to pursue their fulfilments and desires, and to become satiated. She wanted to stop the cycle of mothers unknowingly passing on negative patterns to their daughters. Caroline's voice was heard and I will always remember it.
 I wish I hadn't bought this. September 12, 2006
6 out of 15 found this review helpful
I got so much out of Knapp's book on alcoholism, I foolishly assumed this would be enlightening as well. She seems determined to prove that every woman in America has issues. If you diet, for whatever reason, you have issues. If you eat what you like, you have issues. If you're vegetarian. If you eat junk food. If you work out. If you hate how you look in a bikini. If you LIKE how you look in a bikini. For god's sake, food is just one part of life. And there are actually women who do not have body issues!
I'm currently trying to get in shape (note my phrasing there), and I'd thought this would motivate me. What was I thinking. I can just see Knapp, were she alive, questioning me about my diet and exercise, and then her comments afterwards. "She eats a quarter cup of M&M's a day...Yes, she told me that she read the nutritional info on the packate, but SEE? We're all slaves to the FDA and the LIES they cram down our throat! She's AFRAID to go for it and just take a handful of M&Ms and be FREEEEEEE!" Except that eating like that is how I got out of shape, and then it would be, "Oh, she doesn't like her body, because Vogue tells her she has to disappear when she turns sideways!"
Every girl should read this April 19, 2006
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book is amazing. I go to a large State College and see this sort of thing everyday. Girls spending money the don't have to buy an identity; girls giving themselves up to men just to feel wanted, girls starving themselves simply because they are so lost. This book says everything; very honestly. I think any female can relate to it. I couldn't put it down. I stayed up and read the whole thing in two days. I particularly rec this book if you are about college age from my generation.
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