Appetites by Caroline Knapp

Author:Caroline Knapp [Knapp, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781582436951
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2010-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

4

FROM BRA BURNING TO BINGE SHOPPING

APPETITE AND THE ZEITGEIST

I HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO say I rowed my way out of anorexia, which is partly true. In the summer of 1985, I discovered sculling on the Charles River, a rigorous, insanely exacting sport and an endeavor that very gradually began to coax my sense of the body in a new direction. A skinny woman atop a skinny boat, poised to learn something about strength, and confidence, and the nature of power.

There was nothing the least bit deliberate about this. I’d moved to Boston the previous fall, leaving Providence not so much because I had a clear goal in mind, and certainly not out of any wish to take up obscure water sports, but because I sensed I’d die if I stayed there, the rut of starving had grown so deep, the style so entrenched, the sense of stagnation so oppressive. Anorexia takes on such an airless, empty, mind-numbing sameness over time, life at a flat-line, each hour each minute each breath punctuated by the ache of hunger; each decision dictated by it; each day a grinding replica of the one before, same minuscule breakfast, same tiny lunch, same non-dinner, same cripplingly predictable chain of thought, a closed circle that begins and ends with no: No no no no . . . maybe . . . will you won’t you . . . how much . . . can’t . . . no no no. I put whatever energy reserves I had during those years into work. Beyond that, not much: a lot of TV.

The move to Boston forced a slight loosening of anorexia’s vice-grip, catalyzed tiny changes, all of which I resisted. I rented an apartment in a western suburb, and I remember trying to replicate my old rituals from Providence, every detail: I spent weeks trying to find a deli that sold bagels like the ones I’d eaten daily for the previous three years; I looked for a shop that consistently carried Dannon coffee-flavored yogurt, my lunch of choice; I set up my bedroom just so—TV here, bed there, close attention paid to every angle—so that I could sit in the exact same physical position I’d sat in Providence while I watched TV and ate my apple and cheese. None of it worked quite the same way; the bagels tasted different, the stores all seemed to stock vanilla yogurt and not coffee, or Columbo and not Dannon, the light in my new bedroom was not the same as the light in my old bedroom, and even these tiny changes felt unnerving, a jarring erosion of the solace of ritual.

On some level, too, I must have recognized the inanity of the effort, of trying to duplicate something so profoundly self-limiting. Within several months of moving to Boston, I got hired as a reporter for a newspaper that covered the local business community; the staff was larger than it had been at my old newspaper and I found it harder to cling

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