Appetites: Why Women Want
--Carolyn Knapp
Powells' Review (excerpt):
The late Caroline Knapp was not Everywoman, but there were enough women — and men — who felt that her writing spoke directly to them to put her first book, the memoir Drinking: A Love Story, on the bestseller list. Her second book, about the relationship between people and dogs, did nearly as well. Her third, Appetites, published now, a year after she died at 42 from complications arising from lung cancer, may seem like the culmination of her writings just because it is the last one we'll have from her. But the scope of the book, its effort to root out all the ways that women's desires get twisted, thwarted, redirected and obliterated, using her own youthful bout with anorexia as a case in point, suggests that Appetites was a keystone work for her.
It's also a heart-rending one, because despite the manifest intelligence and sensitivity of Knapp's writing — this is quite possibly the smartest and deepest anorexia memoir ever written, and it's also more than just a memoir — she only occasionally manages to grasp the source of the agonies she details so well. It's as if she's trying to describe a yard behind a tall fence, a scene she can only catch glimpses of by jumping as high as she can. There's a flash of the other side here, and again there, but often she's just telling us about the fence. Yet you can't help but think that Knapp almost made it over that barrier, and that if she had been given a few more years she would have arrived in full.
http://www.powells.com/review/2003_05_23.html