Perseus Academic: Appetites by Caroline Knapp

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.