Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl is a groundbreaking debut memoir that examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites. Continue reading for an exclusive guest post from Anna Rollins about diet culture and the holidays. 

 

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The Holidays, Diet Culture, and the Scripts for Good Womanhood
Anna Rollins

On the drive to Grandpa’s for Christmas dinner, I flip through a stack of women’s magazines. I study health and fitness articles as my dad turns up the volume to The Music Man soundtrack on the car stereo. There’s trouble awaiting me: approximately five pounds of it. At least, that’s how much one article warns me I could gain by the conclusion of the holiday. Cookie exchanges, glasses of eggnog by a warm fire, mugs of hot chocolate after a night of caroling, hors d’oeuvres at an office Christmas party. These are the culprits. They will all add up and appear along my pale and dimpled winter waistline.  

It’s the turn of the millennium, and I am twelve years old. There are no office parties for me. But Grandpa’s Christmas dinner is its own threat. I familiarize myself with tips to avoid disaster. Water, glasses of it, chilled and chugged, held as a prop at parties. Carrots and other raw vegetables piled high on dessert-sized plates. Pre-gaming with protein: a boiled egg, almonds, something to dampen desire during an evening’s events.  

I gaze out the window at the rolling Kentucky hillsides as I consider the upcoming holiday dinner. Dressed turkey and buttered rolls. Crisco-crusted pies.

This is the conundrum of Christmas: how to make merry without making a mess. 

We arrive and Aunt Teresa greets me with a hug. “You’ve grown!” she exclaims, and I try not to wince at the insinuation. In the kitchen, I eye the pre-dinner spread arranged on a foldout table: cubes of cheese, peanut butter crackers dipped in fudge, peppermint bark. I walk to the table and pull a pretzel from a bowl of Chex Mix. I place it in my mouth to suck its salt, slowly disintegrating the pretzel with my saliva. In the kitchen I pour a glass of tap water and chug, hoping to fill the emptiness inside of me.   

At dinner, my cousin Kaitlyn comments on my portions: “You eat like a bird,” she says. 

“I don’t know about that,” I shrug with a laugh. The only thing I care more about than staying small is not letting others see the extent of my desire to shrink.  

“I’m so hungry, I could eat this whole bird!” my cousin Ethan bellows as he piles slabs of turkey on his dish.   

I eye my cousins’ plates. They are all piled high with mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. Their turkey is swimming in gravy. I see a grey hair—feline?—poking out of Ethan’s mound of stuffing. Kaitlyn takes what I deem normal-sized bites of food, eating at what I consider a respectable pace.  

I think about this often—I watch other people eat often. I judge their pacing. The way they chew. I evaluate unfinished morsels, what is eaten first, last. I look for patterns, for foods eaten in specific orders. I notice when someone begins with their vegetables—the steamed or raw ones, not the ones baked in cheese and cream of mushroom soup. 

“I’m already heading for seconds,” Ethan laughs, moving to stand as he slaps his gut.  

Kaitlyn finishes her plate—nearly. There’s still a pool of cranberry relish, a slab of turkey. “I never have been a fan of turkey,” she says as she takes her plate to the kitchen sink. I believe her. I do not believe she has manufactured an excuse to explain away her leftovers.  

Holidays weren’t always like this for me. There was a time when I could celebrate without obsessing about my appetites. As a younger girl, before my aunt passed away from stomach cancer, we enjoyed Christmas dinner Italian style. The manicotti was slathered in homemade marinara and oozed with stuffed ricotta and mozzarella.  

“No salad and extra garlic bread for me, please,” I’d say as my mother served our meal on fine china. I’d ask for seconds, sometimes thirds. I wasn’t concerned then about how much I wanted, how fully I longed for more, more, more.  

But now that I’ve become a woman, I’ve put away these childish things. Both the larger culture and my evangelical culture were teaching me a similar script: good women controlled their appetites. And I wanted nothing more than to be good. Good, small, submissive, approved.

I was willing to count the cost, even if such penance left me very hungry.  

It wouldn’t be until years later that I would learn to listen to, rather than ignore, my appetites. Instead of fighting my desires, I’d learn that they could give me information about my needs and lead toward becoming the person God created me to be. I narrate this story in my memoir, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl. Through personal narrative, reporting, and research, I unpack the rhyming scripts of evangelical purity culture and diet culture, scripts that idolatrize control over surrender. I hope you’ll give yourself (or a friend who needs these words) a copy this Christmas season. 

 

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Blending memoir, research, and reporting, Famished untangles the lies of diet and purity culture and encourages women to reclaim their appetites for life, love, and food, both physical and spiritual. Interweaving her own story of disordered eating and sexual dysfunction with those of other women she interviews, Rollins discovers a sisterhood committed to finding freedom from body shame. Along the way, she rewrites her own body’s story to include a purpose much greater than its size or parts or the roles she fills as daughter, wife, and mother, a body well loved by her and beloved by God. 

“The high cost of religious scrupulosity and institutionalized religious diet culture is evident on every page of this remarkable debut.”
—Tia Levings, author of A Well-Trained Wife 

“Anna Rollins articulates the grief of years spent learning to disappear in a way that was sold as holiness. . . . A beautiful and haunting meditation on what cannot be rewritten and what might still be reclaimed.”
—Anna Gazmarian, author of Devout 

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