Appetites

I’ve started another reread, Appetites: Why Women Want by Caroline Knapp. At different points in her life, she has been anorexic or alcoholic or both and has a lot to say about hunger and why women in particular struggle to find balance between denying the body and overindulging it. It is a beautifully written book filled with keen observations and some hard truths shared from her own life. I wish that every young woman in America would read it. I quote Ms. Knapp’s prologue in its entirety:

Appetite by Renoir

The women linger at the water’s edge, and they are stunning in the most unusual way: large women, voluptuous, abundant, delighted. They lounge along the river bank, they lift their arms toward the sun, their hair ripples down their backs, which are smooth and brood and strong. There is softness in the way they move, and also strength and sensuality, as though they revel in the feel of their own heft and substance.

Step back from the canvas, and observe, think, feel. This is an image of bounty, a view of female physicality in which a woman’s hungers are both celebrated and undifferentiated, as though all her appetites are of a piece, the physical and the emotional entwined and given equal weight. Food is love on this landscape, and love is sex, and sex is connection, and connection is food; appetites exist in a full circle, or in a sonata where eating and touching and making love and feeling close are all distinct chords that nonetheless meld with and complement one another.

Renoir, who created this image, once said that were it not for the female body, he never could have become a painter. This is clear; there is love for women in each detail of the canvas, and love for self, and there is joy, and there is a degree of sensual integration that makes you want to weep, so beautiful it seems, and so elusive.