La seule AUTOBIOGRAPHIE que tu ne peux pas manquer

A tous,

J'ai lu beaucoup d'autobiographies, et c'est le seul qui m'a ainsi stupéfié, j'étais sans mot. Si vous avez une chance de le lire, vous ne serez pas déçu. Ce livre a vraiment aidé mon rétablissement. J'ai inclu les revues, mais elles ne décrivent pas comment grand ce livre est. Une citation que j'ai préféré dans le livre:

" Cottage cheese, of course, is the food God developed to tortue women, to make them keen with yearning. Picture it on a plate, lumpy and bland atop a limp lettuce leaf and half a canned peach. Consider the taste and the feel of it: wet, bitter little curds. Now compare it to the real thing: a think, oozing slab of brie, or a dense and silky smear of cream cheese. Cottage cheese is one of our culture's most visible symbols of self-denial;marketed honestly, it would appear in dairy cases with warning labels: THIS SUBSTANCE IS SELF-PUNITIVE; INGEST WITH CAUTION."

Editorial Reviews

From Amazon.com
The final and remarkable book of best-selling author Caroline Knapp underlines her gift of leveraging her life experiences into provocative lessons. On the surface, Appetites may appear to be about eating—-complete with Knapp's unflinching account of her anorexia. In fact, Knapp is writing about how every woman can decipher her hunger and loneliness by connecting with her desire to experience pleasure. She illuminates the ways in which cultural taboos about women who desire create vulnerability to disorders of appetite including food and alcohol addictions, compulsive shopping and promiscuous sex. In this expansive view, "one woman’s tub of cottage cheese is another woman’s maxed-out Master Card." Readers will nod in recognition as the author seamlessly weaves autobiography and anthropology, describing her family of origin, profiling women of appetite and countering what she calls "the culture of No!" that curbs and disguises women's desires. Knapp gets to yes by urging readers to ask: "What gives me delight and fully engages me?" Knowing that 42-year-old Knapp died of lung cancer makes this question all the more poignant. Such questions suggest Knapp’s brave and generous legacy. --Barbara Mackoff

From Publishers Weekly
What looks like a consciously altruistic effort to encapsulate one woman's entire life into lessons for the benefit of womankind may be just that: after divulging every gruesome detail of her spiral into anorexia and subsequent self-discoveries in this memoir, Knapp died of lung cancer last June at age 42. Similar in tone to her previous Drinking: A Love Story, this work is candid and persuasive enough to reach many women with analogous problems. But it's more than one woman's tragic story; multitudinous interviews with women with eating disorders, excerpts from classic feminist texts and sociological statistics lend credence and categorize the book under cultural studies as much as self-help. Knapp hypothesizes that the feminists who came after the revolutionary 1960s, herself included, were stifled rather than empowered by the overwhelming choices before them. They gained "the freedom to hunger and to satisfy hunger in all its varied forms." Unfortunately, writes Knapp, size-obsessed fashion magazines and other social messages contradict a woman's right to desire, contributing to the rise in eating disorders and other illnesses. Knapp observes an aspect of the backlash against the feminist movement: when "women were demanding the right to take up more space in the world," they were being told by a still patriarchal society "to grow physically smaller." Though Knapp admits it's "easier to worry about the body than the soul," she hopes creating a dialogue about anorexia will enable all women to nourish both.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Two questions seem inextricably linked with the female psyche: what do women want (the age-old Freudian conundrum) and why do they want it? What is it about the feminine perspective that leaves women with a relentless hunger that cannot, or at least not easily or commonly, be satisfied? Knapp used her own bout with anorexia as the cornerstone of this profoundly insightful, compassionately perceptive examination of the nature of women's appetites, not only for food (or, as in her own case, avoiding it) but for sex, love, possessions, career. In a society obsessed with appearance and acquisition, control and contentment, success and sexuality, how a woman learns to define and defend her appetites can be a lifelong struggle between internal demons and external demands. Knapp, who died of lung cancer at age 42 shortly after finishing this book, was an exceptional analyst of the female zeitgeist, one whose astute cultural observations and ruthless personal revelations leave a legacy that will resonate with women for generations to come. Carol Haggas

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author Caroline Knapp was the author of Alice K's Guide to Life as well as the best-selling books Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and died in June 2002, at the age of forty-two. .