Lisa Knopp - Bread: A Memoir of Hunger

A few years ago, I found it very easy and very gratifying to tightly restrict what, when, and how much I ate. It was with a sense of triumph and delight that I watched myself becoming smaller and taking up less space. A whisper, a shadow, or a flicker is what I wanted to be. When I finally realized that the disordered eating that had left me sick and small when I was fifteen and again when I was twenty-five had returned when I was deep into middle age, I was full of urgent questions. Why did I respond to that which threatened or overwhelmed me by restricting my food intake? How can one heal from a condition that is the result of a tangle of genetic, biological, psychological, economic, and cultural forces? Are eating disorders and disordered eating in older women caused by the same factors as in younger women? Or are they caused, in part, by the sorrows and frustrations of aging in a culture that sees midlife and beyond as a time of inexorable decline marked by increasing deterioration, powerlessness, dependency, and irrelevance and so marginalizes older people? In my search for answers to these questions, I read studies by experts on eating disorders and revisited those dark periods in my life when reducing myself to skin and bones seemed like the best antidote to whatever was ailing me.

This book is the account of my efforts to understand the causes and nature of this perplexing and recurring problem in my life. In the introduction, I define terms, chiefly noting the difference between an eating disorder, which is a psychological illness and has a clinical diagnosis, and disordered eating, which is an abnormal or maladapted relationship with food, weight, body image, and self. I suspect that most women and too), I delve into the story of the unexpected return of my malady in my mid-fifties, when I responded to a cluster of separations and losses that left me feeling sad, empty, and hopeless by restricting my food intake, and the ways I eventually discovered to feed my deepest hungers.

I have many hopes for this book. I hope to convince readers that eating disorders and disordered eating are about more than just food and weight. I hope that the story of my malady and my search for understanding will inform and inspire those who also suffer from a conflicted relationship with food, weight, and self-image. Because eating disorders and disordered eating among older women are more common than most people realize, I hope to raise awareness about this hidden, little-studied, little-discussed phenomenon. I hope that those who eat normally and arent preoccupied with the number on the bathroom scale will find something in my story and reflections that speaks to them, too, since this is not only a food memoir and an illness narrative but a spiritual autobiography, concerned as it is with various appetites, hungers, desires, nourishments, and fulfillments.

Most books about eating disorders and disordered eating are written by medical doctors or psychologists, or by those who have been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or binge-eating disorder and treated by specialists in residential programs. I am none of these. I am a writer and this book is a work of creative nonfiction, a first-person account of one womans illness and what she learned about herself and her culture because of it. For those who are restricting, binging, or binging and purging or for those who are concerned about someone who is, no part of this book or my story is to be taken as a substitute for consultation with a medical or mental health professional.