Sam Van Sweden - Eating with My Mouth Open

EATING WITH MY MOUTH OPEN

SAM VAN ZWEDEN is a Melbourne-based writer interested in memory, mental health and the body. Her writing has appeared in the Saturday Paper, Meanjin, The Big Issue, The Lifted Brow, Cordite, the Sydney Review of Books, The Wheeler Centre and others. Eating with My Mouth Open won the 2019 KYD Unpublished Manuscript Award. Her work has been shortlisted for the Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers, the Lifted Brow and RMIT non/fictionLab Prize for Experimental Non-Fiction, and the Lord Mayors Creative Writing Awards.

Eating with My Mouth Open feels like being gifted the most glorious odd-box from the Farmers Market: inside are delicious, unnameable fruits and shining vegetables. Van Zwedens writing is at once both nourishing and thorny, generous and eclectic, sumptuous and piquant. This book marks the arrival of a fresh voice in Australian nonfiction.

REBECCA GIGGS

Eating with My Mouth Open is a beautiful book: heartfelt, intelligent and full of love. It is an examination of the complexities of food and the body, their respective cultures, and the ways in which these basic elements inflect and impact upon so many aspects of our broader lives. Van Zwedens curiosity and warmth animate her writing, which is insightful and lyrical, and a joy to read. This is an important book, and one that will have an impact on many peoples lives.

FIONA WRIGHT

A love letter to Gezellig, to Dutch comfort, Eating with My Mouth Open is a tribute to the rituals of family-making through food. In this excruciating time of bougie food-for-cultural-capital, of body-positive rah-rah, of food-loving, body-shaming confusion, Sam van Zweden cuts through the bullshit, arguing that food is for love, and that if we love food, we must love the bodies that food nurtures. Van Zweden is a masterful caretaker of the bodies that have been left out.

ELLENA SAVAGE

Sam van Zwedens exploration of the interplay between food and pleasure, guilt and shame, the body in space, time and in all its glory, can be read like a novel or as a collection of essays a well-researched degustation of ideas that give us a front-row seat to her Journey towards being unapologetically comfortable in her skin. Something we can all relate to.

ALICE ZASLAVSKY

This is writing as sustenance. The books moments of deep insight and intimacy, all its quiet revolutions, are answerable as is the case with the most enduring nonfiction to two gods only: truth and nurture.

MARIA TUMARKIN

Eating with My Mouth Open is beautiful. Sam is an incredible writer and is amazingly attuned to those tender points where food tangles with family, trauma, illness and mental wellbeing she describes everyday food moments with clarity and compassion in a way that made me fall in love with food all over again. Its a wonderful book.

RUBY TANDOH

An unsparingly honest self-examination of the hungers, the memories and searingly painful truths held deep within our bodies, and how we may permit ourselves to stop and listen to our bodies, and with this seemingly-simple act, connect the nourishment and care of our physical selves with that of our minds and of our loved ones. Wise and brave and deeply empathic.

KATE RICHARDS

Absolutely the best kind of memoir: enthralling, empathic and empowering. A beautiful and important book to read at a single sitting and then return to again and again for the insights it offers.

DONNA LEE BRIEN

Eating with My Mouth Open is a warm and thoughtful contemplation of what it means to have a body, to eat, to grow, and to feel like you are too much in a society that rewards thinness and smallness, especially in women. It investigates the way that attitudes towards food are ingrained through culture, family, and memory, for better or worse. Both deeply personal and thoroughly researched, this intimately written book contributes to the conversation regarding diet culture and body acceptance in fresh and thought-provoking ways. Van Zweden is a conscientious and generous writer, whose words will resonate greatly with anyone who has ever felt uncomfortable in their own skin.

ELOISE GRILLS

I sensed that it was connected to the taste of the tea and the cake, but it went infinitely far beyond it It is clear that the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me.

Marcel Proust

like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that.

MFK Fisher

SAM VAN ZWEDEN

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

Sam van Zweden 2021

First published 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

A catalogue record for this
book is available from the
National Library of Australia

ISBN9781742236988 (paperback)

9781742244914 (ebook)

9781742249438 (ePDF)

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Lisa White

Cover images Stocksy & Shutterstock

Printer Griffin Press

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

This book was written on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation.

Authors content note: This book includes sensitive material including mentions of disordered eating, self-harm, suicide and mental health. Please take it as gently as you need to. Support service contacts are available at the end of this book (page 222).

Your little bottoms, called the dance teacher, are lovely peaches!

When I was very young, from about three or four years old, I took dance classes. Having broken my leg and spent time in a plaster cast, I was too afraid to use it properly again when the plaster was removed. My parents enrolled me in dance classes in the hope that Id forget the break, or at least become braver in my movement.

I remember raising my arms to reach the barre. I held on tight and inspected myself in the mirror. The barre stretched all the way around the room, with mirrored walls behind.

We were to squeeze those precious peaches as we raised slowly up on the toes of our soft shoes, then lowered back down.

Look yourself in the eye and say with me I. Am. Be-aut-i-ful!

At three years old, I didnt doubt it for a second.

Where does that self go? That tiny self with the precious peach bottom, who is unafraid of her own body, and who believes she is beautiful. Where does she evaporate to? Because I find it hard to believe shes still inside me.