Feast
New York
Little A
March 1, 2018
First Edition
235 pages
ISBN 978-1503942578
Read the table of contents page of “Feast—True Love, In and Out of the Kitchen” by Hannah Howard and you’ll see chapters listed like eclectic menu items: Cookies. Peking Duck. Spaghetti (straps). Gelato. After reading this beautiful memoir, you might view the same page as a carefully-logged food list of a person with an eating disorder—things consumed in a week, a day, a sitting. A guilt list. The dichotomy between what’s associated with a menu (celebration, nourishment, love) and a food list (restriction, control, distraction) captures much of what this memoir has to share.
In, “Cookies,” Howard begins her story intimately, by bringing us to her last binge, which start with cookies—and the accompanying feelings.
“And just like starving is the answer, bingeing is the answer,” writes Howard. “Life is big and scary. Food is constant, safe, dependable. Food blots everything out and calms everything down, draws the shades and tucks me in. Cozy. Miserable. Numb.”
Not only is food the answer for lonely, angry, bored, or anxious feelings she has—but she recognizes that it is also there for her in times of excitement, joy, and celebration.
There are happy memories of food shopping and cooking with her mother: “There is no better place than the kitchen. In my mother’s kitchen, I feel lucky.” As she reaches puberty, she feels different, larger than her peers—even undergoing a breast reduction surgery, after which her disappointment in a lack of transformation, a lack of skinniness, a lack of anyone noticing, seems nearly unbearable.
Howard writes about food with a sensual precision and appreciation that is laced throughout the book; food writing, it seems, is at least one of her love languages, and her words fairly adorn every lush detail for us. Her sophisticated palate pairs with a writing hand that translates the full experience of any food with ease.
Her palate, too, sets her apart from her peers. When she goes on a sixth-grade immigration-themed field trip, she looks forward to lunch, authentic Chinese food from Chinatown—and so does the reader: “Tender soup dumplings that ooze savory, salty broth? Crimson nuggets of fatty-crispy pork? Piles of pliable hand-pulled noodles studded with fiery Sichuan peppercorns?” But to her tearful disappointment, her classmates—nearly sixty of them—opt for McDonald’s. A kind teacher swoops in, and together they dine on Chinese food: “It smells of salt and fat and promise; I feel my tears drying, the soft, strong hand of relief and deliciousness.”
Many of us grow up seeing the struggle against the body in our own families, and Howard’s experience is the same: she witnesses her mother’s fight against her own body: her defeat in dressing rooms, unable to fit into a certain size. She sees her mother in step aerobics classes, and the family pantry suddenly void of her beloved bagels.
When accepted to Columbia, her dream school, she plans her transformation: “At college in New York, life is going to start, and it is going to be grand. She vows to be herself, only better. Skinnier.
That summer, at age 17, she works at a Gelato cart; the manager, eleven years her senior, promptly seduces her. He tells her that she should lose weight. That she could be a “ten” if she lost weight and got into great shape. Her heartbreaking response: “I wish I didn’t love food so much.”
And so begins the kickoff to her eating disorder, a way of eating—or not eating—that finally yields thinness. The disease has the side it presents to the world: effortless thinness, being put together, hearing praise from the world; then, the side that is never seen by others: secretive, all-consuming, exhausting.
“My legs are skinnier than ever and always cold. My thighs don’t touch. It seems a weird battle to have won. I am supposed to be happy now, sparkly, float through the streets of New York like laughter. But deep inside my internal organs, there are millions of pounds of longing. This is not the way I thought skinniness would feel.”
The breakup with this man—who warns her that he cannot help her with her disordered eating—leaves an emptiness in her, then a flailing about into her true college experience. She finds, “her people,” a non-frat, coed fraternity for artists and writers, where she cooks for herself and her friends. She also finds her people when she is hired as a hostess at Picholine, “the fanciest of fancy restaurants on Manhattan’s Upper West Side,” crediting this hiring—at least in part—to her thinness. Her eating disorder is going strong. “I hate math, but I am always counting. Food is not just food but a vessel of points and calories, grams of carbs and fat. If I drink only coffee all day, I will allow myself dinner. If I don’t eat dinner, I can eat an oatmeal raisin cookie.”
When her mother first confronts her about her eating disorder, she is forced to look at it in its complexity—on what terms she values her body and her worth. “I know the impossible bind of being valued for being sexy and condemned for being sexy. I know that my body is a source of both vulnerability and power and that navigating this will continue to be impossible. I want to be badass and free from the patriarchy. I want to be badass and free from the patriarchy and skinny.”
Later, when she finally relents to entering treatment and having a diagnosis of Anorexia, her mother apologizes. ““I’m sorry,” my mom tells me. “I thought you were doing something positive with this dieting. I shouldn’t have encouraged it.””
“But is wasn’t just her who encouraged it. It was the whole fucking world.”
In “Feast,” metaphors abound. Food as love is a metaphor not lost on the reader—and neither is the way it mirrors her early relationships with men. Over and over these men—these great loves—fairly consume her, tormenting her, sometimes long after they part ways. She meets chefs and food-celebrities. She develops an expertise for cheese, in all its forms, known in her own rite for this gift. One night she meets a handsome chef who later offers to drive her home—a gesture that turns violent and dark, ending with her home later that night, scrubbing herself in her parents’ shower, crying quietly. By now she has been in therapy for a while, but she tells not a soul.
She meets Josh; they connect through a passion for food, writing, and the culinary scene of the world. He is too old for her; he knows this and respects her enough to leave the relationship. She reconnects with Ari, a chef—impossibly chiseled and handsome—and falls deeply in love. They move to Philadelphia, where she manages a restaurant and he becomes its chef; their worlds become impossibly tangled. Ari is romantic, gentle, fiery, loving, and cruel. When they break up, he begs for her to stay. He promises to spend more time with her. To cook for her.
She moves back to the city and begins a new job that she really enjoys, which includes writing about food for a gourmet market. She joins her mother and her friends for dinner one night—it is the night of her last binge, bringing the story and the reader into a satisfying, full circle, bringing us closer to the world she has shared so intimately.
It is then she finds recovery, attending meetings as a compulsive eater, and it is then that she meets Nick—son of her boss, a former “fuckup” redeemed. He is charming, attractive—and married. As they work together, the attraction grows, too strong to resist. She writes, “He is the best drug, and I am an instant fiend.”
And thus begins a tumultuous affair—shameful and secretive and delicious. Throughout it, she goes to her meetings for recovery. She learns about relationships—with herself, with food, with other people. The people of her recovery group are there for her; she finally does not feel alone in her despair around food.
Nick leaves his wife. He dips in and out of recovery. He moves in with her, and then, finally—after many ups and downs—out of her life for good.
“I know this is the last time,” she writes. “I know this is the real recovery.”
As the pieces come together in her recovery, it becomes clear that food is not the problem; it never was. It distracts from that which longs to be felt and that which we resist, leading us down a false path, further from the truth. The idea of the “Red Herring” is used not only in literature; it has been used as device to shed light on the mystery around disordered eating.
She writes, “I’m less afraid to fall into the depths of my fear, worry, shame. I’ve been there, and I know the way back out again.”
Feast—True Love—In and Out of the Kitchen, is a memoir of a woman unafraid of truth, a woman who embraces, at last, all that food and love is to her. It is an empowering, important read that will leave many of us heartened, understood, and perhaps less afraid of our own hunger.
—
Jennifer Genest was a Peter Taylor Fellow for the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her story, “Ways to Prepare White Perch,” won the 2014 Ryan R. Gibbs award for short fiction, was selected for The Wigleaf Top 50 (very) Short Fictions of 2015, and received honorable mention for the Kenyon Review Short Story Contest. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, New Delta Review, Paper Darts, and elsewhere. Jennifer is currently seeking publication for her novel manuscript, The Mending Wall. She lives near Los Angeles with her husband and daughters.