Reviewed by Layla Khoury-Hanold

In Famished: On Meals, Intercourse, and Rising Up as a Good Woman (Eerdmans; December 2025), writer Anna Rollins tees up one of the crucial highly effective reader takeaways within the guide’s preface: “When ladies labored to heal from physique disgrace, their relationship to faith was intricately concerned.”

Rollins blends private narrative with journalistic reporting and analysis to share her journey, and that of so many different ladies, as they labored to divest from purity tradition and weight loss plan tradition to reframe their relationship to faith and religion, and to meals and their our bodies. We be taught over the course of the guide that each of those relationships deeply have an effect on the best way that girls really feel protected exhibiting up on the planet and of their our bodies. As Rollins writes within the preface, “The extra ladies I spoke with, the extra I felt I had discovered a misplaced sisterhood making an attempt to redefine a method to take up area and reclaim our appetites for all times, love, and meals, each bodily and non secular.”

Rollins does a wonderful job structuring her memoir in easy-to-follow timelines — organized by brief, digestible chapters into sections titled Girlhood, Marriage and Motherhood. She first charts her childhood towards the backdrop of being raised Baptist in an insular Appalachian neighborhood, sprinkled by with popular culture references — just like the pervasive quote “Nothing tastes pretty much as good as skinny feels” — that plant the seed for her restrictive consuming. To be an excellent girl (not taking over an excessive amount of area), and an excellent Christian girl (regulating her physique in order to not lead males into temptation), meant strictly monitoring energy and obsessively exercising whereas abiding by a mantra-prayer of “We should lower in order that He can improve.”

Rollins turns into trapped in a cycle of disgrace and restricted consuming, which is rendered in such poignant prose that the reader’s coronary heart breaks for her. One notably devastating line: “I, too, felt this fashion consuming meals within the firm of others. As if everybody else had a pure expertise for consumption, whereas I used to be taking part in a barely realized sport with guidelines I didn’t perceive, all the time on the verge of dropping.” However the reader and the protagonist each get some aid as soon as Rollins reaches faculty. Her outrage towards the best way she’s restricted her consuming, and in flip, her life, leads her to start enjoyable her meals guidelines, not fully, however sufficient to open up her life to incorporate forging friendships over late evening snacks, skipping finding out for an examination to play soccer with a boy she has a crush on, planning weekend highway journeys and consuming fried meals by the facet of the highway.

Whereas taking a course on Gnosticism in movie and literature throughout her sophomore yr, she unlocks what she believes was the important thing to understanding her childhood.

“I used to be certain that I used to be raised in a faith that hated our bodies. Black our bodies. Females our bodies. Fats our bodies. Poor our bodies. Disabled our bodies. This is the reason we had been obsessive about perfecting the self: We had been petrified of our personal flesh and blood. […] I used to be so petrified of want. I believed my physique was dangerous. I desired for it to be diminished to nothing: to have solely spirit stay.”

It’s one of many first occasions she meaningfully connects want to urge for food, and the way urge for food extends past the meals on her plate. Within the marriage part, this presents as challenges with penetrative intercourse; one thing that she later learns afflicts many ladies who grew up with purity tradition and strict non secular upbringings. By sharing her expertise, Rollins provides voice to and names the supply of disgrace that has affected so many different ladies.

Famished: On Meals, Intercourse, and Rising Up as a Good Woman is for anybody looking for to restore their relationship to physique picture or readers invested in self-help and private progress. The guide’s beneficiant prose and weak tone make it an inviting learn for followers of memoir and gives a recent perspective for unpacking the ways in which society influences and sublimates the appetites of ladies.