Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl

A groundbreaking debut memoir that examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites

Raised Baptist in an insular Appalachian community, Anna Rollins learned early that among the world’s many dangers, her own body loomed large. So, she dedicated herself to keeping it small—strictly controlling her calories and exercising to the point of exhaustion while murmuring some version of the prayer: “We must decrease so that He can increase.”

She was picking up a similar mantra online: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” To be a Christian woman was to be thin and chaste, sidestepping any pleasures of the flesh that would cause you—or a brother in Christ—to stumble into sin. But thinness was also a sign of virtue to the outside world. By day, Rollins attended schools and churches where male pastors and older women policed female bodies. By night, she scrolled websites and chat rooms where dieting itself inspired a kind of religious devotion.

Despite Rollins’s piety, anger grew in her chest. “I was all hunger, all need. I was ashamed. But I was also proud. I knew that I was also physical, embodied, a person with desires, despite how frequently I was told that I was not.”

Still, it wasn’t until she found herself obsessing over how she would burn off the pasta she ate for dinner while watching her infant son struggle to breathe in the ICU that Rollins
could admit to herself the extent to which she’d bought into the false promises of both purity and diet culture: That if she controlled her appetites, she would be righteous. That if she made herself smaller, she would be safe.

Blending memoir, research, and reporting, Famished untangles these lies and encourages women to reclaim their appetites for life, love, and food, both physical and spiritual. Interweaving her own story of disordered eating and sexual dysfunction with those of other women she interviews, Rollins discovers a sisterhood committed to finding freedom from body shame. Along the way she rewrites her own body’s story to include a purpose much greater than its size or parts or the roles she fills as daughter, wife, and mother, a body well—loved by her and beloved by God.