Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Feast
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1987?
WEBSITE: http://www.washedrinds.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2018055942
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018055942
HEADING: Howard, Hannah
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370 __ |c United States |e New York (N.Y.) |2 naf
372 __ |a Authorship |2 lcsh
373 __ |a Columbia University |a Bennington College |2 naf
374 __ |a Authors |2 lcsh
375 __ |a Females |2 lcdgt
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Howard, Hannah. Feast, 2018: |b title page (Hannah Howard) about the author (Howard is a writer and food expert; she received her BA from Columbia University in creative writing and anthropology in 2009 and is currently pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars; she lives in New York City)
PERSONAL
Born. c. 1987.
EDUCATION:Columbia University, B.A., 2009; Bennington College, M.F.A., 2018.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, copywriter, marketing strategist. Serious Eats website, columnist, 2008-13; Fairway Market, director of communications and copywriter, 2011-14; New York Natives LLC, columnist, 2013-; Murray’s Cheese, creative content manager, 2015-16; Dean and DeLuca, senior copywriter, 2017. Has also worked as restaurant manager, guest editor, hotel reservationist, bartender, server, and cook.
WRITINGS
Has published articles in the New York Times, VICE, Self.com, Thought Catalog, Serious Eats, New York Magazine’s Grub Street blog, among others.
SIDELIGHTS
Hannah Howard studied creative writing at Columbia University and received her M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from Bennington College. She has held various jobs, as restaurant manager, hotel reservationist, bartender, server, and cook, while pursuing her education. She has also worked as a journalist, copywriter, and marketing strategist for such clients as Serious Eats, Fairway Market, New York Natives LLC, Murray’s Cheese, and Dean and DeLuca while also publishing articles in the New York Times, VICE, Self.com, Thought Catalog, Serious Eats, New York Magazine’s Grub Street blog, among others. Her first book is Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen.
Howard discussed the background and content of Feast in the Chicago Review of Books, saying that it “is about working my way through restaurants, falling in love with food (and the wrong men), and recovering from a brutal eating disorder.” In narrating her own memoir, she remarked that she felt as though she were “parachuting into the front lines of the very worst moments of my life”—moments that included an unhappy relationship and breakup with a married man and rape by a chef. A self-declared food expert, Howard details her struggles before she was at last “able to find deeper healing and the self-respect that had eluded her,” as a Kirkus Reviews contributor described it. The same critic called the memoir “candid and searching” as well as “inspirational.” A reviewer at Publishers Weekly observed that people who have experienced substance abuse “will recognize themselves throughout this honest memoir”; for those who have not “this story offers a painful glance into the lives of those who suffer.”
Writing at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Susan Pagani called Howard “very brave” and thought the book was “honest and funny.” Howard begins the book with a searing description of her last binge, at the home of her parents on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. While her mother looks at her knowingly and disapprovingly, Howard says that as she simply viewed the table spread with sushi, gyoza, and edamame, “a foreign, malicious force curled up in my stomach and reaching its monster limbs into my mouth.” She continues, “I hate myself for my lack of self-control, my irrepressible gluttony.” Howard casts her gaze back over the events that led her to this point. At last, Pagani reported, “she perseveres and makes a place for herself in food and food writing. And eventually, she does find her way to a recovery meeting for compulsive eaters.” She concludes, “Howard offers food experiences that are, even in their individual details and extremes, so familiar to my own—and in that way they are as comforting as they are illuminating.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Howard, Hannah, Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen, Little A (New York, NY), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of Feast.
Publishers Weekly, January 22, 2018, review of Feast, p. 73.
ONLINE
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (April 6, 2018), Hannah Howard, “Why Narrating My Memoir Was Even More Difficult Than Writing It.”
Hannah Howard website, http://www.washedrinds.com/ (June 29, 2018).
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org (April 26, 2018), Susan Pagani, “Nobody Is Safe: Disordered Eating in the Age of Foodies,” review of Feast.
Hi, I'm Hannah
I'm a writer and food expert who spent my formative years in New York eating, drinking, serving, bartending, cooking on a hot line, flipping giant wheels of cheese, and managing restaurants. I write about delicious things for a living, appear in food videos, teach cheese and cooking classes, and host culinary events. My memoir, Feast: True Love in and Out of the Kitchen, is forthcoming with Little A in 2018.
I received my BA from Columbia University in Creative Writing and Anthropology in 2009. I am currently pursuing my MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars, where I am a recipient of the Lucy Grealy Scholarship.
My work has been featured in The New York Times, VICE, Self.com, Thought Catalog, AMEX OPEN forum, Serious Eats, New York Magazine’s Grub Street, refinery29, The Olive Oil Times and Columbia College Today.
My writing has been the voice of Men’s Health, Applegate, Murray’s Cheese, Bloomingdale's, Panera, Olay, Pantene and many more. I mentor women recovering from eating disorders on building a happy, healthy relationships with food and themselves. I live in New York City.
FEATURES
Why Narrating My Memoir Was Even More Difficult Than Writing It
Hannah Howard on recording the audiobook for 'Feast: True Love in and Out of the Kitchen.'
BY HANNAH HOWARD
APRIL 6, 2018
COMMENT 1
I adjusted the headphones in my windowless studio at Brilliance Audio in Grand Haven, Michigan. “It’s temperature-controlled,” the director Ken Schmidt had told me on the drive from the Holiday Inn earlier that morning. Outside, full-blown Michigan winter unleashed icy, howling winds. I had just turned down the heat in the shoe box-sized room. Still, my palms were sweaty. It was my first day recording the audiobook for my first book, a memoir called Feast: True Love in and Out of the Kitchen, and I was hot with nervousness.
The problem wasn’t the headphones—they were seriously high quality headphones. It was the intensity of my voice. As I read, my own words seemed to reverberate in my head and bounce around my skull. They were loud and aggressive. It was unnerving. It was emotionally draining.
“Can we turn down the volume?” Outside my technically impressive cave, Ken and Matt, the engineers, were making the magic happen. They couldn’t see me, but they could hear every breath and rustle and word. They didn’t have windows to the outside world either, but they kept the door open to the long hall full of studios with serious sound insulation and blinking signs that said, “Quiet please, recording.” They had created thousands of audiobooks between the them. I had entered a different universe, and I was grateful that some of us knew what we were doing.
Matt turned down the volume when I asked. He turned it down more when I asked again. It helped a little, but my voice still seemed to thunder. The headphones created an echo chamber.
How do you narrate your book? It’s pretty simple. You just read. There’s no real way to practice—Feast took three days to record in nine-hour stretches. The studio had scheduled four days just in case. Next to me, a stash of water, Throat Coat tea, and lozenges, which I made ample use of.
Ken had emailed me a list of pro tips for book recording (“eating a light breakfast and snacks helps avoid tummy rumbles” and “avoid bracelets, watches, etc. as they tend to make noise.”). I was immediately grateful for Ken’s knowledge and generous patience. He took me on a tour of Brilliance Audio. A long hallway led to recording studio after recording studio. In the back, a factory floor produced CDs and other physical media. There were jars of candies and lozenges everywhere. I kept taking more. My throat felt chapped but lemony.
Ken introduced me to a few professional audiobook narrators. A kind woman gave me a palm full of Advil. “Your voice is a muscle,” she explained. “It’s not used to working for so many hours at a time.”
Sure enough, I popped the painkillers around lunchtime on day one. My throat had become tight and scratchy. Ken kept asking me to pause and take a sip of water. I did, which meant I had to pee constantly.
Slowly, I got used to the echo of my own voice. We did “punch recording,” which means I read until I made a mistake. Then Matt played back the last good sentence and I jumped in where I left off. I didn’t want to waste their time with too many mistakes. Ken had even looked up the pronunciation of all the French works and obscure food terms ahead of time. (The only word we weren’t totally sure on was the Belgian cheese Wavreumont.)
I became exceptionally focused, as if I had entered a sort of meditative state. It was just my own words and me in that little booth. It was just Feast. Sentences, paragraphs, pages took on their own life and filled up all of my mental space. It was thrilling and exhausting.
Sometimes Ken chimed in with instructions, urging me to slow down or speed up or lower my register for someone’s voice.
“Do you feel comfortable doing a Greek accent?” he asked. I have a minor character in the first chapter who speaks with one.
“No way.” I’m terrible at all accents.
“Then we have to think of some way to distinguish his voice,” Ken urged.
The voices turned out to be the second hardest part of the whole process. The first hardest part was the emotional weirdness.
Feast is about working my way through restaurants, falling in love with food (and the wrong men), and recovering from a brutal eating disorder. Since it’s my debut, every step along the publishing process is new to me. Oh THIS is how they do it, I keep thinking. The whole thing is equal parts exciting and terrifying.
Part of me thought writing Feast would be, if not quite cathartic, somehow satisfying. Sure, I delved into the biggest, hardest parts of my life. But those things were behind me by the time I sat down to finish my proposal. I had recovered from my anorexia and binge eating. I had broken up with Nick, who was a married alcoholic when we met, and full of rage even when he got a separation and sober. Ten years after the fact, I finally got the courage to write about getting raped by a chef I had admired.
Writing Feast would be easy as pie.
It wasn’t, of course. My own memoir transported me right back into the middle of the eating disorder, the rape, the miserable relationships with older, wrong-for-me men. It was as if my hard-earned perspective had evaporated and left me back at age 18, full of self-loathing and despair. By the time Feast had endured its six rounds of edits, two rounds of copyedits, legal review, and proofreading, I had been through the emotional ringer. But it was completely worth it.
Do memoirists reading their own books ever burst in to tears?” I asked Matt and Ken. I was a little worried I might.
“Oh, all the time,” they both agreed, which reassured me a bit. At least I wouldn’t be the first.
Reading was even more immediate and raw than writing the book had been. As I recounted my merciless last binge, my rape, my breakups, I felt my throat tighten and my muscles contract.
“You sound a bit scratchy,” Ken, the director said, “Let’s start again.”
And again. And again. I had to take more than a few moments to wipe away tears. When writing, I could shut my laptop and go for a walk. I could call my mom or paint my nails or turn on the TV. But I was trapped in the little recording booth, trapped in my own story, my own past. Ken and Matt were patient, but I was conscious that they were waiting for me.
Reading Feast was like parachuting into the front lines of the very worst moments of my life. I was 18 again, starving myself to fit into the tiny dress I believed was the key to me landing my hostessing job at a super fancy restaurant. I was 22 and miserable at my corporate steakhouse job in Pasadena, crying in the walk-in refrigerator. I was sticking my finger down my throat, trying but failing to make myself puke after an epically destructive binge on cookies and everything else in my kitchen.
In the studio, I turned down the heat even more. All of this self-loathing made me warm and clammy. I went to pee for the seventh time. I splashed water on my face. I pulled myself together.
At the end of the day, I had only the Holiday Inn to go back to. I was wound up and lonely. Yet if recording Feast was more excruciating than writing it, it was also cleansing and rewarding. Writing the book took three years. Speaking it took three days. Everything felt distilled. Once the words were spoken, I was finished. Easy as pie.
At the end of day three, I was on a roll. “You’re sounding so great now,” Ken suggested, “Let’s go back and do the first chapter again.”
I could hear the difference when he played back the two takes. The second time, my voice was surer, yet also somehow tender. I guess that’s the way I’d like to write, to live—fearless yet vulnerable. I had to brave the dark echo chamber of my own brain, but then I got to offer something I made, a piece of me, to the world.
I was still in a fugue state when we went out for ruebens in Grand Haven. Outside, the town sparkled in November sunshine.
“You have to write another book so you can come back and do it all again,” Matt said. The idea seemed impossible, and essential.
feast4.jpg
NONFICTION – MEMOIR
Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen
By Hannah Howard
Little A
Published April 1, 2018
Hannah Howard received her BA from Columbia University in creative writing and anthropology in 2009. She is currently pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she is a recipient of the Lucy Grealy Scholarship. Her work has been published in New York Magazine, VICE, and Self.
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My memoir, Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen, is out now!
I am a writer and food expert. I write about delicious things, create food videos, teach cheese and cooking classes, and host culinary events.
My work has been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, Thrillist, Thought Catalog, Bust, Mic, Serious Eats, refinery29, Zady, BlackboardEats, oyster.com, The Olive Oil Times, Cheese Connoisseur, and Columbia College Today.
My writing has been the voice of Dean & DeLuca, Men’s Health, Fairway Market, Applegate, Murray’s Cheese, Bloomingdales, Panera, Pantene and many more. Check out my work at hannahhoward.nyc.
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Highlights
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You both studied at Columbia University in the City of New York
Hannah started at Columbia University in the City of New York after you started
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Experience
Hannah Howard
Journalist, Copywriter, Marketing Strategist, Food Expert
Company NameHannah Howard
Dates EmployedMay 2008 – Present Employment Duration10 yrs 2 mos
LocationNew York City
I write quality, captivating things about food and cooking, lifestyle, travel, health, and beyond. I devise (social) media and communications strategy that works, then put it into practice. I create content for websites, magazines, ads, and anything with words. I edit recipes. I wax poetic about figs...or keep it straightforward. That's just the start.
New York Natives LLC.
Columnist
Company NameNew York Natives LLC.
Dates Employed2013 – Present Employment Duration5 yrs
Write a column about living the food life in NYC: http://newyorknatives.com/contributors/hannah-howard/
Dean & DeLuca
Senior Copywriter
Company NameDean & DeLuca
Dates EmployedMar 2017 – Dec 2017 Employment Duration10 mos
LocationGreater New York City Area
Murray's Cheese
Creative Content Manager
Company NameMurray's Cheese
Dates EmployedJun 2015 – Jan 2016 Employment Duration8 mos
As the voice of Murray’s Cheese, I composed website and product copy, signs, brochures,
catalogs, menus, training material, and ads. My work embodied the brand and furthered the growth of New York’s oldest cheese shop. I created and executed creative campaigns in our 250 store locations and online.
As the liaison between Murray’s Cheese and external media and press, I developed and built relationships with key influencers. I landed us appearances on The Today Show and Fox Business Network, stories in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and hundreds more.
I pursued and nurtured business and community partners. I managed strategic program development with special events and initiatives, like the celebration of Murray’s 75th anniversary.
Fairway Market
Director, Copywriting and Communications
Company NameFairway Market
Dates EmployedSep 2011 – Apr 2014 Employment Duration2 yrs 8 mos
Strategize and write Fairway’s blog, website, email blasts, press releases, website content, advertisements, magazine ‘Fairway Flavors,’ in-store signage, and social media.
Responsible for internal and external communication—sending a clear, powerful message both to our employees and the public through marketing, traditional media, and social media. Educate management and staff on products and service.
Manage projects and plan and execute events. Organize cheese and wine tastings; olive oil master classes; benefit galas; a street fair for tens of thousands; tastings and demos; and more.
Brand spokesperson for Fairway, representing the company to print and online media, radio, and TV.
Promote Fairway through creative work: I conceived and run Fairway's Rock Stars program—a demo and sampling program.
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Education
Bennington College
Bennington College
Degree NameMaster of Fine Arts (MFA) Field Of StudyCreative Writing
Dates attended or expected graduation 2016 – 2018
Columbia University in the City of New York
Columbia University in the City of New York
Degree NameBA Field Of StudyCreative writing, anthropology
Dates attended or expected graduation 2005 – 2009
Activities and Societies: Alpha Delta Phi, Columbia Spectator, Columbia Review
Princeton Day School
Princeton Day School
6/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Howard, Hannah: FEAST
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Howard, Hannah FEAST Little A (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 4, 1 ISBN: 978-1-5039-4257-8
A nonfiction writer and food expert tells the story of her long struggle to overcome a poor body image and
unhealthy eating habits.
Howard had always felt like an outsider. She was always the "tallest [girl], towering and ungainly," all
through grade school, a dark-haired Jew in "a sea of blondes." To become "dainty and pert," she went so far
as to have breast reduction surgery in high school. Unfortunately, her efforts did nothing to fill her inner
emptiness or improve the poor self-image at the core of her dissatisfaction. Determined to continue
remaking herself, she began what became an unhealthy pattern of yo-yo dieting just before entering
Columbia University. At around the same time, the author also had an intense sexual involvement with the
troubled middle-age manager of the gelato shop where she worked part-time before moving on to the
prestigious Picholine restaurant. Despite academic success at Columbia and an internship at the Serious
Eats blog, she still wallowed in private misery as a part-anorexic, part-bulimic woman with the character
traits of both disorders: "people-pleasing, timid, perfectionistic, inflexible" on the one hand and "impulsive,
dramatic and erratic" on the other. Yet the same passion for food that caused Howard such personal shame
eventually came to define her career path as a food industry expert. After graduation, she moved to Los
Angeles, where she trained to run a high-end steakhouse, then to Philadelphia, where she managed an
"American Italianish" restaurant, then back to NYC, where she worked at the Fairway Market. As she
battled her eating disorder, she found herself drawn into sexual relationships that were as passionate as they
were destructive. Only after discovering a compulsive-eating recovery group was Howard finally able to
find deeper healing and the self-respect that had eluded her. In this candid and searching memoir, Howard
offers a celebration of food as well as an account of the determination required to forge a path to selfacceptance.
An inspirational memoir of food and finding oneself.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Howard, Hannah: FEAST." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461309/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6981615d.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461309
6/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1529806942741 2/2
Feast: True Love in and out of the
Kitchen
Publishers Weekly.
265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p73.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen
Hannah Howard. Little A, $24.95 (252p) ISBN 978-1-5039-4257-8
Howard, a writer who also mentors women recovering from eating disorders, unflinchingly shares her
lifelong struggles with food and eating disorders. Experiencing anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive eating
throughout her youth, Howard used food and her weight as she posits many women do: to measure her selfworth,
her willpower, her place in the world. "You can't see an eating disorder," she writes. "Thin people, fat
people, normal people have this thing. We look like you." As a freshman at Columbia University in 2009,
Howard began a hostess job at the upscale Manhattan restaurant Picholine--where her food issues crested,'
and she became "fascinated by the emergence of my own hipbone, the concave scoop above my clavicle."
She moved from one food-related job to another, first as a server at a wine and cheese bar in Manhattan,
then as a chain-steak-house management trainee in Los Angeles. Howard also lays bare a string of what she
describes as bad choices that she made relating to men, such as dating one of her bosses--a much older,
married chef--when she was a minor. Those in recovery from substance abuse will recognize themselves
throughout this honest memoir; for those without addiction issues, this story offers a painful glance into the
lives of those who suffer. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 73. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839817/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=74fff8c6.
Accessed 23 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839817
Nobody Is Safe: Disordered Eating in the Age of Foodies
By Susan Pagani
299 0 0
APRIL 26, 2018
WHEN I TELL STRANGERS that I’m a food writer, they tell me I’m lucky, and then — looking at my belly — ask, “How do you eat all that food?” I like to say that I only eat three bites of any dish I taste, but that’s hooey: I got the idea from a novel, and though its restraint appeals to me, I’ve never been able to do it. I rarely tell them that I don’t write reviews anymore because eating all that food started to make me sick. I never tell them that at the peak of my short eating career I ran 15 to 20 miles a week so that I could tuck into my meals with careless abandon. As a “foodie,” being free of such worries is part of my street cred and, as a woman, I’m supposed to have some control. People like the three-bite secret, and the question deserves a false answer: after all, no one asks my male colleagues how they keep from getting fat.
So why am I being honest now? I’ve just read Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen, food writer Hannah Howard’s book about coming of age in the New York food scene with an eating disorder. It’s honest and funny and full of her love of food — and the conflict between her insatiable hunger with her desire to be thin. I’ve come away from it thinking she is very brave. And that I, and maybe all women, have to be more honest about our relationship to food — if only to take some of the pressure off and let each other know that we get it.
Feast opens with Howard’s last binge. She has just moved to New York, and her parents have invited her to dinner at the Upper East Side apartment of some old family friends. The evening is casual: Howard is snuggled up with her parents on a silk-covered couch, a glass of wine in hand, a puppy in her lap, a spread of sushi, gyoza, and edamame on the coffee table. The friends are kind, they ask about her life, and she has good stories to tell — a new apartment, a new job as a cheesemonger.
The scene couldn’t be warmer or easier, but she can’t enjoy the shared meal because she has an eating disorder. Along with all the soft words are the harsh ones she uses to describe her hunger for the sushi, “a foreign, malicious force curled up in my stomach and reaching its monster limbs into my mouth,” and the “sideways glare” from her mother when she can’t stop eating: “I know that look, the same one from when I was a kid. It means, You are eating a lot and I am noticing and it is not okay. It means You are not a skinny girl and you are not okay.” As a daughter, I felt that moment keenly. Why do mothers do that? We know when we’re eating “too much,” and we’re already heaping judgment on ourselves — we don’t need their help. As Howard writes: “I hate myself for my lack of self-control, my irrepressible gluttony. I hate the bulk of my body, and I hate that I am failing to shrink it.”
I must confess: I’m not a mother, but at dinner parties I will sometimes raise an eyebrow at my partner when, it seems to me, he’s had more than enough, and he’s headed for an upset stomach and a sleepless night. (But again it’s different for men, isn’t it? Everyone loves him when he eats big, “Get it on garbage mouth!” they cheer.) And of course, it never works — shame never works. We see that when a gigantic platter of cookies appears in front of Howard. She deconstructs the mouthfeel of a cookie with aplomb — “crunchy but with give, buttery and dense” — but also her further slide into a binge, a process that reads like a peak experience, thrilling and ungovernable and, even as she does the very thing she doesn’t want to do, momentarily empowering.
The rush vibrates and surges to my stomach, my temples. My fat thighs disappear […] I feel the sugar and the butter surge to my toes, as if I have been switched on. I transform. My mom’s eyes say cease and desist, but more cookies are the only answer to the problem of her embarrassment, and of my own. I willfully lose track of how many cookies I eat.
It doesn’t stop there. When she gets home, there are grapes, leftover pasta, chocolate chips, a box of cereal, a half jar of almond butter, dried figs — and she eats until she is sweaty, distended, shaky, and flooded with nausea but unable to throw up. She eats because, aside from the pain, it used to work: “Often, post-binge, I feel a sweet relief, a stillness. Instead, tonight, my brain taunts me: You fat piece of shit. […] My trusty companion has let me down. All that food has done nothing to quiet my demons. I cannot escape myself.” But we know she can because this is the last binge, and she has survived to write down the hard stuff for us. We know there must be healing, and the rest of the book will step back in time to tell us how she got to this moment — and how she moved past it.
By coincidence, around the time I started reading this book, I stumbled onto a copy of Food and Femininity, Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston’s 2015 study of the emotional role food plays in women’s lives. For the study, they talked to women who were deeply interested in food, both consumers and activists — including 47 mothers. And as I read about Howard’s childhood in Baltimore, Maryland, I thought her mother could have been among them.
Cairns and Johnston write that, even in this postfeminist age, women are still largely responsible for the foodwork of shopping, cooking, and feeding children. While the women in the study recognized these activities as gendered, many of them also saw them as emotionally rewarding — as an act of discovery, as an escape from the stress of their workaday lives, and as the feminine ideal of “bringing home a healthy, tasty, nutritionally satisfying bounty.” In Feast, Howard writes about how, as a child, she spent her Saturdays taking long-winded grocery shopping tours with her mother, and the language she uses to describe them echoes the study: “My mom and I bid my dad adieu and off we go on a magical, mystical, grocery-procuring adventure. It is coveted time with my mom, who is always busy with a stressful job and a beeper.”
They go to farmer’s market, a Middle Eastern bakery, and then an Italian specialty foods store gathering goodies: warm mozzarella, fresh noodles, bread stuffed with fava beans, palmier cookies the size of Howard’s face, and fat, wrinkly black olives. The olives are her dad’s favorites. “I am proud to like them, too,” she writes, and it feels like we are witnessing the birth of a foodie. Her tastes are adventurous, clearly way off the standard kid’s menu — few would delight in the mushroom lady’s grilled portabello and pita: “Plumes of ’shroom smoke fill the morning sky. The pitas get stuffed with the hot mushrooms, a handful of milky feta, greens, and a dousing of hot sauce. This is an awesome breakfast.”
At home, Howard’s mother cooks dinner every night, and the food is no less special: chicken marsala, garlicky shrimp, cod over smoky chickpeas. “It’s my therapy,” her mother says. But in her commitment, she’s also “doing gender,” as Cairns and Johnston would say. The mothers in their study talked about both the anticipation of success and the fear of failure they felt as they cared for their children through food: a good mother teaches her children healthy habits and cultivates their palate, “fostering an appreciation for ‘good food,’ as well as an openness to new things.”
Clearly, Howard has a smashing palate and she enjoys eating. Yet, on the page, she uses the fava bean pie, a flag of her young foodie status — so exotic next to her grade-school classmates’ PB-and-Js — to pivot to a section on how she feels like an outsider. She is too tall, she is the only Jew, the only girl with dark hair, but most importantly she is not thin enough. “I fantasize about lopping off whole parts,” she writes. “The flesh of my preteen thighs, inches of height.”
She has not yet begun to diet, but she writes about her mother’s dieting. She gives up bagels for the Atkins diet, and takes Howard with her to Weight Watchers meetings. She tells Howard about her own mother, who had “reed thin wrists,” and panicked if her daughter ever gained weight. Reading this, I thought back on both the aforementioned glare and this passage from Cairns and Johnston:
[W]ithin these tales of success is the implicit understanding that mothers are personally responsible for children’s eating. In this formulation, the child is a figurative extension of the self — their (un)healthy choices a direct reflection of mothering practices — leading to intense feelings of pride, guilt, and responsibility.
I felt compassion for Howard’s mother, whose sense of pride and guilt might be so entwined that she could see her daughter’s affinity for food as a success — and her daughter’s binging as a personal failure.
Howard faces the same double bind. At the end of high school, she is accepted to Columbia University in New York City — her dream. In anticipation of her grand, new college life, she diets: “I am going to be a whole new Hannah,” she writes. “Like myself, but immensely better. Skinnier, of course.” She applies all the energy she has been spending on “doing-everything-right-so-as-to-get-into-college” to the project of dieting, and by the time she leaves she has lost 25 pounds — yet still has 30 to go. What does that mean? As readers, we know Howard is a tall girl, but not how tall, we know she feels heavy, but we don’t know what she weighs. These numbers are intentionally vague because, for Howard, there’s not a right number, she can’t lose enough: “I feel light, a new gap between my thighs, my bras are baggy around my boobs. And I feel heavy too: monstrous, not worthy of my new and shiny life. Trapped, still, inside myself.”
And so she keeps going, losing two or three pounds a week on a diet of Pink Lady apples, skim milk, and coffee. Howard knows, on some level, that it’s not healthy — her best friend gently talks about recovering from her own eating disorder, her boyfriend tells her to be careful. (The same one who said she could be a 10 if she just lost some weight.) But Howard is buying tiny jeans, watching the changes in her body: “I am fascinated by the emergence of my own pointy hipbones, the concave scoop above my clavicle. I keep fingering my shoulder, where I can make out the indentations of muscles and bones I never knew I had before.”
Even though Howard stops eating food, she doesn’t stop loving it. She becomes even more of a foodie. She takes a job hosting at Picholine, a Michelin-starred restaurant, where her enthusiasm for cheese blossoms. (At one point, she gets so excited about a Portuguese azeitão that she talks directly to the reader, saying, “Do you know this cheese? You should […]. It’s sheepy, feety, savory, and revelatory.”) She reads food blogs, food magazines, and cookbooks. And when she travels to Portugal with her high school girlfriends, she meticulously researches the restaurants where they’ll dine — only when she gets there, she can’t eat because she is too afraid of gaining weight.
In fact, Howard eats so little that when she returns from Portugal, her traveling companions get a message to her mother: they’re worried she has an eating disorder. But when her mother confronts her, Howard says no, bucking at the idea — in part because it doesn’t fit her idea of herself as a feminist. Cairns and Johnston echo the same sentiment: in the postfeminist climate, women aren’t supposed to fuss about food: “She needs to make healthy choices without becoming a health ‘fanatic.’ She must be in control without denying herself pleasure. She should be thin, but not on a diet.”
For the women in their study, it’s all about balance. “I’m careful of what I eat,” one woman said, “but I don’t diet.” Oh my, I thought, that’s the same line I use (as I record all my calories in a food diary). Howard’s take reflects that same not me approach:
I am too cool, of course for this whole anorexia thing. Too smart. Eating disorders seem cheesy, predictable. […] Also, I was in my mom’s belly in 1986 in Washington, D.C., at my first march for women’s right to choose. […] Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan adorn my parents’ bookshelves. […] I know that my body is a source of both vulnerability and power and that navigating this is and will continue to be impossible. […] I want to be a badass and free from the patriarchy and skinny.
Hard, but maybe not impossible. We spend a lot of Feast worrying about Howard as she learns how to navigate her vulnerability and power, but it is not all harrowing. Along the way there are wonderful friendships, boyfriends to love and let go of, and lots of good food. It’s not easy being a dame in food, and Howard writes about not only the warmth and generosity of the people who help her along in her career, but also the sexism she encounters. Although women now make up more than half the restaurant industry, the boys club culture persists, especially in fine dining. Howard contends with general managers who refuse to promote her and a male chef who yells in the kitchen and throws food at her head — but she perseveres and makes a place for herself in food and food writing. And eventually, she does find her way to a recovery meeting for compulsive eaters. She introduces herself and listens as people talk about things she too has done: hiding food, throwing away food and then digging in the trash to get it, trying to puke, starving, binging, raging. “And then something miraculous happens […] they do not hang their heads low in shame. They smile, nod knowingly. Their nods say, ‘I get it.’ They laugh and laugh.”
For me, the kinship contained in this quote is the point of Feast, and perhaps even of Food and Femininity. Howard offers food experiences that are, even in their individual details and extremes, so familiar to my own — and in that way they are as comforting as they are illuminating. For Howard, that kinship is the sense of belonging she’s been looking for, the beginning of healing: “I feel the sweet unfurling of relief. We are in this ugly room because of pain, not strength. And yet I feel stronger than I have in a long time, as if I’m swimming in a dense sea of power and love. These are my people. I raise my hand to share.”
¤
Susan Pagani is a Minneapolis-based editor and writer. Her work has previously appeared in newspapers and magazines in Minneapolis, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Berkeley. She is also the co-author of two books, Minnesota Lunch and The Secret Atlas of North Coast Food.