Hungry For You

In HUNGRY FOR YOU Joan Smith turns her attention to this infinitely intriguing. A collection of her own sharp funny and stimulating essays on our attitudes to food and eating is accompanied and amplified by a fascinating selection of extracts from novels tracts songs self-help books poetry and biography. Her essays look at cannibalism and the strange imagination of the man-eating serial killers; at the politics of starvation and anorexia; at sexual 'appetite'; at taboos and the connection between the stricture of Leviticus and the regimes of Rosemary Conley. Each essay is followed by a series of extracts: from Piers Paul Read's chilling account of cannibalism to Nora Ephron on the comforts of mashed potatoes; from the Princess of Wales talking about bulimia to Proust's voluptuous appreciation of the shape and colour of asparagus and gems from Catullus Madonna Swift Brian Keenan Freud and Lorrie.