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612-822-4611
Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl

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

Paperback

Biographies GeneralReligion General Addiction & Recovery

Publisher Price: $24.99

ISBN10: 0802884512
ISBN13: 9780802884510
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Published: Dec 9 2025
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.76
Height: 0.64 Width: 5.62 Depth: 8.48
Language: English

This memoir is doing some important work connecting the dots between purity culture and diet culture particularly for millennial women. Raw and honest.
--Sarah Bessey, author of Field Notes for the Wilderness

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

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