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In fifth grade I was nicknamed ‘hungry girl’.1 This was during my only year in American public school as my family, who had been living in Budapest, Hungary, moved back to the States for a year.2 In this big, sprawling linoleum laced school with three 5th grades3 my classmates decided that because I had lived in Hungary, I was hungry. ‘Hungry Girl’ I became. There are worse nicknames I suppose. After all, they weren’t wrong.
Today’s books star protagonists whose hunger gets awakened. Their hunger is for literal food of course, but the delicious thrill up my spine occurs when they realize their hunger, their appetite, their desire is for something more than a meal. These savory stories deal with the naming, the accepting and the chasing of hunger in past, present and future contexts but are also about what happens when hunger is driven to its extremes. What happens to a malnourished person, community or world when their hunger/desire is repressed or when it is over-exalted?
I find food writing to feel so visceral, simultaneously spiky and silky, and easily conjured in the imagination. Same for writing about ‘eating’. Words like consume, lick, relish, chew, wolf, gorge, taste, devour, savor, and feast evoke so powerfully that greedy, grasping feeling of desire and pleasure through famine and fullness. These are works that’ll make you think about your own hunger. Do you avoid it? Do you eat just enough to survive? Or do you revel in it, chase it, feed it?
Eat something you’re craving so you don’t consume one of these on an empty stomach.
LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C Pam Zhang
Not long after a toxic smog has spread over most of the planet, killing off entire ecosystems of plants and animals, a desperate4 chef takes a job cooking at the mountaintop retreat of a reclusive billionaire and his genius daughter.5 This ‘colony’ has access to clean air, unimagined technology and the most extravagant ingredients the old world had to offer. As she uses these precious items to cook meals for the elite, they begin to slowly re-awaken her hunger, her creativity and her desire that has laid dormant since long before the smog arrived. As our nameless protagonist gets further enmeshed in the lives of her clients and her luxurious, mind bending surroundings she cannot completely forget the world below and when the truth of the colony is revealed, she is forced to choose between her appetites.
This is a beautiful feast of a book. The writing is filling, lush and decadant as our chef works through the loss of her ambition, drive and appetite. Upon arriving on the mountain she “felt myself to be a void, a null space, a set of hands for hire” and I was invested in every step of her journey. Thrown immediately into a horrific setting with no fresh produce, no flavor, no color we as readers are as desperate as the chef is to escape to a mountain oasis filled with abundant, vibrant life, energy and taste. Soon though, I (like our chef) became wide-eyed and sickened by the greedy, ever consuming nature of the entitled clients and the waste that would be repellent even without a worldwide famine. I love a first person narrator and she contains mysterious layers and many contradictions as she eventually realizes her hunger and just what she is actually hungry for.6 She’s a detailed, well described and relatable narrator with terrific bite, but not without her complications and I love a story about the self: its loss and erasure and its discovery.
The story is filled with food of course, but also love, desire, sex and the erotic, the somatic. Filled with poetic sometimes even mythic language, we are inundated with textures and tastes, glorious meals7 and bizarre Jurassic park levels of science and technology which all served character and plot. This character driven story also had light sci-fi qualities and there’s an ominous sense of slowly growing dread throughout as we realize that this ‘life’ cannot possibly be sustainable and observe the flat, unsettling nature of perfection vs the messy, creative, evolving ingenuity that is life.
Instead of section titles there are black and white thumbnail images which were unique and thought provoking. The sentences are skillfully and lovingly prepared, visceral, electric and oh so dreamy. This book has the sort of transportive writing that makes you experience the world differently, that inspires a more mindful, appreciation of the cheap and the luxe, of the delicious, alchemical, bittersweet dish that is life. I loved this and felt very moved while reading; it dug into my chest and sat down. I enjoyed the poignant ending and the author’s perfect closer of an Acknowledgements section. A delightfully idiosyncratic list, don’t skip it!
That day, I knew. A world was gone. Goodbye to all that, to the person I'd been, to she who'd abandoned, half-eaten, a plate of carnitas under blaze of California sun. It wasn't grease I missed so much as the revelation of lime. Waiting on grief, I met hunger. For radish, radicchio, the bitter green of endive.
THE WONDER by Emma Donoghue
A few years after the Irish potato famine the English nurse Elizabeth ‘Libby’ Wright, who studied under Florence Nightingale8, is given a simple assignment: to watch. She travels to Ireland to spend two weeks watching a young girl whose family claims has not eaten in four months; subsisting on just a few spoonfuls of water and God’s blessing. Her task is to be on the lookout for subterfuge and report on the veracity of these claims, watching the eleven year old Anna in shifts with a Catholic nun. Without faith but armed with knowledge, expertise and skepticism, Libby’s understanding of spirituality, the world and herself is tested as she seeks practical answers to what people far and wide call a miracle, a wonder. But is Anna a trickster, a changeling or a saint?
Inspired by the stories of the real life ‘fasting girls’, this is historical fiction with a dash of thrilling mysticism thrown in. Well paced and well written, it has a distinct sense of place as it is set in a land that has known famine9 and weaves religious fervor with local superstition resulting in a morbidly fascinating cultural tapestry10. Each chapter is titled with one word that can have varied definitions which depict the many intricate layers of meaning, reflection and understanding taking place in the story. For example: NURSE: to suckle an infant, to bring up a child, to take care of the sick.
Libby is a well placed stand in for the reader; she is scientifically minded, suspicious, cynical and tenacious as she’s constantly frustrated by the inadequacy of the male authority figures around her as well as the incredibly superstitious and uneducated rural population who cling to norms, politeness and faith even as they reject what they can see and touch. The dynamics of bigotry, class, gender, faith and science interplay with the characters who hunger for forgiveness and seek forgiveness for their hunger.11 Libby has her own history with hunger and I enjoyed her arc as she finds a confidant in a local reporter and slowly grows to care for Anna as “a patient who needs her nurse, and fast.” There’s also some maddening yet intriguing details surrounding her status as a nurse during a time when ‘nursing as a profession [was] in its infancy’; a topic I hadn’t thought much of before.
extra credit: I haven’t seen it yet but the Netflix adaptation stars the incomparable Florence Pugh.
A pair of birds picked at red currants in the hedge. Lib pulled a bunch of the gleaming globes and held them up close to the child's face.
"Do you remember the taste of these?"
"I think so." Anna's lips were just a hand span from the currants.
"Doesn't your mouth water?" asked Lib, her voice seductive. The girl shook her head.
"God made these berries, didn't he?" Your God, Lib had almost said.
"God made everything," said Anna.
Lib crushed a red currant between her own teeth and juice flooded her mouth so fast it almost spilled. She'd never tasted anything so dazzling.
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PIGLET by Lottie Hazell
Known by her childhood nickname ‘Piglet’, our narrator is an ambitious cookbook editor who spends much of her free time creating sophisticated, multi-course meals for her charming fiancé and fabulous friends in her London flat. But when her fiancé drops a shocking admission two weeks before their wedding, Piglet begins to unravel. Balancing work, life, love and family she realizes that she’s never actually been fully satiated so begins to feel ravenous. As she gives in to that hunger and her voracious appetite impacts more and more of her life, threatening to upend everything she thought she wanted, she must finally name the hollowness inside her and decide whether to let it starve or let it feast.
I liked the little twist on the ‘nameless narrator’ here as we get a name for our protagonist, but it isn’t her real name. It was foisted upon her due a specific childhood event and has since become inescapable, just as her life has become inescapable. There are some terrifically snappy food descriptions here which may cause salivation so do have snacks at the ready while reading. Piglet’s cooking scenes are fantastically visceral and lovingly imagined- somehow conveying great emotion and tangibility as she slices, sautés and stirs. I particularly enjoyed all the foreshadowing of consumption at the beginning of the book: Piglet is “ravenous for [her] fiancé”, she accidentally “inhales a mouthful of blond hair”, she craves the “nourishment of approval” etc.
Piglet’s journey to give in to greediness was thrilling, illicit and very human as she attempts to divorce herself from the performative, pretentious aspects of life to respect and embrace the reality of her own appetites. I loved all the food aspects yes, but also the body elements too, like when she literally bursts out of a dress like it is a snakeskin.12 There’s also a few beats of ‘is she mad or is it just low blood sugar?’ which I enjoyed because I’m a sucker for a descent into madness (or is it?) tale. Curiously there’s a particular bit of information that the reader is never given. It’s too important to be left out accidentally so its glaring omission actually resulted in more pondering than its reveal would have so I found it to be an interesting narrative choice. But I don’t want to spoil anything here, so if you’ve read it and have thoughts about this absence let me know in the comments.
She opened the capers, green and freckled as amphibians, and with a teaspoon eased them from their brine. The olives were next, and she pushed pits from the aubergine-dark fruits, dropping their flesh into the tomato sauce. She ate as many as she added, and, as she stirred, she spat out the stones.
The sauce bubbled, and the hob became flecked with red. Heat had started to rise in the kitchen, and she turned to the parsley, cool as morning grass. She chopped the herb to a finely mown darkness, her fingertips stained lawn-green when she pulled back, when she wiped the blade of her knife.
I gave A Certain Hunger a few pages but I couldn’t continue with try-hard writing every other sentence like:
unctuous as a Vegas emcee, salty as a vaudeville comedian, tender as a love song
That was a NO from me.
Did you know I do more than read and tell you what to read? I also edit podcasts AND fiction. If you’ve got an audio project that needs a skilled ear or a fiction manuscript that needs a judgy eye, send me a message or leave me a comment.
have you read one of these?
are you hungry? what book would you add to this shelf? what was your childhood nickname?
DISCUSS!
though my family called me ‘tasmanian devil’
before turning around and moving right back to budapest
my fourth grade class in budapest was like 10 kids
“And so I quit that job to pursue recklessly, immorally, desperately, the only one that gave me hope of lettuce.”
“I can see now that I was hungry for love that summer. For something to love: a bite, a dream, a person, a meal, a field, a piece of a world worth believing in.”
only those approved by the billionaire of course
it takes place during ‘the hungry season’ because the potatoes are not yet ready
“the body’s claims are undeniable”
symbolism!
I LOVE this theme. And such varying stories within it! I have heard this word many times to describe the new VE Schwab book Bury our Bones in the Midnight Soil, though have yet to read it.
I have also been trying to read A Certain Hunger, and I’m trying to figure out how I feel about the writing!