Appetites

I remember grieving anorexia quite distinctly, weeping over the loss of that predictable futile safety, which was really a way of weeping over the self, the poor scared self who needed that safety and felt there was no other way to attain it. This must have taken place in therapy, although I can’t quite retrieve a specific memory. Instead, I have a sense memory of it, several years in which that initial post-starving frenzy gave way to a quiet, persistent sadness, an emptiness I could neither identify nor shop nor drink nor obsess away, as though a heaviness had crept into the edges of things and refused to budge.

Once, right around this time, I told the therapist about what may well have been my worst anorexic day, a Sunday afternoon in August in the very thick of the starving years, when my parents had arranged to come visit. They’d been in southern Rhode Island for an event of some kind early in the day, and they’d planned to stop in Providence to spend some time with me before heading home. I’m not sure we made an actual plan, but I’d assumed dinner would be involved, and I’d hungered for that dinner for weeks: fantasized about it, worried about it, and planned for it with a vengeance, sticking fast to my 800-calorie-a-day diet for three straight weeks prior, not one variation, running extra miles, earning that meal, every bite.

They arrived mid-afternoon, around three, and I took them to a little café near my house for tea, figuring we’d pass some time there, perhaps take a walk, then go out to eat. I’d already picked the restaurant, already memorized the menu in the window, already decided which salad I’d order, which rich pasta dish, which dense chocolate dessert. But my parents left after the tea. I suspect there was a marital explanation for this (they both seemed depressed and preoccupied that day), but they didn’t share it with me, just said something vague about needing to get back, having things to see to, calls to make. I remember feeling absolutely crushed—no meal? no reward? all that effort in vain?—and offering no protest. I walked them out to their car, said good-bye, then came upstairs to my apartment. It must have been four-thirty by then. The afternoon sun was still bright, I had hours to fill before darkness fell, hours to fill before I could allow myself to eat the same tiny meal I’d eaten every night for the past twenty-one nights, hours.

Anorexia is primarily a state of denial—denial of hunger, denial of pain, denial of emotion—but every so often the denial cracks and you feel the full force of your hunger, the depth of your emptiness and despair, the enormity of the ache. Recounting the story, I wept over that sensation, the chasm in my life where food and love and people were supposed to have been, but mostly I wept over my reaction to it. I did not cry that afternoon. The time passed like molasses. I clenched my teeth and waited for nightfall. I slogged through each minute, I ate the apple and the cube of cheese with my usual numb focus and then went to bed, and the memory of this filled me with an aching tenderness for that sad stoic creature, and also the most puzzling feeling of loss. Certainly it felt scary to give up that steely defense, the capacity to muscle through no matter what, but it also felt oddly sad to give it up, as though in leaving starving behind, I was saying good-bye to a kind of bitter and necessary consolation, a form of self-protection that had been painful but also deeply deeply reliable.

He nodded, and we both fell silent for a moment, lost, I suspect, in a complicated set of shared responses: a respect for the sorrow of that specific day, and an understanding of starving’s seductive but wholly illusory protection from it, and also an acknowledgment of sorrow’s larger reach, its durable place in the psyche. The ache I felt that afternoon—loneliness, emptiness, yearning—predated anorexia, coexisted with it, persisted in its aftermath, and no doubt always will; it was the simple ache of being human.

Sorrow is stubbornly resistant to insight. I can put together the puzzle pieces of anxiety and guilt and self-hatred, I can draw neat lines between culture and alienation from body and self, I can trace pieces of my anorexic history to this moment and that one, this lesson and that message. Sorrow is what runs beneath all that, a more mysterious pull that seems at once deep as earth and free-floating, and that casts the matter of appetite in a strong and singular light, all individual and known longings blurred and indistinguishable beneath its glare. Anorexia did not protect me from this feeling, nor has recovery from anorexia. It simply makes its presence felt, periodically and without obvious cause on a sleepless night or the first waking moment of a bad morning, a sudden pang of hollowness and yearning that seems wholly unrelated to any specific want, that seems instead to speak to a deeper variety of hunger, an oceanic brand from which other appetites merely split off, diverge, reveal themselves to be smaller rivers and tributaries of feeling that always, somehow, lead back to this. When the feeling hits, I’ll lie there and try without success to trace its roots, and only the tiniest, most steadfast comforts will seem to ease it: I’ll reach for the dog on the bed beside me and hold her paw in my hand, I’ll scratch her chest, listen to her deep, peaceful breathing.

“Desire,” said the French analyst Jacques Lacan, “has indestructible permanence. Desire is inextinguishable.” There is something, he suggests, fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings. Once satisfied, the goal always leads to another goal, and then another and another.

Paul Hamburg, a Boston psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders, describes this tension by recalling the image of his daughter when she was an infant, nursing. For a very brief period, early in her life, she’d look utterly “narcotized” while breast-feeding, completely at peace, as though there was nothing else at that moment she could possibly want. But that period, he says, was relatively brief, and when he thinks about the nature of desire and appetite, Hamburg always returns to another image, not much later in his infant daughter’s life, when she’d be nursing and then she’d hear something, a sound from outside the window or elsewhere in the room. She’d want to see where the sound came from, and so she’d turn away from the nipple and not be able to nurse anymore, and in that instant you could witness the beginning of a central edginess or dissatisfaction, appetites emerging in competition with one another: The infant’s literal hunger for food pulled her this way, and her hunger to see more of the world pulled her that way, and there, in the conflict between those urges, was the nascent sea of frustration that comes from always wanting more. If there is an infantile experience of pure perfection—nirvana, utter contentment, all needs met—it is woefully short-lived; as Hamburg says, “It’s never going to be quite so simple again.”

Freud wrote about the human “death instinct,” a phrase that has less to do with an actual wish to cease living than with the longing, likely embedded in all of us, to recapture that early state of narcotized bliss, a place devoid of the tension between wanting and being, a condition of complete calm and release. Some of us do get back there from time to time—it’s where we go when we’re lost in music or rhythm or work or sex, or when we do drugs or drink alcohol, or when we give ourselves over to prayer, or when we lie awake in a half-sleep, curled against someone we love—but as a more permanent state it is lost, its memory folded into the soul, blended and paled and diluted with the passage of time until it’s no more than an echo, a whispering ache, that inarticulable sensation that something—something—is missing.

And yet it’s a powerful, haunting sensation, the ache behind it all the more pressing because its roots are so difficult to trace. Freud himself, along with most of his contemporaries, didn’t really attempt to locate it. In his view, infants were essentially narcissistic creatures—bundles of instincts, centers of their own need-driven universes, their relationships with others characterized entirely by physical dependence—and (to grossly simplify) the truly defining aspects of development didn’t really emerge until the child hit the Oedipal years, roughly ages three to six. Like many of Freud’s ideas, that conception of infantile life—passive, orally driven, essentially non-relational—has been criticized and extended, and if you were to plot the focus of post-Freudian thought on a graph, you’d see an increasing emphasis—from Jean Piaget and John Bowlby to Margaret Mahler, D. W. Winnicott, and Daniel Stern—on the earliest stages of life, a reach back to the baby at eighteen months, the baby at six months, the baby at three months, torn between the breast and the sound coming from elsewhere in the room, the baby reconceived as a profoundly relational creature who’s primed from the very first days and weeks of life to recognize, connect, and engage with others.

Mothers have emerged in post-Freudian theory as much more complicated figures as well. Freud, among others, viewed the mother in rather static terms: a largely passive and stationary player in the baby’s world, a figure the baby reacted to rather than with, took from rather than engaged with—a bit of a vending machine with breasts. More recent work has viewed the mother in much more human terms, a dynamic, subjective, fallible, and complex individual whose earliest interactions with a baby can echo through a lifetime. What kind of dance did these two creatures dance? How much comfort was there? How much pain? How much consistency, how much hunger? “Each of us,” writes psychiatrist Polly Young-Eisendrath, “spent some time as an overwhelmed, enraged, unattended little bundle of nerves.” Each of us, she suggests, inhabited a land of squalling infantile need, cold or terrified or hungry, inevitable moments of pain experienced as absolute, moments of panic so intense they set the heart pounding; distressed, an infant’s heart revs up to 220 beats a minute. Each of us knew, too, the experience of relief from that state, which must have felt like an act of magic. Pain is aroused, registered, intensified, and then, just as suddenly, pain is eased; the nerves are soothed, the hunger is allayed, the mouth closes upon a nipple and begins to suck, the fearful moment is interrupted as a baby is picked up, held, contained in the vast warm universe of its mother.

Temperament, to be sure, affects the intensity of this experience, some babies naturally calm and sunny and resilient, others jittery and high-strung and fragile, the individual capacity for contentment in some respects a neurological gift, granted or withheld in utero by the gods of serotonin and dopamine. But environment affects its texture, too, its shape and resonance, for that dance of need and relief is negotiated, inevitably, by the caretaker, usually a mother, who sets the tempo and choreographs the steps, who either responds or does not respond, who soothes or smothers, who begins to stamp the world from the outset as safe or unsafe, others as caring or unreliable, hunger as fundamentally satiable or fundamentally insatiable. Mothers give us our first terrible instructions in giving and withholding, and I suspect these early experiences of need and provision become braided through the individual experience of appetite, that they form a kind of baseline sense of what it means to hunger.

Mothers, too, give us our first lessons in the complexity of appetite, its intrinsic links to relationships and love and nurturance. Lacan talks about this connection by describing the difference between infantile need and demand. Need, in his view, has to do with the requirements of brute survival: food, shelter, warmth, freedom of movement, a minimal amount of contact with others. Need is innate and instinctual and it requires real, tangible objects—the mother’s breast, the soft blanket, the clean diaper—for satisfaction. Demand takes place as a child enters more consciously the world of relationships and begins to develop language, a shift that fundamentally alters need by connecting, immutably, the thing that’s needed and the person who either fails or succeeds in providing it. Hunger, in turn, becomes (and remains) a much more loaded experience, relational as well as physical, forever yoked to the people who either do or do not respond to it. Bound up in the symbolic order of language, a child’s basic survival needs for food and warmth and shelter split off from their instinctual origins and take on multilayered social and interpersonal meanings. I am hungry begins to mean: I am hungry and my mother is (or is not) responding. Feed me not only expresses a physical need for food; it also begins to mean: Love me, take care of me, show me that the world is a safe place, heed my will.

This, I think, is the stuff that lasts, these frayed threads of original fear and original rapture, of huge hunger and hope, provision and failure. And however the story turns out—whether it ends in a happy childhood or a sad one—it seems that sorrow is an inescapable chapter in the narrative, the urge to reach back inevitable, the sense of something gone missing unavoidable. The fortunate among us may spend a lifetime longing for that early bliss, which we found in the arms of calm and consistent mothers but could not hold onto if we were to separate and explore and grow. The less fortunate may long for a bliss that was never ours to begin with, that was kept out of reach because we were colicky or irritable babies, constitutionally incapable of knowing solace, or because we had mothers who were too depressed or nervous or unavailable to soothe us, or because we grew up in chaotic or violent families. Felt and lost; never felt and yearned for—whatever paradigm inspires it, the sensation whispers and tugs, it keeps you up at 2 A.M. on a bad night, it compels you to reach for things, for food, for objects of comfort, for the dog beside you on the bed, a creature of heartbreakingly satiable needs.

Some of the saddest women I know, women who seem particularly prone to fits of sorrow and despair, are the ones whose relationships with their mothers felt somehow compromised or distant or tinged with resentment, who grew up with the feeling that their mothers didn’t really like them. I am one of these, although my own mother would have been horrified to hear me say that: I know that she loved me, and in the years before her death I also came to feel as though she liked and admired and felt close to me, but for much of my life I felt as though some early wires between us had been crossed, a pivotal connection never quite made or sustained. She and my siblings had a more natural, easier rapport; I was constitutionally and temperamentally more like my father, somehow more aligned with him, and I suspect this left me feeling out of the loop in some critical respect, outside the maternal circle, never quite sure how unequivocal or stable my mother’s attachment to me was. My conversations with her were strained in a way that my sister’s conversations weren’t; there seemed to be the slightest edge of wariness between us, as though neither of us felt truly attuned with the other, and for years I felt like a stormy adolescent in her presence, withdrawn and angry and dark. I’d walk into her house and regress within five minutes, as though some oppositional cloud had descended from the heavens and followed me inside.

Anger is easy to identify; it makes your heart race, your teeth clench, your blood run hot; it makes you want to rage and spit. I knew for many years that my mother made me angry, that whatever its origins, the distance between us made me edgy and restless and full of bile. What took much longer to understand, or to tap into, what I didn’t really begin to unearth until I reached back toward times like that August afternoon in Providence, was the deep current of sorrow beneath that anger, a yearning for connection so acute it defied ordinary words; voiced, it would have come out as a howl, the longest and loneliest keening.

Is this why I starved? Perhaps in part, but only in part: Starving sprang from many more sources and served many more purposes than ones related to my mother; to throw all the blame in her direction would be as one-dimensional and simplistic as to point the finger solely at culture or the media. But I do think my relationship with her left me with a particular kind of emptiness, a sorrow-laced brand that’s by no means unique to me. The wounds of childhood, deep and pre-verbal and way beyond the grasp of memory, are like footprints covered by new snow; they get hidden with time, sealed over, the traces of felt anguish difficult to perceive, even harder to access. And so the sorrow behind hunger tends to be acted out, described in symbol and code instead of nouns and verbs, a woman’s body and behavior communicating what words can’t quite capture.

For instance, a woman I’ll call Suzanne, now in her mid-forties, used to steal things. She never took anything she really needed, nor anything major or even particularly memorable, but periodically, during her teens and twenties and even into her thirties, she’d find herself in a store fingering a sweatshirt or walking past a cosmetics counter or standing in line by the candy rack, and she’d be overcome with the compulsion to take something and stuff it into her pocket or her bag: a scarf, maybe, or a pair of gloves, or a Clark bar. Later, she’d feel guilty and deeply perplexed—Clark bars? she didn’t even like Clark bars—but at the time the activity gave her an odd sense of power and satisfaction, as though she’d taken something she deserved, something essential.

Janet, also mid-forties, used to cut herself, still does on occasion. She was twenty-one the first time she did it, alone in an apartment she shared with two roommates, and although she can’t recall the precise circumstances that motivated the behavior, she knows she walked into the bathroom, looked through the medicine cabinet, and happened upon a pair of nail scissors, which she picked up. Then she stood there for a long time, looking at the scissors, and then she opened them up and ran one pointed edge very slowly against the soft skin on the underside of her forearm. A long, red scratch appeared, and she observed this in a rather detached way. A moment later, she ran the scissor along her arm a second time, same spot, and watched as a string of tiny red beads dotted up along the scratch line, her blood. She had no name for this behavior—articles in the mainstream press about self-cutting were at least a decade away—but it gave her a sense of necessary release and she continued to engage in it for twenty years.

Kathleen, late twenties, has engaged for nearly fifteen years in bulimia, behavior that has ebbed and flowed depending on her state of mind, relative level of anxiety, circumstances. At the moment, she’s in a prolonged ebb, in which her symptoms have become, in her words, “manageable.” But in her teens and early twenties, she threw up once, twice, sometimes three times a day, the cycles of bingeing and purging organizing her life, dominating most of her waking thoughts, landing her twice in the hospital. Today, she is far more controlled. She follows a meticulously planned diet, exercises regularly, and binges rarely, maybe only a few times a year. She continues, however, to throw up, once a month or so, when she is plagued with an old sensation of horror about the shape of her body, a feeling so deeply ingrained by now that it’s nearly immune to rational thought.

Behaviors that appear disparate and unrelated—compulsive shoplifting, self-cutting, bulimia—nonetheless share a profound reliance on symbols to communicate what words cannot. Suzanne’s history of stealing—stealthy, bizarre, provoking both satisfaction and guilt—says something about a central feeling of deprivation, one she can’t quite describe in ordinary words or address by ordinary means. “I’ve never been able to explain it in a satisfying way,” she says, “but the word ‘deprived’ gets at it: some feeling of missing something, and of being really pissed off about that. The feeling is about being entitled to have it at that very moment, even if ‘it’ turns out to be a stupid lipstick or a candy bar.” Janet’s self-mutilation—violent and needful—communicates an opposite sensation, which is a basic lack of entitlement, and a deep distress at feeling unentitled. When she describes the mindset that leads to a cutting episode, she uses the image of a balloon: “It’s as though my whole body is so swollen up that it’s about to burst, literally about to explode, and the only way to relieve that feeling is to cut. Bleed it out.” The swollen sensation, of course, is about emotional rather than physical weight: “Need, want, anxiety, I don’t know—feelings, the whole nine yards, you name it,” she says. “I think cutting is probably a lot like throwing up. The compulsion is huge—to just to get rid of it, get rid of whatever the hell you’re feeling because it’s unbearable.” Kathleen, who is well aware that her bulimic episodes have less to do with food and weight than they do with emotion, would agree. Vomiting, she says, is always preceded by the sensation that she is “holding too much inside,” that she needs to “get it out,” and that—at least at that moment—there’s “no other way to address it.”

Transcribing the interviews with these women, I was struck by the use, by all three, of the word it. Suzanne is “entitled to have it.” Janet is compelled to “get rid of it.” Kathleen needs to “get it out.” It is no doubt shorthand; the word may refer generally to the galaxy of feeling that surrounds female appetite, to the blend of longing and constraint that underlies it, but I suspect it also refers to that ocean of sorrow, to a woman’s awareness of its depth and her horror at the volume of need it inspires. All three women come from troubled backgrounds, histories punctuated by maternal loss and failure. Suzanne grew up as the ordinary girl in a family of beautiful sisters, her mother a woman who highly valued appearances, who lavished her other daughters with pretty things, and who left Suzanne feeling “like a mistake, a blob, an object of contempt.” Janet’s mother was an active alcoholic who alternated between periods of neglect and periods of raging, bitter resentment toward Janet, her only child, whom she referred to as “a pariah who sucked me dry.” Kathleen’s mother was more generally erratic and withholding; she favored Kathleen’s brothers, her attitude toward Kathleen was critical and belittling, and she had a violent, unpredictable temper.

How bearable were the losses of childhood? How tolerable the hunger? How laced with confusion or rejection or hurt? And then: How deprived, how unentitled, how full of sorrow and self-hatred did the essential self become? The answer to these questions—and the difference between those who steal compulsively or cut themselves or force themselves to vomit and those who engage in less extreme versions of cruelty to the self—is essentially one of degrees. Suzanne grew up with both a particular sensation of hunger—a girl who never quite felt full enough, never quite felt as worthy of being fed as the others—and a particularly clear mode of expressing it: Take what was never given to you, take it in a way that mocks the happy, open exchanges of ordinary consumerism, take it in a way that says, essentially, Fuck you; I got ripped off, so I’m going to rip you off in return. Janet and Kathleen use different vehicles to express the same feeling: a sensation of being too full of emotion, too hungry, too needy, too large for their own bodies, and an attendant compulsion to release those feelings and to punish the self for having them in the first place.

There is anger in all these behaviors, certainly: rage at the mother who ripped you off, rage at the mother who inspired so much need and failed to meet it, rage at the self for needing anything at all. But underneath the anger is the most powerful sadness, too: the sadness of children who feel unloved and unlovable, who blame and hurt themselves because of it, who remain speechless in its presence, who engage, instead, in a pantomime of sorrow, a shadowy acting out that can be seen everywhere if you look through the right lens. On the day I met Janet, in an ordinary Starbucks filled with ordinary men and women, I overheard a young woman behind the service counter complaining to a co-worker about the buttermilk-cinnamon rolls: They were “too good,” she said; she’d already eaten two, which was “two too many.” She hissed, “I’m such a pig.” Several tables away from us, a pair of high school girls were putting on makeup, passing a compact back and forth, worrying over their lips, skin, hair. “I look like shit,” one of them said, and snapped the compact closed. Before meeting Janet, I’d seen an anorexic jogger, a woman I see almost every morning while I walk my dog—skeletally thin, she runs in rain and snow and heat, her face drawn and tight, her legs so heartbreakingly thin her Lycra tights literally bag at the knees.

Women wanting to eat and slapping themselves for giving in. Teenage girls mastering the art of negative self-scrutiny. A skeletal body forcing itself to run and run. An arm with more scars on it than you can count. This is endlessly sad, this steady, quiet pummeling of the self, women borne along on a river of unwept tears. What does it feel like to lose control in a shopping binge or an eating binge? Desperate, panicky, frightening, to be sure, but then, way beneath those sensations, is an ancient, aching emptiness, a gaping hole so vast you think it could kill you, a longing for comfort that you know, even as you buy and eat and eat and buy, cannot be filled with food and objects. What does it feel like to lose yourself to an obsession with a man who treats you badly? Again, scary and consuming and profoundly destabilizing, but there, too, is the desperate, driving sadness that comes from feeling unloved, the longing it evokes to be fixed, to be held and needed and valued, to be proven lovable at last. And what does it feel like to starve? I have to reach quite hard to get at the sorrow there, for my primary emotional memories have to do with anxiety and isolation and a kind of cold leaden endurance. But starving is a state of sorrow, it is necessarily so, if only because it feels at the time like the only available option, the only possible way to cope, the only way to express how empty and hungry and fearful you truly feel, the only way to make yourself known.

Being known. This, of course, is the goal, the agenda so carefully hidden it may be unknown even to the self. The cutter cuts to make the pain at her center visible. The anorexic starves to make manifest her hunger and vulnerability. The extremes announce, This is who I am, this is what I feel, this is what happens when I don’t get what I need. In quadraphonic sound, they give voice to the most central human hunger, which is the desire to be recognized, to be known and loved because of, and in spite of, who you are; they give voice to the sorrow that takes root when that hunger is unsatisfied.

All children will experience rage and helplessness and the terrible pain of unmet need. The luckiest among them, the ones cared for by mothers who were sufficiently attuned and responsive enough of the time (“good enough” mothers, in analyst D. W. Winnicott’s phrase), will learn to manage these feelings, to develop a sense along the way that there is some intrinsic goodness and safety and care in the world. If you grow up with the feeling that the source of this goodness exists within you—if your mother’s care and attunement has been sufficiently internalized, if it has sparked the confidence that your needs can be safely communicated to and reliably met by someone else—then hunger becomes bearable, rage and helplessness easier to tolerate. You feel, in a word, safe, known, or at least able to be known. If, on the other hand, that early attunement and comfort eluded you, if you never internalized that sense of safety and recognition, then hunger becomes more problematic, rage and helplessness move closer to the surface, the ocean grows wider and deeper.

The pantomime begins when the hunger overwhelms, when it exceeds the organizing capacities of language. When words fail, you fall back on the body, you permit its behaviors and compulsions and urges to say what you feel and need, to explain the inexplicable. And so a woman closes her hand around a candy bar. She draws blood on the delicate skin of her arm. She inserts a finger into her throat. Hidden in the symbolically recast worlds of things and body parts and food—worlds, not coincidentally, that are assigned particular meaning to women in our culture—is an entire language of female sorrow, one that serves as a substitute for ordinary language and also reveals a kind of despair about ordinary language, as though there are no words, have never really been words, to describe how we feel.

The philosopher Hegel posited desire as a lack, an absence, an idea also developed by Lacan, who described desire as a longing for something previously experienced as pleasurable or gratifying and then lost. An inherent part of desire, both believed, is a fundamental sense of incompleteness, something missing, some early division that was never quite repaired, and whether that “something” is a buried memory, or a lost experience of love or recognition or safety, or a never gratified wish for such an experience, it haunts us, tugs at the psyche’s sleeve, creates an eternal loop of hunger in which every new incarnation of want (that man, that apartment, that pared-down body) is yet another stand-in for the more visceral absence. And the story of appetite becomes, essentially, a story of substitutions, or a chain of substitutions, in which each failed attempt to fill emptiness leads to another attempt and another: longings in search of replacements, forever attaching themselves to things, to people, to behaviors which then take on lives of their own, become organizing principles, fragments of hope that always promise transcendence over pain and longing and always disappoint.

This is not a particularly cheerful philosophy—it suggests that human beings are essentially sorrowful creatures, wounded, eternally fated to seek fulfillment from dislocated and impossible sources—but a dash of Hegelian despair can be a useful thing, a check against consumer culture’s blaring strains of false promise, and also fodder for a deeper kind of acceptance. To know that hunger is an essential part of what it means to be human, that it’s possibly epic and anguished and intrinsically insatiable, is at least to muffle the blare, to introduce a sense of proportion.

And yet proportion is hard to hold onto, and may be particularly hard for women. During an interview on National Public Radio’s The Connection, conducted following the publication of her 1999 book, The Whole Woman, feminist Germaine Greer described something she sees with increasing frequency: the weeping woman, the woman stopped at a traffic light with tears streaming down her face, or exiting a stall in the ladies’ room with red-rimmed eyes, or slumped in her seat at the movie theater, clutching a handful of Kleenex. The weeping is always private, indulged on the sly, and Greer sees the sorrow behind it as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual one, a reaction to the lingering understanding among women that despite several decades of social change, the world remains largely indifferent, disdainful, even hostile to their most defining qualities and concerns.

Women weep, Greer believes, because they feel powerless, and because they are exhausted and overworked and lonely. Women weep because their own needs are unsatisfied, continually swept into the background as they tend to the needs of others. They weep because the men in their lives so often seem incapable of speaking the language of intimacy, and because their children grow up and become distant, and because they are expected to acquiesce to this distance, and because they live lives of chronically lowered expectations and chronic adjustment to the world of men, the power and strength of a woman’s emotions considered pathological or hysterical or sloppy, her interest in connection considered trivial, her core being never quite seen or known or fully appreciated, her true self out of alignment with so much that is valued and recognized and worshipped in the world around her, her love, in a word, unrequited.

This sentiment stayed with me for a long time. I was driving from Boston to Rhode Island while I heard it, to visit a friend for the weekend, and I spent much of the trip thinking about the steady press of sorrow in a woman’s life, the feeling of discord that may run through her days, the singular loneliness of living in a world that emphasizes and rewards so many qualities that may run counter to her central humanity: independence instead of interdependence; distance instead of closeness; self-seeking instead of cooperation; the external world instead of the internal world; glamour and wealth and celebrity instead of kindness and generosity and warmth. I thought about the private pain of women, expressed with so much wordless anguish: the anorexic, isolated and terrified and working so relentlessly to starve away her own hunger; the shoplifter, trying to compensate for what she never had with a Clark bar; the self-cutter, lashing at her own skin instead of out at the world; the bulimic, hunched over a toilet bowl, retching out a river of need. I thought about thwarted connections—a girl’s from her mother, a woman’s from her culture—and then I did something I almost never do: I pulled my car over to the side of the road, and I sat there, and I wept.