Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl by Ann Rollins
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2025
Review by Alyssa Witbeck
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Anna Rollins, in her debut memoir Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl, writes about the lure of becoming a “more perfect woman” through controlling her body. The crux of her memoir is the connection between diet culture and Evangelical purity culture, and how the two “frame appetite as suspect” and “glory in self-denial.” She considers their “rhyming scripts” and that the “messages from both purity culture and diet culture were clear: Our hungers did not give us valuable information about our needs. Appetites were forces to fight.” Fighting her desires is a hidden and all-consuming wrestle. Through Rollins’ narration, the reader understands early on in the memoir that policing consumption is consuming.
Rollins grows up a fundamentalist Evangelical and simultaneously has an eating disorder for decades. From childhood to motherhood, we follow her hide in bathrooms to sneak in more workout time, compulsively conduct leg lifts and body checks as a form of self-soothing, and tear her food into tiny pieces to avoid actually eating it. But it’s not just Rollins who does this, and it’s not only the other girls at church who are praised for their weight loss. This narrative, Rollins explains, is “not simply personal or even cultural.” Instead, it “dated back as far as Genesis: when Eve ate and offered forbidden food and was subsequently cursed with pain in childbirth.” The original sin is a woman eating, and she is punished for it.
Rollins resists the easy argument that purity culture causes disordered eating, and instead, through a blend of memoir, research, and reportage, explores the overlap between the two. Specifically, she looks at how the widespread desire for thinness within purity culture is rooted in both patriarchy and racism. “Thin bodies have long been associated with Whiteness,” she writes. Fat female bodies were idealized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the “shift in ideals happened in the eighteenth century, at the same time the transatlantic slave trade was growing rapidly.” She explains that the “thin ideal became associated with upper-class white women because it was a way to distinguish themselves from Black people.” Rollins interrogates not only modern diet culture, but its historical roots “in racism.” Some of the most compelling sections of the book examine the origins of thin as the Western ideal. Starting in the eighteenth century, thinness symbolizes whiteness, godliness, and “American Exceptionalism.” Rollins carries both empathy for herself and people who suffer from disordered eating while also interrogating the systemic racism and patriarchy that they are born from.
Rollins challenges the assumption that eating disorders are exclusively a symbol of submission. She argues that a “thin body has been treated as an outward manifestation of an inward reality: The willpower and discipline shown in dieting are correlated with one’s obedience to God.” Dieting makes the invisible devotion and self-sacrifice to God visible. Within white Christianity, Rollins observes that “overeating was ungodly,” and taking control of one’s impulses brings you closer to God. Within purity culture, resisting impulses applies to more than just eating. Women and girls are taught to avoid sex before marriage at all costs. Rollins builds credibility by bringing in expert voices alongside her own narrative. Author Linda Kay Klein tells Rollins that “Disordered eating is common in purity culture. It requires adherence to a strict hierarchy: the body must submit to the mind, and the mind must submit to the spirit.” And so, Rollins argues that for many women and girls, the “solution to the difficulties of desire was simple: refrain. Say no to all of it. And the promise for this self-denial was a desirable body and a happy marriage.” Within this paradigm, controlling her body through resisting food and sex is one of the limited ways women gain power.
Part of what makes disordered eating so pertinent is that the premise relies on half-truths: there is value in willpower and self-discipline, but despite anorexia having the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses, “The wine has a warning on the label,” but “The diet does not.” And so, the high-achieving Christian girls may get sucked into the vortex of disordered eating to become more perfect. Perfect, according to this framework, meaning more white, godlier, and more exceptional. “In other words,” Rollins writes, “when a woman makes herself small, she is simultaneously trying to become big.” In these moments, Rollins succeeds at carrying her story into a larger commentary on perceived perfection in diet and purity culture.
Not all of Rollins’ work criticizes Christianity. In fact, Rollins paraphrases research that connects people with secure spiritual practices to healthier relationships with food. However, she explains that “those who have anxious attachments to God experience higher levels of disordered eating.” She notes that anxious attachment tends to happen within fundamentalism, when purity culture triggers a relationship to God that is “marked by embodied shame and anxiety.” In this case, Rollins argues that “you can’t get into a space of self-compassion if you’re constantly worried about whether you measure up. High-control religion strongly encourages you to be in that headspace of judgment all the time.” As a fundamentalist Evangelical, Rollins was tethered to constantly evaluating not only her spirituality but her body since childhood.
Rollins takes us on a mostly chronological journey, and as she questions whether her relationship to food and exercise is healthy, her relationship to her faith shifts, too. A woman loosening her grip on disordered eating and subsequently deconstructing her faith is a pattern applicable to more than just Rollins. When writing Famished, she interviews many scholars, psychologists, and women. “In all my interviews,” she writes in the preface, “the most interesting thing I noticed was this: When women worked to heal from body shame, their relationship to religion was intricately involved.” Ultimately, Rollins concludes that she “could not go on an elimination diet to cure my eating disorder” and that discarding religion completely may be a contortion of the same abstinence refrain. Despite the harm she acknowledges within Christianity, she chooses to stay; she chooses to “try to heal my embodied responses to church.” Rollins embraces a space of nuance and suggests,“In the same way that I will never escape my problems with food by giving up a relationship with food, I cannot heal my hurt with religion by giving up my relationship with God.” She abandons the narrow view she was taught that defined the perfect Christian. We see her redefining perfection in other areas as well. She no longer adheres to beliefs about a perfect body, perfect exercise, perfect eating, perfect mothering, or a perfect marriage. As a reader, I would happily pick up a second book from Rollins where she has more space to dig into these new definitions of perspectives on faith. In this memoir, we see Rollins embrace messiness and be cautious not to romanticize recovery or her nuanced relationship to Christianity. She does not exchange one binary thinking for another. “My body is mine,” she says. By the end of the memoir, we’ve seen Rollins deconstruct certainty and strict parameters on what is “good” and “bad.” It is only fitting that what she grounds herself in is not any particular element of her body or her faith, but simply that her body is her body.
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Anna Rollins lives and works in Huntington, West Virginia, where she has taught courses in composition and rhetoric, creative nonfiction, and text analysis for over a decade. Her work has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, Slate, Salon, Electric Literature, Joyland, Newsweek, and the Today show.
Alyssa Witbeck holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Montana where she was an editor for CutBank. Her work is published in Mayday, Chestnut Review, Exponent II, and elsewhere. Based in Utah, she teaches university English composition courses. She crochets an excessive number of stuffed animals, for no real reason. Find her at alyssawitbeck.com.
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