Holy Hunger

The dutiful daughter of an esteemed Harvard professor and a pious Radcliffe trustee, Margaret Bullitt-Jonas seemed groomed for success. But while she was a super achiever in her academic life, the author was eating herself to death. In this wrenchingly honest, eloquent memoir, Bullitt-Jonas describes a childhood darkened by the repressive shadows of her alcoholic father and her emotionally reclusive mother, whose demands for excellence, poise, and self-control drove Bullitt-Jonas to develop an insatiable hunger. What began with pilfering extra slices of bread at her parents’ dinner table turned into binges with cream pies and pancakes, sometimes causing her to gain as much as eleven pounds in four days. When the family urged her father into treatment, the author recognized her own addiction and embarked on the path to recovery by discovering the spiritual hunger beneath her craving for food. Holy Hunger is a brave and perceptive account of compulsion and the healing process.