It is written in forty-eight short chapters of sprinting, irreverent stream of consciousness that is only scantly punctuated.
“Elegy for an Appetite” centers on fifteen years in Loew-Banayan’s life, beginning in adolescence. Mostly, I didn’t think that anything useful or beautiful, and certainly not transformative, could come of the disclosure-until I read Loew-Banayan’s book.
The only time that I’ve spoken about it professionally was during a conversation with the writer Susan Burton, the author of the 2020 eating-disorder memoir “ Empty.” It all feels like a long time ago now.
But, unlike Loew-Banayan, I kept mine a secret, swinging silently among bouts of bulimia, anorexia, and binge eating. But Loew-Banayan (who uses they/them pronouns) is the first writer I’ve encountered who pounds the two genres together into a substance so singular and true to itself that they seem to forge their own language, a code integral to the telling of their story.īefore I say more about Loew-Banayan’s book, I should say that I’m a former professional chef who had an eating disorder from the ages of fifteen to nearly thirty, on and off. There exists a small subgenre of gourmand-with-an-eating-disorder accounts, including Hannah Howard’s books “ Feast” (2018) and “ Plenty” (2021).
What, then, to make of Shaina Loew-Banayan’s new book, “Elegy for an Appetite,” a memoir of a young chef with an eating disorder? Shaina Loew-Banayan, now the chef and owner of Café Mutton, in Hudson, New York, isn’t the first writer to scramble the notion that food obsession can be either professionally constructive or personally destructive. Others get eating disorders.” From that neat and logical dichotomy one might envision two opposite genres of food memoir: the warts-and-all chronicle of life as a restaurant chef and the self-searching literature of life with an eating disorder. In her 1998 book, “ Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia,” Marya Hornbacher writes that “some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs.
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