Appetites by Ann Levin
In “Appetites,” Ann Levin utilizes the ekphrastic essay form to explore the self, examining her struggles with overeating through the lens of a Philip Guston painting titled Painting, Smoking, Eating. Levin opens the essay at the moment she first spots the painting during an art show: “As soon as I saw it, I thought, This is me, this is who I am,” she writes. “Guston had painted a portrait of yearning, of compulsion, of satisfaction and the limits of satisfaction—and I had never felt so seen in my life.” Levin analyzes Guston’s work and biography, blending criticism with her own candid accounts of binge eating to construct a personal essay that probes “what it means to want and want and want.”
Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, in their craft book Tell It Slant, write that “through a close observation of particular paintings, sculptures, or photographs, you can reveal your own take on the world or find metaphors in line with your obsessions.” Levin employs this approach, beginning the essay with a description of the Guston painting to jump-start a succession of ideas and anecdotes. The painting reminds her of psychologically fraught scenes of eating and excess, both in her own life and in literature and film. For readers, the structure mirrors how a work of art may flood the viewer with a series of memories and emotions.
“It goes without saying that I am very different from Guston,” Ann Levin writes in her author’s note. “But I felt like we had enough in common that I could tell the story I had to tell by ‘listening’ to his picture.” “Appetites” is a testament to how another artist’s work can become a reflection of ourselves and how ekphrasis may act as a catalyst, helping a writer explore subjects that were previously too painful to address. —CRAFT
I was halfway through the show when I first saw the picture, hanging all alone on a wall. I knew I should hurry up, had other things to do. But something about the size and the color drew me toward it, and then I just stood there, utterly transfixed.
It was called Painting, Smoking, Eating, and it portrayed the artist, Philip Guston, lying flat on his back in the middle of the night, smoking a cigarette, eyes wide open, with a plate of french fries balanced on his chest. A bare light bulb, the silent companion of insomniacs worldwide, was suspended over his head, and behind him, a shelf or a table was piled high with paintbrushes and shoes. It was the most domestic scene imaginable—a man just lying in bed—but there was also a certain violence, desperation, and crudeness about it that bolted me to the floor.
As soon as I saw it, I thought, This is me, this is who I am. And it took me back to my days as a binge eater, lying in my own bed in a state of abject stupefaction, anxious and depressed, feeling like the end of the world had arrived. Guston had painted a portrait of yearning, of compulsion, of satisfaction and the limits of satisfaction—and I had never felt so seen in my life.
The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which owns the painting, was a bit more dispassionate in its description of the piece: At this point in his life, excessive eating habits and smoking three packs of cigarettes a day began to affect Guston’s health. His work from this time can generally be described as grotesque and shows the tragic side of his own existence.
Tragic? Grotesque? Yes. You could throw in lurid and cartoonish too, as gross and repellent as anything R. Crumb ever dreamed up. But it was also gorgeous, painted in the luscious pinks and reds of Guston’s later years—like lobster shells and lobster meat; or bowels, borscht, and blood.
In the art world Guston is known for his love of a particular kind of pigment called cadmium red, which he was at a loss to explain: “I like pastrami. I just like it. I couldn’t tell you why.” Well, there’s that too—deli meat. What else would you expect from a nice Jewish boy who changed his family name to Guston from Goldstein when he moved to New York in the thirties to become an artist?
Before I saw the show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the spring of 2022, I didn’t know all that much about him although I’d seen his work in New York. Once I started to walk through the galleries; read that his father committed suicide when he was just ten, and that he found the body; saw the numerous references in his work to the Ku Klux Klan rallies of his youth and later, the Holocaust; I realized that Guston was mishpocha, descended from the same troubled, melancholy tribe as me: Eastern European and Russian Jews, fleeing pogroms, then the Holocaust, to come here. Haunted by mental illness, prone to despair, and always desperate for a good laugh.
But despite the grim subject matter—insomnia is almost intolerable, and the shoes looked like they were rimmed in blood—there was a kind of clownish joy in it too, as there was in a lot of his late work, particularly the images of food. One of them, Eating, shows a long-lashed cartoon man with cherry-red lips, his mouth pulling on a few strands of a mountain of spaghetti heaped on a plate, eyes rolled back in pleasure. That attitude—gluttony is good!—was something I couldn’t even imagine myself thinking because for a very long time now, eating and appetite have been wrapped up in shame and guilt.
Back in 1972, the year I graduated from high school, I saw a scene in a movie that still haunts me today. It was in The Heartbreak Kid, when the character played by Jeannie Berlin eats an egg salad sandwich the day after her wedding. She stuffs it in her mouth, leaving bits of food all over her face. Her new husband, played by Charles Grodin, points it out politely, but you can tell he’s repulsed—by that and nearly everything about her. Which, of course, sets up his decision just a few days later to dump her while they’re still on their honeymoon.
Then there are the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn with their vicious and condescending portrayal of a compulsive overeater named Rachel, “slightly plump, dark-haired, and marginally pretty.” Patrick, the author’s addict alter ego, picks her up at a bar when he’s on the prowl for drugs. On the way back to his hotel, she wants to stop at a diner famous for its “chilli.” In excruciating detail, he describes her wolfing down a taco platter followed by a banana split “like a pig in a trough.” She, too, winds up with food on her face as Patrick frets to himself about whether she’s “trying to put him off sex altogether by…saturating her breath with the torrid stench of cheese and chilli.” Even so, he gets that her problem is basically the same as his, it’s just that dope has better PR: “life on the edge…the heart of darkness…Coleridge, Baudelaire, Leary.”
It always pissed me off that drug addicts and alcoholics got to be beautiful losers in books and movies while compulsive overeaters were just pigs. Over time you internalize the judgment, eating becomes pathological; you start to picture yourself as Jabba the Hutt, the giant, sluglike crime lord from Star Wars, with his gaping mouth and no neck. Who lolls around on his dais, devouring Klatooine paddy frogs alive and keeping his scantily clad sex slaves, including Carrie Fisher as the Princess Leia, chained to his slimy chest.
When did I start thinking of myself as Jabba? When did I cross that line? Because there were memories before that when it was okay to just sit around a dining room table with people you loved.
When I was growing up in Western Pennsylvania, we used to go to a family-run restaurant just outside of town called Nesta’s. It was in a small, shingled house right off the highway, with red-and-white checkered tablecloths and dark wooden booths. But since there were seven of us, we sat at a table.
The owners made the pasta by hand but no one called it pasta back then. It was just ravioli or manicotti or big bowls of spaghetti and meatballs—they even gave you a spoon to eat your spaghetti with. But my parents loved the ravioli and always ordered several servings. My younger brother didn’t like tomato sauce, so he got his in butter. My older brother preferred meat, but everyone else wanted cheese. All of it was served al dente though no one said al dente back then either.
Crowded around a table, our knees almost knocking, we were connected like the roots of a tree. That’s when food was this beautiful, comforting thing to me, maybe just what I needed because as a kid, it was very stressful being me. No reason exactly, I had it better than most. Walked to school on safe streets, came home, did my homework, remembered all the states and their capitals, helped my mother make dinner, cleaned up the kitchen, watched TV, then went to bed. But I also absolutely freaked out if I missed an answer on a test or didn’t get all A’s, if my parents seemed worried or went away for too long.
My great tranquilizer was the dinner table. It felt like the safest place in the world until it tipped over into something…monstrous, like Jabba the Hutt. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when everything spun out of control, but one incident burns brightly and shamefully in memory, my own Philip Guston, flat-on-my-back-with-a-plate-of-fries-on-my-chest moment. It was the night that someone Ma and Dad had invited over for dinner, an old friend or business associate, came into the kitchen after the meal was cleared away, when I was supposed to be cleaning up. I was ten.
Back then, we had a refrigerator that hung on the wall over the counter and opened out like a book. I had crawled up on the counter, tugged at the door, and was eating out of a serving bowl of leftover mac and cheese with ham when he said from behind me, standing in the doorway, “Raiding the refrigerator, are we?” He must have been British because Americans don’t talk that way.
I was caught in the act, legs askew on the counter, hands in the bowl. But it was later, in boarding school, when the binges began in earnest. And when they did, they were epic—brown paper shopping bags filled with day-old pastries from the bakery. A dozen containers of Dannon flavored yogurt inhaled in one sitting. Entire cakes, pies, bags of candy—until the predictable body-and-soul sickness set in.
My mother was distraught, way beyond dismayed, when I started gaining weight. For the rest of her life, all she ever wanted was for me to go back to the way I was before I went away to school: five-foot-four, 118 pounds. Though as the years went on, 115 would have been even better.
Why I couldn’t lose the weight remains the greatest mystery of my life. There was a part of me that wanted to but there was also a part of me that knew that every binge was a rebellion—against her, against myself, against my body, against the patriarchy, against all the rules of good health.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, it was misery. But that one percent? Oh, that one percent! It was glorious. I remember one summer, upstairs in my yellow and white bedroom, under the pretty bedspread with its blue and green flowers, completely stuffed, engorged, swelling up like a balloon, yet feeling some sort of exaltation, some perverse and wicked power.
It’s just that those feelings didn’t last for very long. Only seconds, really. But as anyone who knows, knows, that’s enough. There had been something insatiable inside me and for the time being, it was sated. Still, the happiness was always furtive, on the sly, never out in the open, like at a wedding when the bride and groom shove cake into each other’s mouths. Or over a roaring bonfire, like in the Odyssey.
I remember reading that epic poem in high school and being absolutely enthralled by its rhapsodic descriptions of the feasts, which always began with Odysseus and his men slaughtering bulls and other livestock and sacrificing choice portions to the gods. The sheer abundance, immoderation, and gorging by those warriors—I thought it was just about the best thing about the book, certainly better than the endless repetition of the “rosy fingers of dawn.”
As I got older and read more feminist theory, I thought maybe there were other reasons why I binged and wanted to grow larger and wear drab, shapeless clothing. As a form of protection, to ward off the people who might want to hurt me. And also because I’d be damned if I was going to wear makeup and high heels and try to conform to some Waspy male fantasy of soft, weak feminine beauty.
Standing there that day in front of the Guston painting, I thought of all those struggles. I also realized that by any measure, I am thin. In fact, these days I rarely binge. But it wasn’t that I really stopped. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I got sick. The doctors took out most of my stomach (cancer) and my gallbladder (cholecystitis), and some other stuff happened too, and as a result, there are about a million things I can no longer eat, including sugar and fat.
Still, even if I couldn’t binge anymore, that picture of Guston smoking a cigarette with a plate of greasy fries on his chest brought it all back. All the appetites that couldn’t be slaked, the aching solitude, the loneliness, the intractable problem I was trying to solve, of how to be myself inside this stupid wrapper of pink flesh. And what it means to want and want and want.
ANN LEVIN is a writer, book reviewer, and former editor at the Associated Press. Her essays and memoir have been published in The Inquisitive Eater, The Coachella Review, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and many other literary magazines. She has also read her essays onstage with the New York-based writers’ group Writers Read. Find her on Twitter @annlevinnyc.
Featured image by Elena Leya, courtesy of Unsplash.
