How writing about female cannibals changed my relationship with food
How writing about female cannibals changed my relationship with food
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Describing issues of autonomy, femgore, worth and hunger all had ain impact on what I wrote and how I felt about myself, says Lucy Rose. My conflict with food began before I was born. According to family lore, I couldn’t be sated, even in utero. I consumed everything, apparently putting my twin at such risk that we were delivered prematurely. There are even stories of me climbing into my twin’s crib late at night and stealing their milk bottle, swapping it out with my empty one. I’ve always felt hunger, but I soon learned to associate “want” with shame.
In 2020, I started working on a novel about mother and daughter cannibals, who lure lost souls to their rural forest homestead and bake them into pies and stews. It wasn’t a conscious choice to write about women with a carnal desire to feast, but slowly, deep into drafting – which is a very physical act for me because I write by longhand – I realised that my relationship with food and consumption was changing. Exposure to these women, who binged without guilt or inhibition, forced me to confront my fraught relationship with food, and in turn, eventually, heal it.
As long as I can remember, I’ve always been hungry. Unbeknownst to the adults around me, I was a child with undiagnosed autism and ADHD, which meant my behaviour around food was inherently complex and difficult. At a sleepover, I remember coveting my friends’ unopened Advent calendar. It was on her windowsill, filled to the brim with sweet, delicious things that didn’t belong to me, but she’d had the impulse control to keep it fully intact before December began. I reached and pulled it from the windowsill and while the other girls forged the early bonds of lifelong friendships in the front room, I slipped under her bed and ate every single chocolate. I stayed there, hidden beneath her mattress. The guilt set in, but teeth aching and lips sweet, there was only one thing I knew for certain: I wanted more.
