Holy Hunger: A Memoir of Desire

The compelling story of a young woman's recovery from a privileged yet painful childhood and away from the cravings that came to control her life. In public, Margaret Bullitt-Jonas was a superachiever--a stellar graduate student at Harvard and a dutiful daughter in a distinguished family. In private she was eating herself into oblivion. Beginning with her childhood in an emotionally constrained home where uncommon accomplishment was the expected norm and where her father's alcoholism--and the toll it took on the family--was kept secret, food addiction became Bullitt-Jonas's means of both concealing and communicating her needs and desires. We see her life increasingly consumed by overeating and the desperate effort to make herself stop. With extraordinary honesty and grace, she describes her descent into addiction; the crisis that forced her to choose, literally, between life and death; and the arduous process through which she learned to set aside her compulsive cravings and listen to her heart's desire. A tale of anguish and longing, confusion and forgiveness, Holy Hunger shows us a life-threatening situation becoming a path to grace as Bullitt-Jonas gradually finds new ways of relating to herself and others, and discovers the spiritual hunger beneath her craving.