Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen

Howard, a writer who also mentors women recovering from eating disorders, unflinchingly shares her lifelong struggles with food and eating disorders. Experiencing anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive eating throughout her youth, Howard used food and her weight as she posits many women do: to measure her self-worth, her willpower, her place in the world. “You can’t see an eating disorder,” she writes. “Thin people, fat people, normal people have this thing. We look like you.” As a freshman at Columbia University in 2009, Howard began a hostess job at the upscale Manhattan restaurant Picholine—where her food issues crested, and she became “fascinated by the emergence of my own hipbone, the concave scoop above my clavicle.” She moved from one food-related job to another, first as a server at a wine and cheese bar in Manhattan, then as a chain-steak-house management trainee in Los Angeles. Howard also lays bare a string of what she describes as bad choices that she made relating to men, such as dating one of her bosses—a much older, married chef—when she was a minor. Those in recovery from substance abuse will recognize themselves throughout this honest memoir; for those without addiction issues, this story offers a painful glance into the lives of those who suffer. (Apr.)