Her style is so conversational that reading a Katriona O’Sullivan book is like sitting in her company, listening to her recount her life story. It’s also never going to be easy. The facets of honesty which she erects around that story force a level of self-examination in the reader that few authors achieve. But it’s uneasy in the same way that therapy is. It takes you to a better place. O’Sullivan clearly has done the work of therapy, of processing, of honing a message that is unique and so so important to hear.
The message of this book is about women, about our bodies, about how we internalise, through childhood and youth, messages that surround us, shame us, mess with us. Those messages shape our relationships with our bodies, what they’re for, how they bring us shame, how they let us down, until we have lost all appreciation for this magnificent apparatus which carries us through life. In writing this book, and in doing her work, O’Sullivan has learned that “my body isn’t the issue; that this pattern of thinking my body is the problem is old, obsolete; that, while focusing on my body helped me gain some semblance of control as a child, I don’t need that any more. As an adult, I am safe.”
This is a gendered topic, without a doubt, and this book has the potential to help men understand the unique relationship that women have with their bodies, in the same way that O’Sullivan’s first book, Poor, revealed for those of us with class privilege, the dynamics of growing up in poverty. Hungry deals with class issues also. O’Sullivan tells of how, although we all obsess about our bodies, it plays out differently depending on our background; “The contrast between my people and the people I meet in the university is stark. Academics don’t get lip-fillers. Their eyebrows are mostly their own. They are not posting before-and-after pictures on Instagram. Or on LinkedIn. But they don’t escape the fat algorithm – they just respond in different ways.”
[ Katriona O’Sullivan: I live in the grip of the fat-girl algorithmOpens in new window ]
There’s a very nostalgic feel to Hungry. The 1990s references – French & Saunders, sugar sandwiches, “the black Labrador collection box with its faded words, ‘Guide Dogs for the Blind’” – situate us in a time of heroin chic, slut-shaming and the original proliferation of the weekly rituals of slimming clubs; “Every Monday evening was the same for the year 1994. At 7pm, Lou and I would face the dreaded scales in Silvermere Youth Club. Our feeling of success or failure, of worth, correlated to the amount of weight we lost or gained that week.”
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Being of a similar vintage, I’m familiar with the body shaming toxicity of that decade and how it has left an indelible mark on my own body image and self-esteem. But O’Sullivan goes in deep on how every element of her upbringing fed into her relationship with her body. And she has had a much more complex experience than most. “The shame I felt about my body had become entwined with the shame I felt about being abused. Fixing one was unconsciously attached to fixing the other. But chasing the dream of being skinny was easier than listening to the voice that said I was to blame for what happened to me; easier than stopping and feeling the deep sadness that goes along with being abused in childhood and adulthood.”
The catastrophic impact of abuse, the before and after of the moment of sexual assault is central to O’Sullivan’s relationship with her body. This childhood experience, and how it was not effectively dealt with by any adult in her life at the time it happened, becomes the shifting sands on which all of her life’s other challenges are fought. The poignancy of pinpointing the exact moment is heartbreaking; “As darkness engulfs me, lying under the weight of this disgusting man, I hope that I will never wake up. I have never woken up.”
In public discourse, we hear about assault, the fight-or-flight response, the lifelong trauma, but O’Sullivan maps it on to and into her experience in a way that is so detailed, so unseen by awareness campaigns, or statistics, helping us to get a glimpse into the intricacy of the mental health challenges experienced by sexual abuse survivors.
And there’s so much more in Hungry – the reality of being a hungry schoolchild, disordered eating, social media, childbirth, sex, love, marriage, how her parent individually and catastrophically contributed to her dysfunctional relationship with her body. “... my Dad, by including me in his ogling of women, hurt me – a lot. It gave me the same creepy feeling I had when the bad men were in our house.”
The recent debate about the quality of hot school meals could benefit from her recounting of childhood hunger in a school setting
O’Sullivan’s telling of her experience with a gastric band is particularly harrowing. We don’t hear, typically, about the specific mechanics of these procedures, so it is an eye-opener to learn that the liquid in the device has to be lowered or raised to get the balance of restriction and satiety just right. Or that her precarious mental state was glossed over by a provider promising the world, but with little honesty of the reality of the treatment. “I lock the door of the cubicle, open the can, squeeze my nostrils closed and gulp back the full can of Coke. Gas, and the pressure of gulping make me projectile-vomit into the toilet; Coke sprays everywhere – the floor and walls. I pause to wipe my nose and mouth. Blinking slowly, gulping in the air.”
[ ‘Our house was wild and unpredictable... I was starved and cold and unloved’Opens in new window ]
The little asides in Hungry are wonderful. O’Sullivan’s writing is witty, words are well spent. “He has had one serious girlfriend (‘before you’, he says, which makes my heart lift). He says she was small; she looked a bit like Kylie Minogue (this makes me feel sick).” And we need them, because she reaches heights of vulnerability in her writing that require the cushion of humour and fun. Bodily functions, inner voices, therapeutic privacy, female sexuality – there’s really no part of her life where O’Sullivan isn’t willing to let us in. The first time that she and her beloved husband, Dave, have sex, is particularly personal. “In that moment, I know I have a choice to make – I could say nothing; I could lie here, half-satisfied, half-frustrated and push my needs aside; I could do what I have always done and choose a man’s needs over mine. I could continue to act in line with what’s taught to all women – that our sexual needs are second to a man’s. That we are not supposed to want to come, to explode, to feel every single nerve-ending alight with passion. I could say nothing and succumb to the patriarchy and the lifetime of abuse I have endured. Or I could say something. Speak the words.” She does, and in doing so, sets the tone for a beautiful honesty in their lifelong partnership.
In terms of body image, O’Sullivan truly has the power to shift women’s thinking. Because although body positivity has been an incredibly progressive force in the last decade or so, it has not brought everyone along. Younger generations are far more open-minded, despite the fresh pressures of social media. In older age groups, many people are unaware of how much toxicity they’ve absorbed over the course of their lives, and how much it still impacts their happiness, mental health, wardrobe and eating habits. Women expend a huge amount of mental energy on our bodies and how we appear. Whole industries are underpinned by this obsession. Think how gratifying it would be to undermine those profits by inoculating ourselves to their pressures, and how liberating it would be to not think about our appearance as often as we do.
Ultimately, the hunger in the title isn’t about food, or at least it’s not only about food. Rather, it’s the hunger that we all experience in life for acceptance, sex, achievement, connection, love or food. It’s about how these various strands of craving become intricately woven together, presenting us with personalised sets of issues and dysfunction that we have to work through. O’Sullivan’s dad is held up as an example of this, “He was fucked up. A broken man who spent most of my childhood seeking solace in drugs. Everyone can get lost to hunger … lost to an uncontrollable hunger for drugs, abuse, food or harm. My Dad was no different.”
What O’Sullivan does for policymakers is bring an authentic lived experience of what we normally hear about in numbers, in official language, in sanitised terms. She makes it visceral, never easy, and so so memorable. The recent debate, for example, about the quality of hot school meals, could benefit from her recounting of childhood hunger in a school setting. “I want to scream at her. I want to open my mouth and sink my big, beautiful teeth into her face to show her how hungry I am, how I have nothing left to give her, how I don’t hear her, how I never hear her, how I can’t hear her when I have nothing inside of me.”
Sinéad Gibney is a Social Democrats TD for Dublin Rathdown
Further reading
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk (Penguin, 2015) is considered a seminal work in this space. Van der Kolk combines his life’s work as a clinician with a bucketload of empathy, and brings this to bear on the effects of trauma on our bodies.
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West (Hachette, 2016) is a nonfiction book calling out societal fat-shaming with intelligence, patience and wit. It was turned into a TV show of the same name, starring Aidy Bryant, which is an absolute treat – funny and heartwarming, while challenging our internalised attitudes to weight.
The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living by Hillary L McBride (Collins, 2021) balances research, personal experience and a compassionate writing style to provide a really valuable work.
