Holy Hunger: A Memoir of Desire [Hardcover]

Margaret Bullitt-Jonas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 29, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The psychology underlying eating disorders is fraught with contradictions and uncertainties; researchers are just beginning to formulate the exact biochemical and emotional combination that impels a woman to binge and purge, or starve herself, or chronically overeat. But the familial forces behind such self-destructive behavior are what Margaret Bullitt-Jonas focuses on in her ultimately graceful memoir, Holy Hunger.

As in 1998's Wasted, where Marya Hornbacher's anorexia, bulimia, and exercise addiction were fueled by her parents' implicit orders to excel, Bullitt-Jonas was born into a family of extreme overachievement. Her father ("the rapscallion, the charmer, the rogue"), a covertly alcoholic English professor at Harvard, and her chronically depressed mother, a trustee at neighboring Radcliffe, maintained a miserable home atmosphere. Her father called her "a failure in life even before you've begun to live." Bullitt-Jonas reacted by addictively overeating in her desperation to sate an emotional hunger she couldn't quite identify.

Holy Hunger is her way of answering the question: "How did my desires go so awry?" She started as a child: "So who knows what I felt, who knows what I was really longing for.... I had no idea what it was--a compulsion, a desire, an unspoken something or other--that caused my small hand to dart out, reach for an extra slice of bread, then slip it quietly, unseen, into my pocket." Bullitt-Jonas's overeating spells through her adolescence and early adulthood are, as expected, devastating. But she manages to save herself through faith in the Higher Power she defers to in her Overeaters Anonymous meetings; her prayers for help; the almost eerie assistance she finds by reading Alice Miller. She transcends her desperation, offering a valuable lesson in the power of spirituality.

From Publishers Weekly

This unusually well-written memoir of recovery comes from an Episcopal priest who has been involved with 12-step spirituality for more than 15 years. Her addiction was to food, to which she turned for solace while growing up in a family ruled as much by repression as by overachievement. Bullitt-Jonas was a privileged child?complete with Swiss boarding school and a spacious home provided by Harvard, where her father was a star professor. However, her charismatic but cruel father slowly killed himself with alcohol, her distant mother was silenced by depression and the children were emotionally abandoned and unable to express their feelings, even to themselves. With a steady hand, Bullitt-Jonas describes the years of whole pies and batches of pancakes, the fasting and compulsive exercise by which she tried to escape her pain, until she discovered that 12-step programs helped her listen to herself. Her account of her spiritual triumph is nonsectarian?an approach in keeping with the 12-step movement. But the fact that she has become an Episcopal priest implies that she possesses a professed creed more specific than that of 12-step spirituality. Bullitt-Jonas is a good enough writer that readers will lament the lack of a more detailed, perhaps more sectarian account of her spiritual renewal.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (December 29, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037540094X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375400940
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #259,617 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Triumph of Loving Honesty: Holy Hunger by M. Bullitt-Jonas, June 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Holy Hunger: A Woman's Journey from Food Addiction to Spiritual Fulfillment (Paperback)

A searing reflection on growing up in a family of passionate, loving and flawed human beings, Holy Hunger is the product of a decades-long struggle by a person of courage and imagination to discover and honor her true nature.

Margaret Bullitt-Jonas writes from the point of view of someone who is on the other side of years of suffering, telling a story of addiction, loss and renewal from a very unusual point of view. This former literary scholar turned minister combines a clear-eyed honesty about herself, her family and the lives they lead with a depth of compassion for her subjects that I have rarely encountered. Holy Hunger weaves together suffering, anger, insight and forgiveness in an engaging and moving way.

It has always seemed to me an enormous occupational hazard of the novelist or autobiographer that one's duty to the craft collides with, and often trumps, one's loyalty to and respect for the feelings and memory of family and loved ones. If ever a book had the potential to support this thesis, Holy Hunger would have seemed to be it, as addictions and psychological wounds drive painful and self-destructive behaviors in two generations of a complex, high-achieving, and often very unhappy family. Instead, what one gets from Ms. Bullitt-Jonas is a blend of intellectual candor and emotional decency which one suspects is the result of sterling character, deep love, and great effort. This is a wise, strong, loving storyteller at work, and both she and her other subjects are in good hands.

The question of why, how and whether people will come back from the precipice of self-destructive behaviors to fashion lives of meaning and joy is a topic of common importance to many, perhaps most of us. In Bullitt-Jonas's life, and in this book, the story is about those who make it and those who do not. This is the real stuff.

There is a density to this book not reflected in the number of its pages, but despite its fullness, it left me wanting to know and hear more. At its end, I wished I knew even more about the nature of Bullitt-Jonas's spiritual journey, then and now. I wanted to hear her reflect and dig even more deeply into the nature of desire, as a spiritual longing, a physical condition, and a daily human emotion, particularly in this period of her life, at her strongest and most powerful. I suspect this is true for others of her readers. This is a great problem to have -- an embarrassment of intellectual and narrative riches -- and one I feel sure she will address in her future work. So we'll just have to wait for the next book, with pleasurable anticipation.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Holy Hunger Goes to the Heart, June 8, 2000

By 

H. John McDargh, Ph.D. (Boston College, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Holy Hunger: A Woman's Journey from Food Addiction to Spiritual Fulfillment (Paperback)

I have just finished using this Spring Rev. Margaret Bullitt Jonas' book for two courses at Boston College, one for pastoral ministry and counseling psychology graduate students on "Spirituality and Psychotherapy" , the second for advanced undergraduates on "Sexuality and the Spiritual Life". In my experience such students are tough- minded reviewers who easily pick up on cant, self-promotion and any note of emotional falsity. Uniformly they found this book an honest, intricate and nuanced presentation of life in one family - no more or less "dysfunctional" than many of them found their own. Ideological reactions to the text that grumpily and simplistically assign it to a genre of "victimology" simply have not read it as closely as these students who were awake to the genuine if complicated appreciation the author has for both of her parents - fully drawn individuals who the author sees with a completeness and complexity we all could learn from. It is a text I will continue to use professionally, and value personally.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Holy Hunger: A Review, June 30, 2000

By 

Evelyn Miller (Chatsworth, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Holy Hunger: A Woman's Journey from Food Addiction to Spiritual Fulfillment (Paperback)

When first reading this book I couldn't help but wonder how the author managed to grow up in my house and I didn't notice her! Any Adult Child of an Alcoholic will find this book riveting and very personal. Her journey through her addiction to food, facing herself and growing is gripping. She avoids many of the "buzz words" that one often finds in self-help literature. While she uses many of the OA jargon, it's in the context of talking about OA. I admire the author's courage in opening up about her family, her problems and her road to recovery. A must read.