Customer Reviews

Holy Hunger: A Memoir of Desire

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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.

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.

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.

Holy Hunger struck a deep chord in me, not because I share Bullitt-Jonas' family history or her obsession with food but because in it Bullitt-Jonas insightfully reflects on her primordial family relationships. The book is about the early life of a woman with an eating disorder, but it is also about the pain of growing up and discovering the inadequacies and absences of parents, even loving and smart ones. Bullitt-Jonas' story is one of sadness and loss. At the same time, her quest leads her to redemption, joy, and victory.

I found the book utterly captivating and I highly recommend it.

Holy Hunger is an intimate, honest and balanced story of one woman's brave journey out of addiction and into grace. Her desire to confront her family's troubled legacies, and her movement beyond that makes this book far more than any kind of "dysfunctional family memoir." Her portrait of her (very much alive) mother is particularly moving and redemptive.

I was inspired with the thoughtful and soul-searching story of Margaret Bullitt-Jonas. It's not too often that people have the courage and ability to share their experiences of hope and recovery in such a personal way. We get to see and experience the real-life issues around food addiction without many judgments and without prescriptions for quick fixes or tidy solutions to a very serious problem. An eloquent, passionate, often painful exploration of how we might better understand food addiction and compulsive behavior. I truly appreciated the author and her story.

Through her memoir Margaret Bullitt-Jonas invites us to delve into our own stories and discover parts of life previously hidden, covered over, or locked away. It is a gift for those wanting to enter into life more deeply, but not one to be chosen by readers who refuse to be propelled into their own self-examination and self-discovery.

"Sometimes we have no access to our feelings, we can't get hold of our lives; we can only find ourselves as we read our way through the stories of another writer, another teller of a family tale" (p. 198) For Bullitt-Jones,the Russian revolutionary writer Alexander Herzen was the writer that propelled her further in her own self-discovery. For myself and other's like me who choose this self-discovery process for ourselves, Holy Hunger is a precious and grace-filled family tale that opens doors to create a space "Within which to discover and sort out my feelings, so that my own authentic self might arise at last and find a language in which to speak" (p.159).

I am thankful for the author's courageous choice to tell her own story of spiritual recovery. Her grace filled truth telling is refreshing. Her ability to tell the truth about her family without blaming is the product of twenty years of hard work in recovery from addiction. It is good news for all who've chosen the pain of truly living rather than succumb to the anesthization of addiction.

This book has a number of important strengths. The author courageously shared insights about her eating disorder and experiences in twelve-step programs. I admired the richness of the language she used and the images she invoked. And, most essentially, she made plain the connection between hunger for our culture's quick fixes and hunger for God. Yes, some of the incidents she recounted made me uncomfortable, made me want to put the book down and run for the nearest distraction. But that may have been the point! My only complaint was that sometimes I wanted to shout at her, "Margaret, stop telling me so much about your mother's life and tell me some more about yours!" or, "How could you value that selfish, vicious, controlling father above all others?"

I not only enjoyed this book but profited from reading it. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas doesn't so much tell her story as find it as she traces her path from compulsive eating to sanity. I felt humbled and thankful to be invited with her on this sacred trek. Her tone is reflective, and, despite her star-studded academic origins and family wealth, she always chooses matter-of-fact intimacy over sensationalism. Where a previous reviewer identified "whining" I found only frankness, thankfulness and hope.

I read Holy Hunger because I have a friend who is struggling with an eating disorder and because I had the pleasure of meeting Bullitt-Jonas at a conference. I was glad I did. Bullitt-Jonas is an Episcopal priest, writer, environmental activist, retreat leader, Harvard PhD, marathon runner, and spiritual director. She was also a food addict who writes to share the lessons she learned about compulsive overeating.

Bullitt-Jonas began binge eating in the tenth grade. By the time she was thirty food controlled her body, mind and spirit. She describes her late night forays to the grocery store where she would furtively buy her "drug of choice." Sometimes she would inhale an entire box of donuts in the car. Other times she would wait until she returned home to consume an entire pie at her kitchen counter. In one four day period she gained eleven pounds; on another occasion she did not eat anything for ten days. In one of many turning points, the pleasant lies told at the funeral of a colleague who had committed suicide outraged her. How could the family lie so badly about what had happened?

And then the penny dropped. Much of Bullitt-Jonas's book is about unearthing her family archaeology of enormous wealth but deep dysfunction. Her grandparents' home was lined with paintings of Picasso, Matisse, and Gaugin. Boarding school in Switzerland and Maryland was followed by Russian studies at Stanford and then Harvard. Her parents were polar opposites. Her mother was taciturn, private, and emotionally distant. Her father, a Harvard professor, was a volatile and verbal alcoholic who loved to sail his boat directly into a storm. In between were the people-pleasing, the peace-making, the perfectionisms that were pleas for love, and the emotional starvation not for food but for human affirmation. Over it all was an unspoken compact of silence: "we didn't do feelings in my house." The wealth could not cloak the deep emotional, psychological and spiritual poverty of everyone involved.

Eventually Bullitt-Jonas connected with Overeaters Anonymous and Adult Children of Alcoholics. She took an acting class, enrolled in Buddhist meditation, met the man she eventually married, and even rejoined her church community, all of which helped her to listen to her own voices, to discover her personal identity apart from her family, and to begin writing a new story. In the end, she construes her story as a memoir about desire, "the desire beyond all desire," as she puts it. Her words reminded me of the opening sentences of Augustine's Confessions, that "God has made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee." There are no victims or villains here, no shaming and blaming, either of herself or of her family. Rather, Bullitt-Jonas has written a beautiful story of redemption that combines courageous truth-telling with tender compassion. I hope she will write a sequel.