Lisa Knopp’s memoir of her disordered eating—not “eating disorder,” because there are such strange, stringent criteria one must meet to be “officially” diagnosed—Knopp refers to it as her “malady”—traces the connections between experiences and anxiety, between hunger and craving, and between the awful shifting attitudes of society towards eating behaviors. Knopp restricted her eating, in different ways, during three separate periods: as a 15-year-old high school student, after college at 25, and as a 54-year-old woman, and she writes with a precision and poignancy that took my breath away. Knopp began restricting as a response to her hunger for her mother’s presence; she began restricting again as a response to a lack of control and fear for the safety of the things she consumed, and finally, as she grieved for the changes in her life as well as a response to her health concerns.Disordered eating is manifest, it’s everywhere, and no one is talking about it because it’s not a “real” disorder. But Lisa Knopp is talking about it, and she’s also talking about the other shunted-aside population—older women, who’ve learned how to hide their behaviors. This book is vitally important, and the vulnerability it takes to write about a disorder-no-one-calls-a-disorder is immensely moving.