Text

theses

This thesis manuscript is the beginning of a book-length project by the same title. Taste is a memoir, dedicated to the exploration of the author’s life through a deep fixation with family dysfunction, mental illness, body image, and food. The narrative begins with the author’s childhood experience of taste, texture, and the insatiable desire to eat, tempered by an awareness of her own developing body, her family’s history with morbid obesity, her mother’s militant avoidance of “junk” food, and her father’s inability to feed his children in the aftermath of an especially vengeful divorce. The narrative follows the author’s bout with anorexia, spurred by a desire to improve a competitive figure skating career with the increased speed and rotation that inevitably follows dramatic weight loss. Once the author is hospitalized in her first eating disorders unit, she discovers the warped world of chronic eating disorder patients, women whose lives revolve around a psychological diagnosis that traps the food-obsessed for the rest of their lives. Out of the hospital, the author’s violent addiction to binge eating, anorexia, and bulimia intensifies and, during the following decade, her weight fluctuates 100 pounds, sometimes rendering her bloated and unrecognizable, other times reducing her to a 58-pound death wish. When the author wakes up one morning to discover she’s mysteriously lost her sense of taste, a life-long infatuation with food is thrown into the fire, but she’ll do anything to recapture the love of her life.

ETD_4854

M.F.A.

by Elizabeth Licorish

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10005600001.ETD.000068604

doi:10.7282/T3NP232S

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.