Penance and Control in “Famished”

Penance and Control in “Famished” https://ift.tt/MU8xLRK

It’s almost painful to imagine what Anna Rollins’ childhood might have been like if she hadn’t suffered in secret from exercise bulimia. As Rollins writes in her debut memoir Famished, “My whole life was a ledger of deposits and withdrawals” — a relentless cycle of eating and working out compulsively to atone for what she had eaten or was going to eat.

My use of the word atone here is deliberate. Rollins’ disordered eating had a religious component; it was a kind of self-imposed penance. She was raised in the “purity culture” movement of a white evangelical Christian fundamentalist church in Appalachia. She was taught that her body was evil, that she must be “pretty,” that she must remain sexless before marriage (by quashing her desires), and that she was responsible for the sexual thoughts, feelings, and actions of the boys and men around her.

“Our bodies are a liability to our souls,” Rollins writes of women in purity culture. “Our eternal salvation is contingent upon our ability to maintain corporeal control.”

And maintain control she did — to the detriment of her mental and physical health.

Famished is a fast, heartbreaking read about the perfect storm of diet culture and purity culture and the deleterious effects of that storm on the lives of girls and women. It’s divided into three main parts: “Girlhood,” the lengthiest part; “Marriage”; and “Motherhood.” Chapters are short and read like personal essays.

In “Girlhood,” Rollins details micromanaging meals, calculating calories, and exercising obsessively by running or putting on workout videos. After chewing up powdered donuts then spitting them into the toilet, she’d complete several hundred sit-ups in bed at night… just in case.

“We must decrease so that He can increase,” a male pastor bellowed from his podium, and Rollins took him literally, praying, restricting, shrinking her body, then praying some more.

She developed scrupulosity, a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder characterized by excessive worry about one’s moral or religious standing. And she fully “bought into” the scripts she was fed: “If I controlled my appetites, I could control my world… if I made myself smaller, I would be better, safer.”

In “Marriage,” she describes her struggles with vaginismus, a common problem among women raised in purity culture, and her worries about pregnancy-related weight gain. Although she manages to exert some control over her illness, which waxes and wanes throughout early adulthood, her anxiety continues to flare up even after the births of her two sons.

A particularly stark encapsulation of Rollins’ eating disorder occurred when her youngest son was hospitalized for respiratory syncytial virus on the weekend she was supposed to run a race. Because of her son’s illness, she couldn’t run. As hospital staff put tubes down her baby’s throat and drew blood, all she could think about was the pasta dinner she’d had the night before. “That pasta… I can’t believe I ate that fucking pasta.” While her son slept, she escaped into the bathroom to exercise to workout videos streamed on her phone, shutting the door to hide what she was doing from hospital staff.

Toward the end of the book, in the section on “Motherhood,” Rollins engages briefly in a broader cultural conversation about diet and purity culture, trading the role of memoirist for that of journalist. She reads widely and reaches out to other women who’ve been similarly affected. I was intrigued by her references to thinness as a way to access power and of fatphobia as rooted in racism, and I would have welcomed a more substantive discussion of these topics.

What I will take away most from Famished, however, is the damage inflicted on girls and women by the white male evangelical leaders of what Rollins herself concedes are “imperfect,” “broken,” and “misogynistic” religious systems. Although Rollins expresses anger at herself, at her husband, and at God at various points throughout her memoir, it is church leaders who deserve the most blame, in my view, and it is church leaders who must be held to account.

After what appears to be a fair amount of soul-searching, Rollins has decided to remain in the church to challenge the system from within, to pay attention to young girls in need. But I wonder if it’s even possible to effect equality in a system that, according to its own design and teachings, promotes the opposite? As W. Edwards Deming has said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” A system is harming these girls; perhaps a new system should rise from its ashes.

NONFICTION
Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl
By Anna Rollins
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Published December 9, 2025