Pamela Moses | A Message to My Younger Self

When I was a young girl, after our dreaded annual visit to the pediatrician, my mother would take my brother and me to the gourmet bakery nearby, allowing each of us to choose a pastry, something sweet and filling enough to erase the morning’s unpleasantness. Food was important in our home. Meals involved some ceremony and were prepared in generous portions. Food was for enjoying, I understood, but it was also comfort and nurture and affection.

When I left for college at eighteen, I was suddenly responsible for taking care of myself for the first time. I was thrilled by a world of brand-new possibilities. But with this independence came new pressures—challenges with boyfriends and roommates and choices for my future. I had learned that food was the best way to calm anxiety. Temporarily, at least, it seemed to soothe any pangs of loneliness or self-doubt. So I would eat until my stomach ached from fullness, then for the next few days, to avoid gaining weight, would restrict my calories and measure every meal. This felt, at first, a way of managing my life, of controlling both my body and my emotions; but it did not take long for me to understand that this cycle—one I seemed unable to break— had begun to control me. It stole increasingly more of my energy and time. It was a secret that lived below the surface of all I did, eroding my confidence, my very sense of self.

Now, years later, I have found a healthy relationship with food, but the road from there to here was long, and the path full of bumps and missteps. Although I am not sure I knew it as I began to write, THE APPETITES OF GIRLS is everything my younger, more uncertain self needed to hear, needed to believe. If I had known the friends from the book, how I would have identified with each one of them—Ruth and Francesca, Setsu and Opal—and with their struggles: to find themselves, to win their battles with self-doubt and self-destructive tendencies.

Writing the journeys of these four women, was a way of making sense of my own. “These struggles are part of what it means to be human,” Ruth says, “struggles with our own natures, often undeclared, as if unnoticed by those who know us, even by ourselves.” And I think that this is right. But what the women in THE APPETITES OF GIRLS also learn is that these weaknesses can be overcome. For each one of these friends, finding her way in the world means eventually discovering that though she may have been knocked down by life’s circumstances or even by her own misguided choices, the truest part of her is the part that is strong. She is strong enough to triumph over what has damaged her, strong enough to claim wholeness. This is the message of THE APPETITES OF GIRLS. How this would have helped me if I had known it long ago. And the understanding of this truth is my deep hope for girls and women everywhere.

About AUTHOR

Pamela Moses grew up in New Jersey. She attended Brown University and received a master's in English from Georgetown. After graduating, she moved to Manhattan to teach English at a girls' school. She now lives outside of New York City with her husband and two children. THE APPETITES OF GIRLS is her first novel.

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About THE APPETITES OF GIRLS

For the audience that made COMMENCEMENT a New York Times bestseller comes a novel about women making their way in the world.

Self-doubting Ruth is coddled by her immigrant mother, who uses food to soothe and control. Defiant Francesca believes her heavy frame shames her Park Avenue society mother and, to provoke her, consumes everything in sight. Lonely Opal longs to be included in her glamorous mother’s dinner dates—until a disturbing encounter forever changes her desires. Finally, Setsu, a promising violinist, staves off conflict with her jealous brother by allowing him to take the choicest morsels from her plate—and from her future.

College brings the four young women together as suitemates, where their stories and appetites collide. Here they make a pact to maintain their friendships into adulthood, but each must first find strength and her own way in the world.