This review is a little bit late, since Hungry came out in September of last year. However, I haven’t seen too many posts about it around the fashion blogosphere, so I thought I’d chime in with my two cents on the book!
As you probably know or can tell by the photo, Hungry is the autobiographical story of Crystal Renn, a very popular “plus size” model (even though she’s a size 12, about the same size as the average American woman, she’s still considered plus). The book tells the story of how she got into the modelling world and how she accepted her size – it’s kind of a nice twist on the “fat girl loses weight” Cinderella-style story.
Short version: if you’re interested in health at every size and the modelling world, buy it (or check it out from your library, like me!). It’s a good read, although not anything life changing.
Long version:
The book tells a story you probably already know, at least in part. Model is found in small town. Model loses a lot weight in a dysfunctional manner to get to the Big Apple. Model has a “moment” and realizes that the side effects (including fainting on the street) are not worth it, and gets back to a healthy size. The next part is fairly unusual for the modelling world, though: model then starts having several times more success than she ever had as a “straight size” model.
The book starts off in the introduction, with an overview of her life thus far, and food-for-thought statistics are sprinkled throughout:
I was hardly alone in my descent into weight obsession and madness. Five to ten million Americans have eating disorders. A 2005 study found that over half of all teenage girls and nearly a third of teenage boys use unhealthy methods to try to be thin … Even women without clinical disorders spend a heartbreaking amount of time obsessing about their weight, hating their bodies, and thinking that if they were only thinner, their lives would be richer, fuller, happier.
Marjorie Ingall is listed on the cover, and I have no idea if she was a co-author, an editor, a fact-sourcer, or most likely (from the way it reads), a bit of all three. The book reads like it’s mostly Crystal, at least judging by interviews I’ve seen with her. To be honest, the prose is a bit clunky at times, and I think that if it was entirely ghost written it would’ve read better! Overall, the writing style isn’t incredibly smooth, but it’s not terrible, either.
The first half and then some details how she got to the breaking point, where she decided that she couldn’t keep treating her body the way she was. Some of the back story was interesting, and some of it was less so. One thing I did find a bit annoying was constant references to her future eating disorder when talking about her childhood – I’m not sure what the point was, the fact that Crystal used to be anorexic is fairly well known, no suspense or secrets there!
The second half of the book talks about her journey to treating her body with kindness. I expected it to be a lot fluffier than it was – she does get a bit “love your body and everything good will follow!” at times, which I can agree with to some extent, but I don’t think loving your body will lead to multimillion dollar contracts for everyone out there.
At any rate, she talks a lot about issues that I expected her to gloss over entirely or just treat differently than she actually did. From non white models:
The world of modeling is only the real world writ smaller and skinnier. Though our culture has come a long way in terms of accepting diversity, we’re not there yet. It’s no coincidence that the bodies on runways are pretty darn white as well as very darn thin – the normative ideal is still white and skinny.
To natural thinness:
A researcher named Ethan Sims at the University of Vermont set out to deliberately make thin mice fat. He couldn’t do it. … So he force fed them. (Sucks to be a laboratory mouse.) They gained weight, but their metabolism also sped up, and they gained much less than they should have according to the food they were eating. As soon as he stopped force-feeding them, they dropped the weight. Sims tried a similar experiment with humans, hiring college students with no food or eating issues and no family history of obesity to gain weight. They just couldn’t, no matter how much they ate. Their metabolisms, too, compensated for the extra food.
She goes on to detail a similar experiment Sims conducted with prisoners (because their physical activity was limited). Four to six months of ten thousand calories a day was enough to make some of the prisoners increase their weight by 20 to 25 percent.
Also mentioned is the role of the weight loss industry in the obesity scare:
Everyone loves to trumpet statistics about how much fatter Americans have gotten in recent years. About 65 percent of Americans are classified as overweight or obese. But almost no one points out that 29 million people became overweight overnight in 1998, when the government changed its body mass index’s “overweight” category from 27 to 25. (Incidentally, seven of the nine members of the government’s obesity task force were directors of weight-loss clinics – making thousands more people instantly “overweight” was great for them!)
And the illogic of dieting (dieting the way most people do it; not just eating healthier for the sake of eating healthy), since 50 million Americans go on diets every year, but only 5-10 percent lose weight and keep it off for at least five years.
Anyways – enough statistics. They’re scattered throughout the book, worked in well enough with the story that it very rarely seems like a sidetrack to mention them. A lot of the information isn’t exactly news to me, but I’m sure it would be to many readers.
The book is a fascinating insight into the fashion world and the mind of one model. Crystal has a pretty good sense of humor about it all as well – she’s inside the fashion industry, but fully realizes how ridiculous it can be. She does have an annoying habit of describing what she was wearing in a particular photoshoot in a very detailed fashion, i.e. (made up quote) “I posed for Harper’s Bazaar in August 2009, wearing this gorgeous chiffon dress by so-and-so with heavy beaded detailing that reflected the light” – but there aren’t photos in the book of all the outfits she describes. Which I suppose would be pretty hard to do – but I wish there could have either been more photos, or less detailed descriptions, since they were the most distracting of the asides.
All in all, Hungry is a great combination of the personal & the informative. I’d recommend it to people interested in getting an insider’s glimpse into the fashion world, learning more about health at every size, or just curious about Crystal.
One more quote, just because I like the spirit of it:
It’s essential to see that size is only one of the battlefronts. Those of us who want to see more plus-size women represented in fashion should also be supporting the use of more women of color and age. There’s strength and solidarity in numbers. Diversity helps us all. And thin people are not the enemy. When we gripe at other women for being too thin (“Eat a sandwich!”) as well as too fat, we allow ourselves to be distracted from the real issue. We have to change the culture be rewarding and applauding diversity in all its forms, not by vilifying individual women. We women are a lot more powerful if we see ourselves as fighters on the same side.
Have you read Hungry? What’d you think of it?
