A groundbreaking debut memoir that examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites. 

Raised Baptist in an insular Appalachian community, Anna Rollins learned early that among the world’s many dangers, her own body loomed large. So, she dedicated herself to keeping it small—strictly controlling her calories and exercising to the point of exhaustion while murmuring some version of the prayer: “We must decrease so that He can increase.” 

She was picking up a similar mantra online: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” To be a Christian woman was to be thin and chaste, sidestepping any pleasures of the flesh that would cause you—or a brother in Christ—to stumble into sin. But thinness was also a sign of virtue to the outside world. By day, Rollins attended schools and churches where male pastors and older women policed female bodies. By night, she scrolled websites and chat rooms where dieting itself inspired a kind of religious devotion. 

Despite Rollins’s piety, anger grew in her chest. “I was all hunger, all need. I was ashamed. But I was also proud. I knew that I was also physical, embodied, a person with desires, despite how frequently I was told that I was not.” 

Still, it wasn’t until she found herself obsessing over how she would burn off the pasta she ate for dinner while watching her infant son struggle to breathe in the ICU that Rollins could admit to herself the extent to which she’d bought into the false promises of both purity and diet culture: That if she controlled her appetites, she would be righteous. That if she made herself smaller, she would be safe.

Blending memoir, research, and reporting, Famished untangles these lies and encourages women to reclaim their appetites for life, love, and food, both physical and spiritual. Interweaving her own story of disordered eating and sexual dysfunction with those of other women she interviews, Rollins discovers a sisterhood committed to finding freedom from body shame. Along the way she rewrites her own body’s story to include a purpose much greater than its size or parts or the roles she fills as daughter, wife, and mother, a body well-loved by her and beloved by God.

Learn more about who FAMISHED was written for over on my Substack.

Editorial Reviews

“Famished is a visceral unveiling of the secret lives of Christian girls. Evangelicalism has a long history of the ‘skinny white woman,’ and Rollins’s bold memoir not only traces the roots but also exposes the sexualized purity culture that teaches girls to fear men, their own bodies, and especially anything beyond their control. The high cost of religious scrupulosity and institutionalized religious diet culture is evident on every page of this remarkable debut.”
―Tia Levings, author of the New York Times bestseller, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy

“While others write coming-of-age memoirs about discovery and freedom, Anna Rollins articulates the grief of years spent learning to disappear in a way that was sold as holiness. Famished honors generations of women―but especially Millennial women―who built our entire sense of self around becoming smaller, a pattern that reappears throughout our lives. This is a beautiful and haunting meditation on what cannot be rewritten and what might still be reclaimed.”
―Anna Gazmarian, author of Devout: A Memoir of Doubt

“Famished is a visceral account of the work it takes to release the chokehold of bodily compulsion, religiously inspired and otherwise. It’s also a joyful rendering of the beauty that can blossom even in the midst of that lifelong work. Anna Rollins has crafted a nuanced exploration of desire that I couldn’t put down. I devoured Famished in two sittings.”
―Kelly Foster Lundquist, author of Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage

“Anna Rollins challenges us to consider what it means to believe that our bodies were made good and what aspects of culture―Christian and secular―we need to reconsider to live into that belief. She does it by offering her own experience as a way to trace the intricate connections between purity culture and diet culture and how they work together to constrict women’s bodies and souls. Many readers will recognize their own struggles in hers and will appreciate her clear thought and wise insight in working through them. Famished points us toward the possibility of bodies, desires, and faith that are more supple, more capacious, and more full.”
―Lynne Gerber, author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America

“In her vital contribution to the purity culture conversation, Rollins reveals a world in which the body absorbs everything religion tells us is bad about women. She takes us on a journey through the ways that she and other women learned to dominate, deny, and bully their bodies into small, quiet, controlled submission to earn the love of God―and the healing that is available when we realize we are lovable exactly as we are, body and all.”
―Linda Kay Klein, author of Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free

Press

Finding Spiritual Strength in Women’s Voices on Publishers Weekly

Podcasts

Fresh Reads with Anna Rollins on A Fresh Story