Not Hungry, Just Empty
I wonder what Joan and Eve would write about hunger and appetite if they were too victims of the endless scroll.
Eve Babitz and Joan Didion are not the same kind of writer. Although both of the same era and the same state (albeit different ends of California: Joan from Sacremento and Eve a native Angeleno), their way of commenting on their environments were totally polarised. Joan was removed. She wrote with distance. She was a perennial observer. Her now famous packing list from her essay The White Album is an exercise in blending in. “Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume,” she wrote. “in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of culture.” She was a journalist. If Joan was the storyteller, then Eve Babitz was the story. Joan would be at a party, watching, quiet, small, waif-like; Eve was the party, a buxom blonde storm. This is the girl who once wrote a note to the novelist Joseph Heller that simply read: “Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.”
Both love hosting and throwing dinner parties. But while Joan was rarely seen eating (she existed more on a diet of coffee and cigarettes), Eve had a voracious appetite. Where Joan was bird-like, Eve was full. You’d be fed well at Joan’s – apparently she liked to cook a beef wellington for forty and was known for her parsley salad. But at Eve’s, the food would be fun. A little off-piste. The energy would be wild. It’s not that I don’t love Joan – in fact, I’m probably more like her than I care to admit. Every always wants to be like Eve – hungry for life.
And while I would never suggest Joan was empty, these two writers popped into my head when I was thinking of my own appetite. And how it waxes and wanes according to the weather, the news, the perpetual uncertainty, the dark and lonely afternoons, the bright morning sun or the way my reflection looks in the mirror. How earlier this week, despite feeding myself, my body refused to feel fulfilled. How I wasn’t hungry, just empty.
How to feed an empty soul: eat and eat and eat but never feel satisfied. Trap yourself in the house and refuse to engage with others. Up your dosage of self-pity. Glare at yourself naked in the mirror. Scroll endlessly.
To be hungry is to be in search of something. Usually something that will bring you an experience. Often we’re hungry for pleasure or joy. But sometimes we can be hungry for pain or relief. But to be hungry is to be active – actively in want, in pursuit. To be empty is a passive existence. It is to be drain, not to drain yourself. It’s to feel deflated, as if someone has let all the air out of your tyres. It is the essence of defeat. To fill yourself up, you need to do exactly that. Fill yourself. An empty body cannot be filled by someone else. You must take care.
I often fear that all I write are meditations on sadness. In truth, like Didion, I often find it easier to report on the more morose elements of life. Babitz did her fair share of this, but it was shrouded in colour and excitement. Dig beneath the surface of a glamourous stay the Chateau Marmont and you’ll find a girl desperate to escape herself. This emptiness isn’t a daily affliction I face, but its existence is significantly more interesting to write about than hours upon hours of satisfaction. Although I could probably tell you more about the golden frittata from Italo that I gobbled down whilst walking to Oval station yesterday, oozing with egg, the shallots caramelised and sweet, the tenderstem broccoli crunchy, the slightest hint of cheese and plenty of salt. Or the way my mouth waters when I see butter bubble and hear rice crisp and watch the fat from a perfectly butchered chicken rise up when the cast iron comes out of the oven. This are moments where my hunger is palpable. Reminders of why I am so actively happy to be alive. When I channel Eve and take my softness in and run wild with glee and don’t stop in front of the mirror because I’m not here to observe myself, I’m here to live a life.
But earlier this week, for no good reason, I fed my emptiness dumplings and noodles (the usual order: spicy beef dan dan noodles and chilli-soaked prawn wontons) and it barely hit the sides. What would usually fill me up, both physically and emotionally, left a void in my stomach. It’s been a week of tearing down my body, of looking at how it’s changed and hating it for not being taut and firm and nipped in.
But then I listen to two podcasts on Joan and Eve, and I look back the photo of her playing chess, naked opposite Marcel Duchamp and I see parts of myself in that body, and while I respect Didion for her intellect, her clinical observations, her stark and unromantic view of her environment, her smallness makes me uncomfortable.
All of this has made me realise that we have to want to be full. We have to want to sate our appetites. To fill ourselves up. That hunger is perpetual, because we eat and experience, then we digest and forget, and to be constantly hungry is to want to do it all again, all of the time. I’m sorry Joan, but I don’t want to take the ice-cold diet coke, almonds and cucumber sandwiches. I’d rather have too many taquitos with Eve.
Taquitos are much better than heroin, it’s just that no one knows about them and heroin’s so celebrated.