A painful, powerful, and ultimately enriching account of what it feels like to be young, confused, and controlled by food.

Adolescence is a time full of pitfalls for teenage girls. Many escape relatively unscathed; some -- unable to cope successfully with the pressures exerted by family, school, and the media -- develop eating disorders. Marianne Apostolides was one of those girls. She became anorexic at the age of fourteen and struggled for the next ten years with anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia.

In this courageous work, Apostolides recreates the years in which she felt she could control her life only by controlling her diet. Insecure, unable to communicate with her parents, and driven to achieve at school, she initially found relief in the structure of calorie-counting and schedules. When the constant dieting became too much for her body to handle, she began to binge, and then to binge and purge. Her world defined by food, Apostolides would battle throughout high school, college, and adulthood to confront the deeper issues that compelled her to hurt herself again and again.

This is a book about a young woman who did not know how to cope with her feelings, and who, through therapy, was able to find the road to recovery at last. Absorbing and honest, hers is an important story of anguish, frustration, and, ultimately, triumph.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. VOLUPTUOUS PLEASURE: THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WRITING LIFE is a collection of nonfiction whose title states that nonfiction does not exist. These stories, by acclaimed author Marianne Apostolides, are sensuous and smart, ambiguous but incisive in their truths. VOLUPTUOUS PLEASURE will take you inside brothels and bedrooms, kitchens and consciousness; it will seduce you along the limits of nonfiction, making you question the veracity of anything you've ever read--or even experienced.

Because fear can transform into confidence, recklessness, the kind of power you can't imagine until you're inside it. And then, once you've felt it, you can't feel alive when it's gone. Sophrosyne. You understood this feeling. I know you did, though you never said it. I saw it, instead, on your face when you danced. Sophrosyne is one of only four virtues identified by Socrates - four traits which, if lived deeply, define who we are as human beings. But sophrosyne is a concept our culture has long forgotten. ""Self-restraint,' 'self-control,' 'modesty,' 'temperance' - none of these terms expresses the essence of the word. In this provocative new novel about desire and restraint in a digital age by acclaimed author Marianne Apostolides, 21-year-old Alex is consumed by the elusive problem of sophrosyne for reasons he cannot share with others. While Alex's philosophy professor believes studying it will help shed light on the malaise of our era, Alex hopes it will release him from his darkly disturbing relationship with his mother. As he attempts to uncover his mother's truth, Alex is drawn inside an amorphous, indefinable undercurrent of love and violation. Only through his lover, Meiko, does Alex open into a new understanding of sophrosyne, with all its implications. Reminiscent of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, Sophrosyne asks readers to surrender themselves to the book's logic and language. Infused with a sensuality balanced by its intellect, Sophrosyne reads like "the music's rhythm... soft like wax and supple, warm," pulsing through your veins.

"Breathe on four. Define your terms. What is this desire?"
Attuned to a body in motion, "Swim" pulls the reader beneath the logic of prose, into the eroticism of language itself. The arcing rhythm of a body breathing a woman marking her birth as she swims in a pool sustains the unique and hypnotic language that becomes the medium through which this story moves.
"Swim" entwines the present with those past actions and consequences that have brought Kat to the Greek mountain village where her father was born. She swims laps while her fourteen-year-old daughter reclines on a chaise lounge, poolside, reading a book. Without ever leaving the pool we enter discrete scenes with Kat's parents, daughter, husband and lover. On entering each point in this history, Kat reveals an undertow of sound, rhythm and words in their rippling meanings. Each new lap moves Kat closer to her impending decision: whether she will leave her husband. But the deeper tension within this innovative novel derives from the writing itself its vital urgency that extends the possibilities of narrative beyond the fixed and into the fluid.