We're All Starving

I don't make light of the term "starving," given the hunger in the world. It's true I've used the colloquialism, "I'm starving," to mean "I'm really hungry," but that was more when I was younger and not thinking in the larger context. I try not to do that now.

But I was struck by the short story "Starving," inside the novel-in-stories Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, when Olive says to a young woman who is truly starving, from anorexia nervosa, "We're all starving," meaning emotionally. Or spiritually. We are all hungry for something we lack.

"Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight?" she asks the young woman, who gets it. Sympathy and empathy are achieved.

Looking for art to pair with Kristine Snodgrass's poems for the current feature at Escape Into Life, I was struck with how Lee Price is dealing with women's relationship with food in her paintings. Here is her EIL feature, with an artistic statement about that.

And the Snodgrass poems also have something wonderfully obsessive about them, with a Gertrude Stein-like repetitiveness, and an odd mix of calm and chaos, of the sort Lee Price is creating, too, in her paintings. What a lucky match this time.

Above, Lemon Meringue, by Lee Price. Below, Strawberry Shortcake III.