Devouring the bonkbuster

I have written about how I always gravitated towards food scenes in the books of my childhood. However, there’s no embarrassment in admitting how influenced I was by what was known as the shopping and fucking novels (or bonkbusters) of the late seventies onwards.

How novelists wrote about food and appetite in the novels of the seventies and eighties offers an insight into changing sexual politics, written on the female body. As Stephen Brown wrote: “Virtually every figure in the books is an embodiment of the American Dream and a monument to the adage that it is necessary to suffer in order to succeed” and nothing makes this clearer than food and eating both in the context of domestic and private lives, and the workplace. Although Marilyn French's The Women's Room is not technically a bonkbuster, it is through the prism of food that French’s American Dream is refracted into a million pieces. As Mira stands at the sink and strings beans in the home she shares with her adolescent sons after she has left her husband, she loses herself in the moment, enjoying their company and the home she has created, fascinated and warmed by the image of herself in her sunny kitchen, preparing a meal for her family before sharply pulling herself up.

“She danced into the kitchen, unloaded her purchases, put beef bones in a great pot to simmer, and began to wash and chop vegetables. Sun was pouring through the kitchen windows. Outside, she heard small children playing … Peace cupped her heart and held it gently … It was beauty and peace, the child noises outside, the delicious simmering aroma of the soup, the fresh liquid smell of the string beans. Her home was humming, happy and bright, and Ben- sexy, exciting Ben- was coming at six. It was happiness.

“She brought herself upright. My God! She dropped the string beans, dried her hands, sank into a chair and lighted a cigarette. It was the American Dream, female version. Was she still buying it? She didn’t even like to cook; she resented marketing … But she still believed in it: the dream stood of the happy humming house. Why should she be so happy doing work that had no purpose, no end, while the boys were off playing and Ben was off doing work that would bring him success, work that mattered?

She got up and skimmed the broth, pondering the question, but she could not keep the joy out, it invaded her like the sun pouring over her head and arms.”

Mira’s string bean moment came to mind when the furore over Nigella Lawson’s How To Be a Domestic Goddess broke. Never mind the fact that Lawson never intended the title to be literal, what we see in this reaction is a hangover of second-wave unease with any activity associated with performative femininity even though the ability to cook and feed oneself (especially when we are cognizant of its politics) is an act of power. The hand that comfortably feeds itself rules its own world.

That act of power can be malign too. In books by Jacqueline Susann, Judith Krantz, Shirley Conran and Ruth Harris, time and time again, food is used to not only punish and chastise the self but also others. In the case of Krantz’s Scruples One and Scruples Two, the central character Billy Ikehorn has a deeply unhappy childhood which continues into adolescence. Poor, overweight Billy is unattractive on all levels until she moves away to Paris and embarks upon a programme of physical self-improvement. Only then is she rewarded with approval and, eventually, her first sexual relationship. Billy punishes herself with food and rewards herself with food and even though she becomes slim, wealthy and enviable and devours men instead, her iron control over her diet never waivers and her treats are rare and as precise as her self-denial:

“In the kitchen Billy’s chef, Jean-Luc, concealed his surprise at the appearance of his employer; twice a week he conferred with Miss Speilberg about menus for the week, but Billy rarely visited the kitchen, and never in her bathrobe. Billy asked him to … make her a dish she saved for very special moments: three slices of white toast covered thickly with Tiptree’s Little Scarlet strawberry jam and topped by carefully layered slices of very crisp bacon. This combination tasted like sweet and sour Chinese food for infants and was a masterpiece of empty calories.”*

In Scruples Two, we are introduced to Gigi, the stepdaughter of Billy’s husband. The expert chef that she is, Gigi nonetheless adopts the role of culinary ingenue when the household employs an attractive male head chef, asking him to give her cooking lessons. Gigi’s expertise will have been hard-won over time and, more importantly, outside of the domestic realm. Her ability to cook has greater currency, both literal and metaphorical, and in its dismantling, we see how threatening to men a professional, skilled woman can be when these skills involve the monetisation of traditional, performative femininity. Gigi goes on to seduce him and eventually the relationship founders because his ambitions do not include tying himself down to a private household kitchen. It is at this point that Gigi turns the tables on him, choosing to bake a genoise sponge cake and making him watch her lesson. I watched too and learned what happens when a young woman wipes her slate clean to get a man, losing a vital part of herself in the process, and then has to weaponise those skills to restore her sense of self.

From Dee Dee Grainger in Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough who exclaimed "Breakfast? Who eats Breakfast? Breakfast is for children”, the schoolgirls in Conran's Lace who used rolling pins stolen from the kitchen to pummel away their puppy fat to destroy what they saw as the effects of unbridled eating in their Swiss finishing school; Ginny from Wendy Perriam's Absinthe With Elevenses embarking on an affair which starts with prawns dripping in garlic and butter wolfishly devoured by her future lover whose Brobdingnagian appetites are in sharp contrast to her own, diminished as they are from years of marriage to a beige man; to Chris’s compulsive eating in the face of a sexless marriage and imminent affair in Rona Jaffe's After The Reunion, the messages could be confusing. They alternated feministic insights with the lingering aftermath of the fifties, the era of togetherness, where you landed a man by staying thin and glamorous, wearing pastel pink, fuzzy sweaters, and cone-stitched brassieres whilst turning out outrageous but homely meals. These girls and women of a certain era had their femininity moulded as tightly as a caterpillar in its chrysalis, whether it be literal (girdles) or the more longitudinal effects of peer pressure and a myriad of social rules on the meeting and keeping of men and the management of the male sex drive, marriage, and housekeeping. ('Gracious living' was something female students at Radcliffe had to attend in their first year.)

Contrast two of the main characters in Ruth Harris’s Decades: Evelyn who came of age in the forties, married a wildly unfaithful man and bore one daughter called Joy who came of age in the sixties and rejected everything her mother stood for. Evelyn cooks every evening regardless of who is home and does not have a career. She does not understand why Joy, who has a Bloomingdale’s charge card and access to everything she could want, shoplifts luxury food. The practical, homely and domesticated Evelyn knows her way around a kitchen but founders outside of the home. Joy rails against home and takes full advantage of the sexual freedoms available to her but lacks the domestic practicality to shoplift the tin opener she needs to get into the cans of food she has stolen: she is both a victim and aggressor in the sixties capitalist boom whereby the female body gets to both consume and be consumed.

I know Germain Greer pointed out in The Female Eunuch that “romantic fiction is the opiate of the supermenial [which] … sanctions drudgery, physical incompetence and prostitution,” but on rereading these novels I think the truth is more nuanced. These women were forging new paths and the fact that they were not always successful in this was oddly reassuring. Far from sedative in their effects, their initial reading acted more like a shot of speed and even now, in my fifties, their messages continue to resonate in the context of my own exciting and imperfect-eating life.

* I have made Billy's sandwich and it is excellent. You should too.

Reading list:

Rona Jaffe: The Best of Everything / Class Reunion / After the Reunion
Shirley Conran: Lace
Ruth Harris: Decades / A Self-Made Woman
Judith Krantz: Princess Daisy / Scruples One / Scruples Two / I'll Take Manhattan
Jacqueline Susann: Once is Not Enough / Valley of the Dolls / Dolores
Marilyn French: The Women's Room.
Judy Bloom: Wifey
Wendy Perriam: Absinthe For Elevenses
June Flaum Singer: The Debutantes
Erin Pizzy: The Watershed

(Still from the film 'Once Is Not Enough' by Jacqueline Susann: Paramount 1974)