Eve's Apple

by Jonathan Rosen

Book Overview

Ruth Simon is beautiful, smart, talented, and always hungry. As a teenager, she starved herself almost to death, and though outwardly healed, inwardly she remains dangerously obsessed with food. For Joseph Zimmerman, Ruth's tormented relationship with eating is a source of deep distress and erotic fascination. Driven by his love for Ruth, and haunted by his own secrets, Joseph sets out to unravel the mystery of hunger and denial. This gripping debut...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312424361
• ISBN13: 9780312424367
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 309 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

"....anorexics do like to read about themselves."

this line summed up why i bought this book. we really do have a tendency to want to read about ourselves haha this book is really incredible and in all of my ED-centered books ive never read anything quite like this. the author really captures not just what its like to live with an eating disorder, but thoughts of a partner of someone with an eating disorder. as i was reading this i couldnt help but recognize a dynamic that my husband and i have at home. it really brought to light things that i dont think my husband have addressed, and really helped me see things in my life in a different light. basically this was a lifechanging read for me, i think im going to ask my husband to read it as well.

eating disorders and painful relationships

This is truly a story of the other side, the family of those who suffer with anorexia and bulimia. I have been a sufferer for many years and I felt like I could relate to Ruth. Joseph seemed at times to like her disorder and it drives the reader to continue reading as to why. He is the restless hero. He wants to save her but at the same time he is in awe of her very being. At times I was left wondering if Joseph suffered an eating disorder of some sort because his thought processes were disjointed and he did not make the reader believe that he thought it was wrong. This is a love story about standing by someone you care about. A reviewer wrote of sexual perversions. Yes, I agree. The mind of an anorexic woman can be full of distorted body images and self-loating. It can drive sex out of the relationship and leave the male feeling left out. I think this is what the author was trying to get at. Sex is a connection with mind and body. With eating disorders you can connect with one of the other but it's hard to let someone know both. Joseph wants to be connected with both Ruth's mind and body. The images are very powerful, from throwing popcorn to the blends of coffee. I recommend this to anyone coping with the disorder but not to those in recovery as it will be triggering.

a wonderful book...

Reviewed by Jennifer Leblanc for Small Spiral Notebook The cover of the novel Eve's Apple shows the silhouette of a slim woman's body with a fingerprint pattern. Inside, Jonathan Rosen shows us that just as every fingerprint is different, so is ever anorexic's struggle with the disorder. Ruth and Joseph are Columbia grads living together in New York. Ruth's mother, a self-involved film scholar, and her remarried, benefactor father have been absent from Ruth's life since sending her off to boarding school as a teenager, where her anorexia developed. Joseph, through whose eyes of love and rescue we see Ruth, is still fighting his own demon- the guilt of his sister's suicide that he believes he could've prevented. At first Joseph limits his involvement to watching Ruth's eating habits and reading her diary. When she begins binging and purging he delves deeper into the mystery of anorexia to be her personal savior. Instead of going to the source, Ruth, he goes to the library to read every book on eating disorders, however clinically or culturally dense they may be. But his research doesn't provide any answers for him- it only sparks more questions: But why were women the shock troops in this war against human nature? Were they more bound to reproductive nature and therefore in more conspicuous revolt against it? And why, if repressive Victorian society had forced submerged appetites into unhealthy irruptions, did the sexual revolution of the 1960's in America unleash even more cases of anorexia? Dr. Flek, a friend of Ruth's mother and former psychoanalyst tries to lead Joseph to the truth, and back to Ruth. After Joseph gets lost in the emotionless theories, Flek tells him, The language of food. The Primitive language that truly shapes us and that we can never escape. That is the language you will have to learn if you are going to understand her... learn the language of the body. The language of blood and bone and appetite. The body is our one great book. After Ruth follows Joseph to the library and watches him research, she begins to trust him the way she never could with anyone else but always wanted. First she has to make Joseph see her again, not the disease, as he is still a frustrated, clueless outsider. Only Ruth can set him straight and tell him that when you are anorexic "You're not thinking. Your body's going Food Food Food, and your brain's going No No No." At the heart of this book is a man who loves the inside and out of a woman who doesn't know how to love herself. Eating disorders remain a haunting mystery, even to those who are so close, but Rosen shows us that love never hurts.

eve's broken

I read this book after having read a countless number of ..., cliche, ...books that didn't know how to depict an accurate version of an anorexic/bulimic. I thought it was a very well written book that really shows how people think when in situations like this. my husband and i went through so many similar things. it was just... lovely.

A striking debut

I have re-read this book many times, as it fascinates me for both personal and aesthetic reasons. Having endured 14 years as a bulimic/anorexic (recently recovered), I have found most fictional depictions of eating disorders to be shallow efforts that feed into the fallacious cultural stereotypes (the afflicted women are trying to revert to childhood; they are getting revenge on an inadequate/inattentive parent; etc.). Rosen's novel doesn't necessarily depart from some of these stereotypes-- its eating disordered heroine, Ruth, is an upper middle class product of an overbearing, narcissistic mother-- but its sensitivity and thoroughness is remarkably admirable. Rosen has clearly done his homework regarding the etiology of the disease, and there are stretches of writing which become a bravura performance; Joseph's interaction with the charismatic Dr. Flek, for example, and the way this leads to the revelation of Joseph's own obssession, are accomplished with an almost 19th-century precision. My one disappointment was Ruth, whose childlike neediness (alternated with thinly veiled hostility) bothered me; I would have preferred a depiction of a woman emotionally emancipated from her family and attempting to be stronger for her own sake, yet still, tragically, failing. Nevertheless, I recommend this book for all readers-- and especially those with a vested interest in the psychopathology of eating disorders and those whom eating disorders affect, both directly or peripherally.

A wonderful journey

Rosen uses a modern-day malady--at least we begin to understand eating disorders in these modern days--to explore the hungers and passions that drive his characters. What we learn about the mind of children of immigrants helps us to understand the worlds of our mothers and fathers. The climatic scene that leaves the protagonist lost and wandering through the barely recognizable streets of his grandparents' lower east side New York, now changed by a new generation of immigrant with new hungers, still haunts me.