Paige West

“I finally started reading Feast by Hannah Howard. The book is beautiful and heart wrenching in its raw honesty. The first few chapters, about Hannah’s childhood and the ways in which her body becomes her enemy, cut so close to the bone that I had to put the book away several times because I could not read through the tears. She, with an ethnographer’s eye, details how girls come to hate themselves and there are moments in it where it feels like Hannah is writing my childhood along with her own. The next chapters, about her time at Columbia, make this a book that everyone who teaches university students should read. It reminded me that while we see them in our classrooms, we don’t actually see students and we don’t know them at all. Those chapters capture youth, joy, pain, and how NYC intertwines with all of that. I won’t say more but seriously people, go buy this book. It is breathtaking.
I’ve had the book for a while but wanted to be able to sit with it and think with it properly and not be distracted by teaching or research or anything else so I brought it on holiday with me.
I am so proud of Hannah. So proud.”