Description

“Ravishing and provocative.”-Olivia Laing *** “Stunning and powerful.”-Andre Aciman

The example of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who lived “a dog’s life,” sleeping, teaching, having sex in the public square, sets the tone for this extraordinary, genre-bending memoir. Posing crucial questions about what drives certain individuals to risk physical suffering in the name of freedom, Bite Your Friends also asks what we ourselves might learn from such examples to become braver, more authentic individuals.

From a Roman amphitheatre in the 4th century, where martyrs are fed to wild beasts, to the S&M leather bars of New York in the 1970s and the programmatic defiance of groups like Pussy Riot, this sinuous and illuminating mix of memoir and social history explores the lives of uncommonly brave men and women-saints, philosophers, artists-who have used their own wounded or stigmatized bodies to challenge society’s mores and entrenched power structures. Running through her narrative of the body militant is Eberstadt’s own story and the vivid story of her mother, a New York writer and socialite of the 1960s, whose illness-scarred body first led Eberstadt to seek connections between beauty, belief, and the truths taught through the body.

Publisher Review

“A stunning and powerful book. In it Fernanda Eberstadt describes the hardscrabble lives and death of militant souls, homosexuals, saints, philosophers, and despised others who refused to bow to what those around them called normalcy and truth. Their legacy and this work is the bite that cures.” * Andre Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name * “Ravishing and provocative, Bite Your Friends is in an invitation into bodily power as well as a history of resistance, deviance and refusal of all kinds.” * Olivia Laing, author of Crudo and The Lonely City * “Fernanda Eberstadt is blessed with more gifts than any one writer should be […]. Her prose is exuberantly, obscenely rich.” * Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters * “At once philosophical and narrative, comical and profound, nostalgic and angry, disarmingly vulnerable and seductively powerful, [Bite Your Friends] will enrich anyone’s understanding of the nuances that allow us to transmute suffering into wisdom, even joy.” * Andrew Solomon, author of Noonday Demon * “Thrilling, absorbing and true. It’s like having the best, most fascinating conversation: a book that you don’t so much read as inhabit. Bite Your Friends is simply extraordinary.” * Cressida Connolly, author of Bad Relations * “With a thrilling combination of erudition and wit, Fernanda Eberstadt takes us on a journey across decades, centuries, and millennia to explore the ways in which artists and activists have used the body as a site of political, religious, and personal resistance. Eberstadt unearths little known stories from antiquity and elegantly draws connections between these and contemporary examples, mapping a vast territory of ideas that are as captivating as they are convincing. Bite Your Friends is a knockout.” * Marisa Silver, author of Little Nothing * “I loved this book. Often funny, unsparing of self as of others, Bite Your Friends is fuelled by genuine curiosity about what leads some to discount physical pain and transform their harmed bodies into instruments of communication. This curiosity is joined by intelligence, kindness, and a precision of observation which makes Eberstadt’s singular subjects knowable and, occasionally (though that is not the point) likeable.” * Elizabeth Cook, author of Lux *