Labor of love? Cooking,chaos,and consumption in Clara Sereni's Keeping House

In Clara Sereni's (1946–2018) semi-autobiographical (cook)book Casalinghitudine (1987), later translated as Keeping House: A Novel in Recipes (2005), elliptical and non-chronological recollections are evoked by a variety of recipes that mark crucial moments in the narrator's life. The book is divided into eight chapters dedicated to various flavors, foods groups, and dinner courses. At first glance, Sereni portrays herself as a patient and perceptive housewife who learns how to read a room and cook accordingly. She describes her individuality and imagination in the kitchen as an adolescent, and later she depicts the pride and power she derives from her duties as a housewife. However, if we peer between the cracks, what emerges is a picture of a woman who struggles to convince herself of her worth as daughter, wife, mother, and working professional. Undoubtedly, cooking is one of Sereni's chosen means of communication and self-starvation is another. ¹ Food speaks volumes about the challenges she faces as a woman navigating the private, patriarchal sphere as well as the public, capitalist one at a crucial time when the Women's Movement was gaining momentum in Italy. ² Akin to most eating disorder narratives, at heart Sereni's work is an “[auto]biography of belonging” that revisits and unravels the complex social dynamics of her past (Warin, 2009: ch. 4), “relationships that were never static but, like any social connections, were constantly shifting and transforming …. places where her identity was performed, constructed, and deconstructed in multiple ways” (Warin, 2009: ch. 8). In the same way Sereni's identity is not fixed in time, nor is the trajectory of her eating disorder, the nature of which ebbs and flows fluidly throughout her life. Yet, despite the vicissitudes of her erratic relationship to food, her identity is inextricably entwined with the act of cooking during all phases of her development.

In many of Sereni's memories, she endeavors to influence others through her cooking. In particular, she spends much emotional and physical energy organizing meals in order to appeal to male company, namely her father, husband, and son. As a child, Sereni learns to associate food with love, and she happily prepares meals alongside her adult caretakers, seemingly the closest she comes to the warmth of a parental figure. In the introduction to Keeping House, translators Giovanna Miceli Jeffries and Susan Briziarelli note that “Sereni does not make it a secret that perhaps she did not feel cared for as she was growing up and that she always craved affection and cuddling” (Sereni, 2005: 17). Her biological mother passed away when she was a child, and although she is fond of her stepmother, their shared lack of appetite is merely what binds them. Consequently, it is through cooking in the company of her Jewish relatives that Sereni derives most of her emotional nourishment. Understandably, as an adult she turns to the culinary arts as a vital expression of creativity and care.

Food preparation and housewifery are integral components of Sereni's life that she deems productive and worthy of her labor. Yet, her self-portrayal presents a dichotomy; on the one hand, she willingly tends to the needs of others and, on the other, she explicitly draws attention to her dire bouts of bulimarexia amidst lighthearted accounts of cooking. ³ It is in her autobiographical writing that Sereni gives voice to the unspeakable. As Smart and Wegner (1999: 474) note, “People who have a stigma that can be hidden—a concealable stigma—may be highly motivated to engage in a deliberate effort to conceal the stigma.” As a reflective adult, however, Sereni is not afraid to bring her disorder to light. Indeed, she was one of the earliest Italian authors to explicitly use the term anorexia in her writing (Calamita, 2015). Yet, although Sereni only refers to her experience of anorexia and bulimia in passing—the origins of which are complex and multifactorial—her eating disorder is rich in meaning that echoes throughout Keeping House.

Sereni's complicated relationship to food reflects an inner state of turmoil that has been noted by more than a few scholars. In “Food and Subjectivity in Clara Sereni's Casalinghitudine,” Giuliana Menozzi (1994) explores the narrator's expression of autonomy and dependence, as communicated through her relationship to food preparation and the home environment. In particular, she focuses on the implications of the absent (deceased) mother. In “Consuming Women and Animals in Clara Sereni's Casalinghitudine,” David Del Principe (1999) looks at womanhood through the lens of ecofeminism to elucidate how both women and animals are oppressed by patriarchal society. He relies of the seminal work of ecofeminist Carol Adams (1990) to illustrate how the dishes the protagonist prepares represent a feminist discourse. In “Anorexic Symptoms in Clara Sereni's Casalinghitudine,” Ioana Raluca Larco (2019) examines how Sereni's relationship to food helps her to “reaffirm her subjectivity” in her manifold roles beyond the father-daughter relationship (Larco, 2019: 200). Additionally, she explores how Sereni employs food as a means to reembrace her Jewish roots. In “Around the Table: Gender and Generational Conflict in Clara Sereni's Autobiographical Writing,” Maria Grazia Scrimieri (2020) analyzes the significance of food as a means of social engagement and belonging. In this article, I focus on Sereni's complex relationship to food, family, and freedom as she transitions from childhood, in the wake of the Second World War, to parenthood, on the heels of the Vietnam War. First, I illustrate how Sereni's account of adolescent bulimarexia in relationship to her father problematizes the mainstream eating disorder theory of the 1970s and 1980s, which casts blame on mothers while largely overlooking the role of fathers in the etiology of the young woman's eating disorder. ⁴ Menozzi (1994: 222) enquires, “But where is the mother in Casalinghitudine? Apparently she is not as significant as the father, whose presence seems overwhelming.” The lack of a stable maternal figure in Sereni's youth allows for a unique analysis of the father figure and the effect he has on her psychosocial development. ⁵ Finally, I suggest that as an adult Sereni is spread thin in her conflicting roles as housewife and employee, and thus she struggles to negotiate the opposing demands imposed upon her. Consequently, Sereni experiences an eating disorder relapse. However, as an adult her anorexia is of a highly different nature. It no longer stems primarily from volatile familial dynamics, but rather it is triggered by the larger social and cultural context of the 1970s, a time when the Italian feminist movement was arguably at its peak. In essence, I show how Sereni's eating disorder is shaped and reshaped over time, namely in line with a shifting patriarchal system.

In the narrator's earliest memories as a child, she associates food with power. She recounts how her stepmother always served her the best part of the salad: “When we lived in the house on Viale XXI Aprile, to me salad meant the small lettuce heart. The king's morsel, awarded to me, if not exactly as a sign of preference, at least as one of distinction” (Sereni, 2005: 100). Yet, once her younger sister is born, Sereni is replaced as lady of the table: “Deposed from my throne, I would eat only if forced” (Sereni, 2005: 100). Even as a child, she employs starvation as a vehicle to express discontent. It is when her sense of security seems to be slipping through her fingers that disordered eating makes her feel as if she were in control. As psychotherapist Marilyn Lawrence (2008) points out, it is not the body the anorexic seeks to control through rejecting food, a view upheld by psychoanalyst Hilde Bruch (1974), but rather it is her mind she sets out to control: “There are certain thoughts and ideas so repellent to her that she seeks to create a ‘special’ state of mind in which they are simply impossible” (Lawrence, 2008: 42). According to Lawrence (2008: 42), these disturbing thoughts are primarily linked to sexuality, as well as to “development, change, growth, and creativity.” In a similar vein, she views bulimia as the sufferer's attempt to control her internal world. Sereni's bulimarexia provides relief from the growing pains of adolescence and serves as a means for her to cope with the strain of trying to please her father. ⁶ In recent years, more research has been dedicated to understanding the role fathers play in the etiology of eating disorders. Ceri J Jones et al. (2006: 327) conclude that “paternal rejection” can be detrimental to a young woman, and it plays an instrumental role in her eating disorder psychopathology. Daughters who are not accepted by their father tend to feel flawed and ashamed. In turn, their sense of inadequacy may feed their unhealthy relationship to food. In line with this reasoning, throughout Keeping House Sereni struggles to convince herself of her worth, as her self-esteem is commensurate with satisfying her father's high standards.

Sereni's relentless effort to achieve excellence is reflected in her rigorous cooking and household routine as well as in her slender body. Anthropologist Carole M Counihan underscores:

Contemporary anorexics attempt to achieve perfection through self-control and thinness. They receive only pitying recognition from family, friends, and medical professionals, and they may die unless they find a path to the self-esteem, sense of control, and autonomy they so desperately seek through fasting.

Undoubtedly, feelings of self-loathing are commonly expressed by people navigating eating disorder recovery. One of Bruch’s (1978: 127) patients maintains that the core of her illness stems from negative self-perception; she perceives her weight issue as a mere “smokescreen” that conceals deep-seated suffering and insecurity. It is noteworthy that all of her patients come from upper-middle-class homes. Yet, despite their relatively privileged position, they struggle to cope with deficient family dynamics. In particular, they desire autonomy, are groomed to be polite and accommodating, and their parents­—often overbearing—tend to have high expectations of them. It may be difficult to comprehend why young women who are intellectually and materially pampered experience such dire emotional strife. However, as one patient succinctly put it, “If you are given much, much is expected of you” (Bruch, 1978: 25). Problematically, however, Bruch primarily frames the mother as a domineering figure who has the propensity to impose her will on her daughter, thus causing her to feel out of control and unable to take initiative. She focuses her analysis on mothers who “[keep their] children so close that they have to fight to get free of her” (Bruch, 1978: 134). It is significant that Sereni's experience contrasts starkly with much of the theory Bruch sets forth. Most poignantly, deeply entrenched feelings of inadequacy, linked to her eating disorder, largely stem from her volatile relationship with the demanding man of the house.

The dynamics of Sereni's relationship with her father are best exemplified via food. As an adolescent, while the maid is away on vacation, she is charged with the chore of preparing dinner. As such, she sets out to prove that she is a worthy cook: “I wanted to demonstrate, (I don't know to whom: my father, my mother, or whomever) that I was able to cook well, even with no fat” (Sereni, 2005: 71). On her first attempt, she decides to make chicken in salt. As Sereni holds her breath, her father tastes the dish and evaluates that it is decent. Yet, his tepid assessment is served slowly, like a three-course meal. Sereni (2005: 72) expresses:

“But …”—he kept on, holding up his fork, and that “but” was suspended in mid-air like Damocles’ sword, the habitual critique assigned to my mother's culinary efforts as well —“but something is missing … I have it: perhaps you should have put some crushed garlic on it …” I hated those “buts.”

On the third day, Sereni prepares stuffed zucchini following her grandmother's recipe; her father cherished his mother's cooking. However, even her third attempt to appease her father's stubborn palate is unsuccessful. She expresses, “The ‘but’ arrived once more, I don't remember about what. I ate with false appetite, obstinate, thinking without the courage to say so, that my zucchini was better than Grandmother's” (Sereni, 2005: 72). After dinner, Sereni suffers a “colic attack” and vomits up the fruits of her labor (Sereni, 2005: 72). In this scene, it is through her capricious appetite that Sereni expresses her discontent. She is so upset that she reluctantly chokes down her dinner, only to subsequently dispose of it in the toilet. As Bruch (1978: 85) elucidates, “The conviction that food is dirty or damaging is so strong that [bingers] feel pure and liberated only by emptying themselves.” In Sereni's case, the food that she consumes and throws up is both literally and metaphorically the cause of her insecurity.

It is important to point out that many eating disorder patients go to great lengths to maintain a facade of normalcy in social settings so as to avoid drawing attention to their illness (Bardick et al., 2004). Starvation is undoubtedly more public than purging. Sereni's eating behavior takes the form of both stealthy starvation and private purging. Hence, although her eating disorder is arguably at its worst while residing in the family home, the gravity of her disorder largely goes unnoticed. It is significant that she is unable to voice her anger and frustration, characteristic of eating disorder patients. She would like to reprimand her father, but she is not audacious enough to challenge his authority. Thus, in purging her food, repressed anger shoots to the surface. Upon Sereni's last attempt to please her father, the dish she prepares is just right. On this rare occasion, instead of rejecting food, she releases tears of relief.

On the fourth and final day Sereni serves as family cook, she works diligently to earn her father's validation. She decides to transcend the familiar and create a recipe of her own. She conjures up a dish composed of cow meat, hard-boiled egg, and chicken breast. Even Sereni is suspicious of the finished product, and she serves it to her father “as if [she] were going to the gallows” (Sereni, 2005: 74). When her father's evaluation of the recipe is flattering, she is so overwhelmed with emotion that she cries alone in her room.

Sereni's father applauds her for demonstrating independence through creative cooking. If we read between the lines, he is coaxing her to plow her own furrow beyond common comfort food in order to create recipes not yet concocted. Hence, the role of Sereni's father is antithetical to that of mother who, according to feminist writer Kim Chernin (1985), creates a deep sense of guilt in her daughter for seeking to develop and surpass her achievements. Chernin maintains that the anorexic is stuck in a double bind, unable to embrace the power and opportunities of her generation yet unwilling to tie herself to the home like her mother. As a result, she straddles two opposing realms which she struggles to negotiate. Moreover, Chernin argues that the anorexic is plagued with guilt for sucking her mother dry, both literally and figuratively, only to leave her behind as she marches forward to pursue studies and a career in the public sphere: “[The] problem with female identity hides in turn a profound mother/daughter separation struggle, which becomes particularly acute when a daughter is required to surpass her mother” (Chernin, 1985: xiii). Yet, Sereni's father has just as much influence over her as mothers do over their daughters. It is ultimately the man of the house who assesses if her creative contributions, culinary or otherwise, are praiseworthy. Interestingly, men rarely manage the domestic kitchen but account for the majority of chefs. Cultural anthropologist Sherry B Ortner (1972: 20) posits that “when a culture (e.g. France or China) develops a tradition of haute cuisine—‘real’ cooking, as opposed to trivial ordinary domestic cooking—the high chefs are almost always men.” Thus, although Sereni hardly plays the role of the subservient housemaid, her father—despite his indolence in the kitchen—nonetheless treats her like his sous-chef. Consequently, he does not spare her criticism.

Mainstream theories of the 1970s and 1980s propose that the young woman is unable to delineate clear boundaries between her mother's body and her own (Bruch, 1978; Chernin, 1985; Orbach, 1986). ⁷ However, in Sereni's case, she is unable to demarcate clear boundaries between her father's desires and her own, as she incessantly seeks to see the world from his perspective. Thus, while exercise and starvation may lead the anorexic to feel more in control of her body (Dell’Osso et al., 2016), Sereni's experience elucidates that starvation more likely helps her to feel in control of her own intellect, an idea that resonates more closely with Lawrence’s (2008) perspective. Yet, similarly to many other anorexics, Sereni is unable to experience “an autonomous sense of self” and largely obeys parental figures, “leading to an inability to master the psychological tasks of adolescence such as individuation and separation from the family” (Dell’Osso et al., 2016: 1655). Therefore, bulimarexia becomes a coping mechanism with which Sereni asserts her independence and differentiates herself from her father.

Akin to Bruch’s (1978) patients, who mostly struggle to please their mother, it is difficult for Sereni (2005: 72) to satisfy her father's demands and to distance herself from him both spatially and psychologically:

I consulted every cookbook in the house in my attempt to prevent my father's “but.” All my life, under my father's gaze, there was an unavoidable “but,” and each of my attempts to assert independence, freedom, take an intellectual position, would clash against his fury, or a conceited smile. In his greener years he had done, and better than I, all the things I was trying to do: studying, establishing relationships, politics, even cooking.

Sociologists McIntosh and Zey (1998: 126) argue that although women are responsible for “the purchasing, storing, cooking, and serving of food,” men also play a role in the management of these duties. Women are traditionally tasked with maintaining a comfortable family environment while men are usually the breadwinners who control the finances and the selection of food that is served at the table: “[r]esponsibility is not equivalent to control” (McIntosh and Zey, 1998: 126). Accordingly, although the mother prepares the meal, patriarchal society privileges the father's palate at the dinner table. In Sereni's household, her father is undoubtedly the revered patriarchal figure who estimates the worth of food and women. Consequently, Sereni is primarily preoccupied with whetting his appetite. Interestingly, he finally throws his daughter a few crumbs when she bravely strays from the beaten cutting board.

As Sereni develops from an adolescent to an adult, she continues to employ food as a vehicle to assert her individuality and distance herself from her father. In the second chapter titled “Appetizers,” she relates: “When I started to make crostini in my own home, for a while I used fresh bread instead of stale bread, a conscious act of waste in order for me to cut the umbilical cord” (Sereni, 2005: 39). Again, in the third chapter titled “First Courses” she attempts to distinguish her diet and identity as different from the men in her life. In particular, as also noted by Del Principe (1999), Sereni describes how the dish pasta e fagioli becomes a staple of her diet and a symbol of independence: “What revenge on my father's white beans, and on my brother-in-law, who had warned me when I left home: ‘Go ahead, go live by yourself: you don't know what it means to live on pasta e fagioli’” (Sereni, 2005: 50). Adams (1990: 12) emphasizes that meat, a metaphor for power and strength, is traditionally associated with men, while vegetables are considered an inferior female food, and so “[j]ust as it is thought a woman cannot make it on her own, so we think that vegetables cannot make a meal on their own, despite the fact that meat is only secondhand vegetables and vegetables provide, on average, more than twice the vitamins and minerals of meat.” It is noteworthy that upon leaving home, Sereni is “adopted” by the mother of her friend Beatrice, who worries that Sereni eats too little: “[W]hen I was at their home for dinner she prepared enormous steaks for me, and through Beatrice she sent me Bavarian cream made with a large number of eggs. A common respect for food united the brothers as well, who protected me, indulged me, and in turn became desirable company” (Sereni, 2005: 58). Consequently, just as Sereni escapes one patriarchal environment, she unconsciously falls prey to another in which she is pampered and plumped full of meat from animals, some of which are hunted by Beatrice's brother. It is not to be overlooked that, at the time, Sereni may have still been struggling silently with an eating disorder, an illness that likely stemmed from her past patriarchal environment and her sense of powerlessness within it. In essence, Sereni's social sphere suggests that a female plant-eater will not survive without the nourishment of meat and men. Thus, her fork is never fully free from male contamination. Financial constraints aside, Sereni consciously associates her recently adopted vegetarian diet with her newfound identity as a self-sufficient woman living outside of the family home. She acutely perceives the feminist value of a vegetarian diet. Social scientist Claude Fischler (1988: 275) highlights that food is essential to both group and individual identity:

The way any given human group eats helps it assert its diversity, hierarchy and organization, and at the same time, both its oneness and the otherness of whoever eats differently. Food is also central to individual identity, in that any given human individual is constructed, biologically, psychologically, and socially by the food he/she chooses to incorporate.

Adams (1990: 12–13) maintains that the consumption of meat is linked to patriarchal domination: “In many ways, gender inequality is built into the species inequality that meat eating proclaims, because for most cultures obtaining meat was performed by men.” Indeed, Sereni intuits the maleness of meat, the idea that Manhood is partially created “by access to meat eating and control of other bodies” (Adams, 1990: Preface). Del Principe (1999: 216) argues that “[r]eading Casalinghitudine in an ecofeminist light points out that both women and animals are oppressed and disembodied by patriarchal society.” He understands Sereni's eating disorder as an act of defiance:

The narrator's bulimia can be interpreted as a show of resistance, the psychic regurgitation of the authority and terms of approval she cannot digest. By vomiting meat, cheese, chicken, and steak, the narrator halts the literal consumption of animals and contravenes in male authority that temporarily installs the oppressed as oppressors, in a cannibalizing, ideological discourse. (Del Principe, 1999: 215)

Feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous (1976 [1975]) stresses that men have distanced women from the act of writing in the same way they have distanced them from their own bodies; women are made to fear the pen as they fear their sexuality. She believes that the phallocentric sphere has silenced their real voice and confined them to male language. Yet, for many eating disorder patients their body functions as a female language through which they assert their being in the phallocentric sphere. Paradoxically, as psychoanalyst Susie Orbach (1986: 10) points out:

[The anorexic] has agreed to take up only a little space in the world, but at the same time, her body evokes immense interest on the part of others and she becomes the object of their attention. Her invisibility screams out. We cannot avert our eyes from her.

As a young woman, Sereni did not receive the support of family or doctors that she needed to resolve internal conflict and self-doubt, which was exacerbated by the cultural silence that obscured her eating disorder. Desperately unhappy, Sereni ultimately attempted suicide. Psychiatrist Maria Selvini Palazzoli (1985) underscores that in the wake of the Second World War and the advent of the economic miracle in Italy, when food supplies were plentiful, anorexia was enshrouded in a veil of mystery. She emphasizes the enlightening correlation between increasing rates of anorexia and economic stability: “[A]s food becomes abundant and available to everyone, so each person is obliged to be thin” (Palazzoli, 1985: 201). In the late 1940s, however, anorexia patients usually did not receive the treatment they needed because practitioners misdiagnosed their condition as Simmonds’ disease, a pituitary dysfunction that, at the time, was as rare and poorly understood as anorexia. This ultimately led baffled physicians to refer them to other, although equally ill-equipped, medical institutions for care (Palazzoli, 1985: 199). Sereni (2005: 70) indicates that her doctor is similarly a stranger to eating disorders:

When I was an adolescent the term “anorexia” was not yet fashionable; that must have been the reason why my fasting did not carry serious consequences. I was, however, always very thin (in the snapshots of that time knees, elbows, feet are most prominent) and my last period of life at home with my parents was marked by a radical refusal of food; I was throwing up almost everything I ate. The family doctor diagnosed colitis and put me on a diet.

As previously discussed, most Italian patients suffering from active anorexia during the economic boom came from bourgeoisie backgrounds. Thus, most eating disorder patients could afford to thoughtlessly binge a week's worth of groceries, despite causing frustration and draining the family's financial resources. Moreover, they had access to the supplies necessary to cook and bake in abundance. Bruch (1978) recounts the case of an adolescent girl who would routinely bake pastry goods as soon as she returned from school. She did not allow her parents to go to bed until they had licked up every last crumb:

Many anorexics show an increased interest in cooking. A certain sociological factor seems to be involved. In middle-class homes … the anorexic daughter takes over, cooks for the whole family, bakes special cakes and cookies, even force-feeds the others, but she is secretive about how little she eats. (Bruch, 1978: 75)

Each Christmas the family matriarch holds a three-day eating marathon at her home where Sereni is particularly repulsed by the quantity of cold fried foods she serves. Moreover, she is hardly pleased by the predictable menu. In the years following her marriage, Sereni convinces her husband's family to let her host the feast around her dinner table. She is even allowed to add a tuna dish to the menu. Sereni's desire to take over the celebration, however, is hardly an attempt to feel part of their close-knit family: “I kept myself on the margins, I willed myself outside, concerned to preserve my identity from that magma where my contours and physiognomy would have melted away” (Sereni, 2005: 86). Rather, she longs to leave her distinct mark on the social sphere that surrounds her.

Throughout Keeping House, Sereni expresses her vital need to exercise independence and assert individuality. Hence, she feels smothered by her husband's family:

I realized that [they were] starting to love me, to consider me one of them: but their affection was too invasive, too warm, too protective, and I clung for dear life to my being strong and independent, intellectual and atheist. Different. (Sereni, 2005: 86)

It is noteworthy that Sereni's rejection of food, especially processed items, occurs during the economic miracle of the 1960s when it was in abundance and available in many new forms. It was a moment when poor man's polenta was passed over for canned goods and packet cheeses. Historian John Dickie (2008: ch. 17) sketches the impact of Italy's prosperity on the food industry during this period of transition: “The meaning of eating has undergone a metamorphosis: no longer merely a biological necessity or even a collective ritual, eating is a form of entertainment like going to the cinema or watching a football match.” Sereni suggests that she is disgusted by her mother-in-law's meals, born from the economic boom, because they are smothered beneath mysterious sauces and devoid of the refined rhythm of a traditional Italian dinner. Undoubtedly, her mother-in-law's dubious dishes stand in stark contrast to her own fresh fare, carefully crafted from simple ingredients.

Yet, although Sereni turns her nose up at her mother-in-law's unsavory meals, she nonetheless admires her domestic prowess and seeks to attain a similar level of excellence in the home. Thus, it is also envy that lies at the heart of Sereni's disdain for her mother-in-law's domestic expertise. In the face of stiff competition, she employs her homemaking skills to entice and retain her husband's loyalty. Yet, she is not able to compete with her mother-in-law's audacious culinary and sewing skills, which she describes as “bold, aggressive, chaotic, resourceful, pervasive” while, on the contrary, she portrays herself as a reserved and unimaginative housewife (Sereni, 2005: 55). Although the women manage their homes in different ways, Sereni admits that she is angered by how similar they are in spirit, “always on the lookout to leave [their] personal mark on everything concerning [their] home, [their] family, [their] world” (Sereni, 2005: 55). She perceives her mother-in-law as a domestically superior competitor, and consequently she fears her husband will be lured back into the comfort of his childhood abode. Because Sereni believes she pales in comparison to the family matriarch, she feels less than extraordinary—a highly precarious position for a bulimarexic. Bruch (1978: 128) reminds us that eating disorder patients are distressed by the idea that they are “ordinary, or average, or common—just not good enough.” Thus, although Sereni employs impeccable housewifery as a form of currency, it comes at a high price. However, contrary to her mother-in-law, it is not her only form of currency, as she is also successful in her career outside of the home.

While in later years Sereni is considered prosperous according to traditional standards of the time, traces of her dangerous eating habits seep into her adult life as wife, mother, and employee. Working outside of the home she is ashamed to be associated with food in any context. Thus, she goes to great lengths to conceal her love of food, as she does her eating disorder:

During ten years of working in cinema I had hidden food as embarrassment. I would eat and cook secretly, only with my closest friends who were not of the “circle”; inside the frivolous, elegant, and educated world to which I felt I should belong, the word “kitchen” did not have citizenship. (Sereni, 2005: 90)

In her foreword to The Golden Cage, psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair (2001) suggests that during the 1980s Bruch's analysis of eating disorders was considered progressive. Most of the research that came before her work was disdainful of eating disorder patients, “suggesting such characteristics as a desire to manipulate, infantile sexuality, and fear of oral impregnation” (Steiner-Adair, 2001: viii). On the contrary, Bruch's assessment of anorexic girls is compassionate and respectful. However, as Steiner-Adair notes, her analysis of the origins of anorexia in young women is not without limitations. First of all, she neglects to take into account the immense influence that the fashion industry has on young women's body image concerns. Secondly, she overlooks the role that the women's movement of the time plays in the development of eating disorders. Rather, Bruch posits that girls are overwhelmed by the vast array of options available to them within the familial context, and consequently they are afraid to choose the wrong path. Steiner-Adair deems it essential for one to also consider the politics of the public sphere in their understanding of a patient's eating disorder. Indubitably, Sereni's history of bulimarexia aligns more closely with Steiner-Adair's ideas. During the women's movement of the 1960s, her references to erratic eating behavior resurface and are depicted as differing in nature from her eating behavior as an adolescent residing in the family home. Steiner-Adair (2001: xi–xii) comments:

Although it is true that many girls with anorexia do feel overwhelmed with life choices, it is critical to trace feelings of inadequacy beyond individual and family contexts. In fact, feminists in the 1960s were searching for the same kind of power that Bruch describes in anorexia, “a kind of weight, the right to be recognized as an individual … to be nurtured, to be cared for, to be recognized.”

The bourgeoisie patriarchy of the time constructed impossible norms that caused many women to feel exhausted, unhappy, and hungry. Perhaps the “liberated” woman would have been happier and healthier still tied to the hearth. Betty Friedan (1963: 3) describes the extreme measures American women went to in order to lose weight: “They ate a chalk called Metrecal, instead of food, to shrink to the size of thin young models. Department-store buyers reported that American women, since 1939, had become three and four sizes smaller.” Thus, just as Sereni transitions from adolescence to adulthood and from private to public sphere, she becomes vulnerable to instability and falls into old habits, relying on fitful eating behavior to keep her emotionally afloat.

In the public domain, Sereni negotiates her conflicting roles as housewife and employee by ceasing to eat in a predominantly male environment in which she feels inferior, as exemplified by her eating behavior. She presumably shrinks in size, thus unconsciously leaving more space for men in a place that does not yet feel like her own. Yet, although Sereni is both a paid worker and housewife, her main preoccupations are related to the home. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is her role as housewife that is most integral to her identity. Beauvoir (2012 [1949]: 471) describes the nature of housewives similar to Sereni:

It is through housework that the wife comes to make her “nest” her own; this is why, even if she has “help,” she insists on doing things herself; at least by watching over, controlling, and criticizing, she endeavors to make her servants’ results her own. By administering her home, she achieves her social justification; her job is also to oversee the food, clothing, and care of the familial society in general. Thus she too realizes herself as an activity.

The final chapter of Keeping House is suggestively titled “Bitter.” Undoubtedly, Sereni has avoided many of the household tasks shouldered by housewives of the 1950s; she has a cleaner who visits her home twice a week to take care of heavy housework. Yet, although women worked outside of the home during the 1960s and 1970s, a critical period for the women's liberation movement, they were hardly free from problems related to the hearth. Journalist Gemma Hartley (2018: 12) defines emotional labor as “emotion management and life management combined. It is the unpaid, invisible work [women] do to keep those around [them] comfortable and happy.” She maintains that the idea of the perfect housewife and mother has not changed drastically over time. Rather, with the onset of second wave feminism, the various roles of wives and mothers have become more difficult. Even at present, the status quo of women has arguably become more overwhelming. Hartley (2001: 173) describes the multiple responsibilities of 21st-century women:

Women now have to contend with the male standard of the ideal worker in the workplace but are still expected to fill the role of the devoted housewife and mother in a fraction of the time. All of the emotional labor, most of the physical domestic labor, and whatever other competing priorities we have outside the home are all our domain.

Whereas in Nascita e morte della massaia [Birth and Death of the Housewife] Paola Masino's (1945) anorexic housewife, the Massaia, avoids motherhood at all costs yet is nonetheless spread so thin from tending to the interminable household duties she abhors that she eventually withers away, ⁸ Sereni depicts herself as a devoted mother and her demanding household as a dynamic space in which “stillness would mean death, and recipes are only a base on which to build new flavors, new combinations every time” (Sereni, 2005: 128). In particular, she portrays domestic tasks as a form of reinvention, “the only possible way to escape our boundaries” (Sereni, 2005: 128). Contrary to Sereni's perspective, Beauvoir (2012 [1949]: 474) describes performing domestic labor as a repetitive act from which one cannot escape:

The housewife wears herself out running on the spot; she does nothing; she only perpetuates the present; she never gains the sense that she is conquering a positive Good, but struggles indefinitely against Evil. It is a struggle that begins again everyday.

In the final chapter of Keeping House titled “Bitter,” Sereni (2005: 127) describes her father's death as an event that sets her free: “The Adversary was no longer before me, and now I no longer had roots, at least as far as the official records were concerned.” In the wake of her father's death, she has nobody to blame or implicate but herself; she could “stop killing [herself]” and even allow [herself] to have enough happiness to give others” (Sereni, 2005: 127). She suggests serenity by falsely portraying herself as blissfully devoted to her domestic domain, where she works tirelessly to control her surroundings. Yet the possibility of genuine self-realization is a mere illusion, as she endures an endless cycle of tedious tasks. Beauvoir (2012 [1949]: 481) expresses:

Done every day, [housework] becomes monotonous and mechanical; it is laden with waiting: waiting for the water to boil, for the roast to be cooked just right, for the laundry to dry; even if different tasks are well organized, there are long moments of passivity and emptiness; most of the time, they are accomplished in boredom; between present life and the life of tomorrow, they are but an inessential intermediary.