The Life of Hunger

The Life of Hunger is an autobiographical novel by the Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb, first published in French in 2004. In it the narrator describes a chronic appetite for life, which she traces through her own experiences.

The novel follows her path from childhood to adulthood. It opens with the narrator as an omnipotent baby, seeking the love and attention of her Japanese nanny. The girl who follows struggles with alcohol, with a constant sense of hunger that drives her to chocolate, and with her supposed "potomania", a compulsive urge to drink water. Adolescence comes next, when she decides to stop eating and falls into anorexia alongside her sister Juliette. The book ends with an adult narrator who is intelligent, perceptive and brilliantly funny, and who has gathered her whole life into these pages in a raw, witty and hypnotic way.