My Belly: Exploring Why It’s So Hard for Women to Love Their Bodies

If my hatred of my belly was a person, she would be old enough to have completed a lengthy education and given me grandchildren. An unflinching and feminist portrait of one woman’s obsession with her belly and the cultural and social norms that feed that obsession––for readers of Nora Ephron’s classic memoir I Feel Bad About My Neck. “Hilde Ostby says she's never entered a room without thinking about her belly. She can't stand it. … So [she] decided to really examine why she spent most of her adult life hating how she looked.”—NPR Weekend Edition Hilde Ostby is an acclaimed cultural critic and successful writer living in Norway. At the start of My Belly, she is on tour in London, promoting her latest book about the culture and science of memory. As she poses for a photograph for the London Times, she silently worries about how her belly will look on the front page of the Arts section. Later, she realizes how ridiculous this is: she’s being celebrated for an intellectual achievement, and yet all she can focus on is her belly. How did a girl from an academic home, where intellect came before looks, find herself in this position? As Hilde approaches her 45th birthday, she calculates that she’s spent 30 years obsessing over her belly. If she had spent that time writing books instead, she would have written the equivalent of Knaussgard’s My Struggle. All six volumes. How can we stop obsessing over our bodies and claim back our time? We can start by understanding who and what led us to this place. In My Belly, Hilde explores the original reason she began hating her body: at fifteen, she was sexually abused. She also examines patriarchal attitudes towards women’s bodies, and delves into diets, revealing that by the time most women reach her age, they have tried 61 diets. Drawing on philosophy, neurology, sociology, literature, and popular culture, as well as her own dark truths, Hilde offers an honest look at an obsession that seems to have plagued women for centuries. Readers will come away with laughter, anger, tears, and a new perspective on their own unique struggles.