Overview

"At once a subversive autobiography of a mercurial woman and a mesmerizing history of the body as a site of resistance to power. ""I bite my friends to heal them.""--Diogenes the Cynic, c. 350 BCE From a Roman amphitheater where 4th century martyrs are fed to wild beasts to the S&M leather bars of New York in the 1970s, this sinuous and illuminating book by novelist and cultural critic Fernanda Eberstadt explore 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. The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes who lived ""a dog's life,"" sleeping, teaching, having sex in the public square; Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, two early Christian martyrs; twentieth-century prophets of bodily freedom like filmmaker-poet Pier Paolo Pasolini and philosopher Michel Foucault; Russian punk feminist group Pussy Riot; the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin's tyranny; these are the outrageous, uncommon, but deeply committed activists featured through original interviews and careful case studies in Eberstadt's immensely readable book, which is part political treatise, part manifesto, part memoir. Running through her narrative of the Body Militant is Eberstadt's own story and the story of her mother, a New York writer and glamor figure of the 1960s, whose illness-scarred body first led Eberstadt to seek connections between beauty, belief, and the truths taught through the body. Eberstadt asks crucial questions for our time: what drives certain individuals to risk pain, disgrace, even death, in the name of freedom? And, what can we learn from their example to become braver ourselves?"

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Reviews

"""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 Everybody 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 and Flâneuse ""The book is totally thrilling, absorbing and true: on every page there is something to underline, ponder, exclaim about. Bite Your Friends is an adventure story of a unique kind, a book which defies classification. Part memoir, part manifesto, it is discursive, witty and wise. It's like having the best, most fascinating conversation: a book that you don't so much read as inhabit. I absolutely loved it. Eberstadt examines how - and whether - it is possible to elude the self our families create for us, and proposes radical and subversive escape routes. I was reminded of those signs on trains which say: Break Glass in an Emergency. I've never read anything like it. Bite Your Friends is simply extraordinary.""--Cressida Connolly, author of After the Party ""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"

"""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 Everybody 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 and Flâneuse ""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"

Author Information

Fernanda Eberstadt was born in New York City. She has published five novels and one work of nonfiction, a memoir about her friendship with a family of Rom musicians in Southern France. She has written for publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Vogue, and Granta, and is an editor at large for the European Review of Books. Her books have been translated into fourteen languages. She lives in Europe.

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