I was thirty-one, engaged for three months, and marrying a man I loved.
That part was never a lie. Marcus was warm and funny and generous; he called his mother every week, and he was monogamous all the way down to the bone. Our life was good. Something in me was never touched.
I have two rooms in me. One for love, one for hunger, and they are in different buildings. I have always known that about myself. A festival field when I was twenty. A hotel bar in Lisbon at twenty-two, a man I could not speak a word to. A wedding in Voss at twenty-four, ten minutes with someone whose name I barely learned. I remember all of it with heat and not one gram of regret.
The night I tried to tell Marcus who I actually am, he kissed my forehead and asked if we could talk about something else.
I said of course. I said it every time.
Then there was a borrowed cabin in the hills above Bergen, too much wine, and his best friend in the kitchen at two in the morning, asking me whether the thing Marcus had said about me was true.
I could have laughed it off. I had a wedding booked, a ring on my hand, and every reason in the world to laugh it off.
I said yes.
Appetite is a book about myself. It is explicit throughout; it is set in Bergen, Norway, and it is the year I stopped trying to be someone simpler. Contains graphic sexual content, infidelity, and no happy ending.
