Bite Your Friends - by Fernanda Eberstadt (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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. 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"--Back cover.

Book Synopsis

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?

Review Quotes

"The diverse stories of Eberstadt's subjects illuminate the complex ways in which bodies can constitute contested political terrain. Incisive and philosophical, this intrigues."--Publishers Weekly

"A literary insurrection from the kind of semi-gonzo journalist you only find in America: exuberant, visceral, headstrong, and never less than highly addictive...Bite Your Friends is a remarkable act of self-haunting, a work of art that reminds us that the job of the writer in society is to Make it New and be always out front."--The Independent

"In Bite Your Friends, Eberstadt makes the case that those explorations of the extreme by outsiders are a necessary corrective to society and humanity, dragging all of us to a more vital existence."--Forbes

"An alternative memoir/studious examination of both self and other, accentuating within it how the body can be utilized in protest. It's a fascinating romp through eras and across individuals, providing more than a little insight as well as any number of places to branch out for further study."--Under the Radar

"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

"A stunning and powerful book. . . Fernanda Eberstadt describes the hardscrabble lives and death of militant souls, homosexuals, saints, philosophers, and despised others who refused to bow to what those around them called normalcy and truth. Their legacy and this work is the bite that cures."--André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name

"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

"Fernanda Eberstadt sings the body aesthetic--the body magnetic, the body pathetic--in a book that, in more ways than one, made me crack up. It's a book that clads airy notions of the relation between flesh and spirit with the bodies of real people, and as the body count rose, so did my love and admiration for one of the best writers around."--Ben Moser, author of Sontag: Her Life and Work

"Thrilling, absorbing and true....a book that you don't so much read as inhabit. 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

"In this courageous, original, sparkling consideration of the human body and its necessary intimacy with pain, Fernanda Eberstadt blends her own story with the stories of those she admires or has admired, beautifully weaving together elements of trauma memoir, well-considered biography, and wild celebration. At once philosophical and narrative, comical and profound, nostalgic and angry, disarmingly vulnerable and seductively powerful, it will enrich anyone's understanding of the nuances that allow us to transmute suffering into wisdom, even joy."--Andrew Solomon, author of Noonday Demon

"I loved this book. Often funny, unsparing of self as of others, Bite Your Friends is fuelled by genuine curiosity about what leads some to discount physical pain and transform their harmed bodies into instruments of communication."--Elizabeth Cook, author of Lux

"A masterful study by a great journalist: Roman arena to New York piers at night with Stephen Varble, Pasolini, Eberstadt's mother's body scars to Pussy Riot. The rich white kid, as Eberstadt called herself, has emerged as a great writer. A fearless look into Man's journeys on this earth: our joys and darkness, our wars."--Adrienne Kennedy, author of Funnyhouse of a Negro

"A studious-yet-sensual meditation on exuberant art and the transgressed body and whatever the politics are that interpret those bodies as a valuable commodity."--White Hot Magazine of Contemporary Art

Praise for Fernanda Eberstadt

"No other writer has captured our recent American past... so vividly or with such detail and force."--Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, on The Furies

"Eberstadt's skills bring to mind the early A. S. Byatt (the darting, foxlike intelligence; the searing judgments), and her dissection of class differences has a physical urgency that lifts her characters above their schematic limitations."--The New Yorker on The Furies

"Eberstadt writes with nearly unbearable honesty about womanhood."--Susanna Moore, author of In the Cut, on The Furies

"Eberstadt is an expert, sensual, and at times truly breathtaking conjurer of New York City."--New York Observer

"Fernanda Eberstadt is blessed with more gifts than any one writer should be...Her prose is exuberantly, obscenely rich."--The Washington Post