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A memoir of addiction, body image, and healing, through the lens of a long-distance runner.Emily Pifer’s debut memoir, The Running Body, wrestles and reckons with power and agency, language and story, body dysphoria and beauty standards, desire and addiction, loss and healing. Pifer employs multiple modes of storytelling—memoir, meditation, and cultural analysis—interweaving research, argument, and experience as she describes how, during her time as a collegiate distance runner, she began to run more while eating less. Many around her, including her coaches, praised her for these practices. But as she became faster, and as her body began to resemble the bodies that she had seen across start-lines and on the covers of running magazines, her bones began to fracture. Pifer tells her story alongside the stories of her teammates, competitors, and others as they all face trouble regarding their bodies.Through the lens of long-distance running, Pifer examines the effects of idolization and obsession, revealing the porous boundaries between what counts as success and what is considered failure. While grounded in truth, The Running Body interrogates its relationship to magical thinking, the stories we tell ourselves, and the faultiness of memory. Fractures, figurative and literal, run through the narrative as Pifer explores the ways bodies become entangled in stories.The Running Body was selected by Steve Almond as the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize.
I am usually hesitant to write reviews when something is remarkable because I’m worried that my words will taint it or influence anyone’s experience when they do come into contact with it, but in this case - I feel like this is an important enough book that warrants an effort to capture my experience.Throughout “The Running Body” Emily masterfully interrogates some of the most pressing and haunting elements of the human experience through the lens of her own personal journey. Before I started reading this book, a friend saw it on my bookshelf and asked what it was about. “I think it’s about the author’s relationship with her body as a competitive runner.” Generally speaking you could say that that is an accurate statement, but it’s also about suffering. Grief. Obsession. Pain. Love. Lust. Insecurity. Fear. Shame. Pride. Success. Failure. Recovery. Existence. Purpose. Life.One of Emily’s talents is that in a mere 192 pages she is able to delve into all of those elements of humanity, further complicate (and simplify?) them by attaching them to cultural norms and biases, rope you in to her own story (gut-wrenching with courageous vulnerability and honesty), and force you (without asking or telling you) to consider how these themes look through the lens of your own story and experience.If you or someone you care about is interested in collegiate and professional sports (participating, watching, or coaching), this is an important read. If you or someone you care about has struggled with an eating disorder or body image issues, this is an important read. But regardless of your connection (or lack thereof) with college sports or eating disorders, this is still an important read that will leave you feeling raw and with an urgent sense of needing to understand your own relationship with your motives and passions.“Isn’t acceptance the most devastating step in the grieving process because it is inside a state of acceptance that you risk losing what you have lost?”
