How I Live Now

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains descriptions of disordered eating, incest, wartime violence, and violent death.

Daisy’s relationship with food and hunger changes dramatically over the course of the novel, marking her character development. In New York City, her disordered eating is born from the belief that her stepmother is trying to poison her. Food initially symbolizes the conflict between Daisy and Davina. When Daisy gets to England, she continues to starve herself in order to maintain her thin figure. She believes that she is successful at being hungry, and she even enjoys the feeling of it. When she falls in love with Edmond, she tries eating more so that he doesn’t worry, but “after a week or so he even said [she] looked better by which [she was] sure he meant fatter so [she] cut back some more after that” (55). In these early chapters, Daisy sees desire for food as a weakness, and she misguidedly embraces hunger as a way to exert obsessive control over her weight. Daisy’s disordered eating is, in part, a way for her to attain and maintain the unrealistic body image that her society promotes.

Daisy also hungers for Edmond in an emotional sense, lusting after him and succumbing to her romantic and sexual feelings for him.