Kim Chernin, who wrote about weight and identity, dead

Kim Chernin, a feminist author and counselor who wrote with compassion about female body dysmorphia and its cultural causes, as well as her own upbringing as the daughter of a fiery Communist organizer jailed for her beliefs, died Dec. 17 at a hospital in Marin County. She was 80.

Her wife, Renate Stendhal, said the cause was COVID-19.

In 1980, Chernin was an unpublished poet when Ticknor & Fields bought her book “The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness.” The manuscript, seven years in the making, had been rejected by 13 publishers.

Anorexia and bulimia were little-discussed disorders at the time; on college campuses, however, there was an emerging crisis among young women, and when Chernin’s book appeared, she became a sought-after speaker on television and on college campuses. The book, which had a limited first print run, sold out quickly.

“Obsession” was the first of what would be a trilogy about women’s appetites and identity. In it, Chernin wrote of her own obsession with her weight and her attempts to equate food with nurturing. She used a variety of lenses cultural, feminist, anthropological, spiritual and metaphorical to explore why so many women felt alienated from their bodies.

“Many of life’s emotions from loneliness to rage, from a love of life to a first falling in love can be felt as appetite,” she wrote. “And some would explain the obsession with weight in these easy, familiar terms. But there are deeper levels of understanding to plumb. That night, for example, standing in front of the refrigerator, I realized that my hunger was for larger things, for identity, for creativity, for power, for a meaningful place in society. The hunger most women feel, which drives them to eat more than they need, is fed by the evolution and expression of self.”