In early March of 2021, Louise Gluck visited Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, where I teach. Because of COVID, she was afraid to fly on a small plane to our regional airport, so I drove her myself from Berkeley, where, for some years, she rented a house during the winters. She packed pumpernickel bagels, apples, and cheese for our six-hour road trip, and she brought CDs of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto, Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, and the songs of Jacques Brel, a Belgian master of the modern chanson.
At the farmers' market in Claremont, she bought nasturtiums and two baskets of strawberries while talking openly about her girlhood and how she'd weighed only seventy pounds at the worst moment of her anorexia. But you love food, like a gourmand, Louise, I said, and she replied, All anorexics love food.