NONFICTION

Hungry All the Years

By Austin Segrest     VOLUME 57 No. 4

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Only after my mom died unexpectedly in 2003, just as she and I, in my early twenties, were starting to get along as friends, brunching on the weekend—only then did I learn, mainly from my father, about the anorexia that nearly killed her in the early years of their marriage. It’s amazing in today’s therapeutic climate to think that such a serious condition would, or could, be kept so scrupulously secret (not that there weren’t a host of concerning, strictly off-limits indicators, complications, questions).



She had tried, inchoately, imperfectly, to wrest autonomy from the patriarchy, to exercise her choice and privacy. The patriarchy abetted the burial.



“Your mom’s so thin,” a friend’s mom said as I got in the back seat for carpool, compliment veiling envy veiling concern veiling critique.



“I had been hungry, all the Years - / My Noon had Come - to dine,” begins Emily Dickinson’s 1862 poem (Fr 439). She was thirty-two, cranking out great poems almost daily, the war was on.

Against the background of a lifetime of hunger, this “Noon”: presumably not just any supper guest.

Noon is a favorite word of Dickinson. In her poems, it straddles time and infinity, earth and the Ideal, encompassing a brightness, which, as here, can both blind and show, hide and make known.



That Mom was starved of love, however (I can’t help but think of James Wright’s “starved pullets, / Dying for love”), we heard all about. Her Noon—my neurodivergent, figure-watching, scientist father’s carnal antithesis, down to the body hair—never arrived.



Though I only remember eating with her a handful of times, she loved food. Bread, pastries, steak fries—I can still hear her relish the word Gorgonzola, see her dig for a personal supply of syrup ferreted into the IHOP in her purse. Stringently frugal, she kept us well-fed, was perpetually worried about my brother being too skinny, kept her pantry and freezer unassailably stocked, would hardly allow us in the kitchen. When my brother, twin sister, and I were in high school, she started hoarding candy bars, which, like soft drinks (she was an Atlanta girl, after all), she believed could help in a pinch.



So, too, she fed us language, grammar, writing.

Though she wanted us to look it up ourselves, it was a favorite game, it was maybe her at her most nourishing, to ask her any word, any, and she, a former editor, always had the precise definition.

The horror I was met with in third grade when for homework I lazily conflated habit with habitat !

At some point as an adolescent, I started nibbling from her Collected Dickinson. One of the poems I came across—an excerpt from an 1851 letter—seemed to invite me in directly. Writing to her brother, Austin, whose recovery from illness and expected return to Amherst give her cause to sing, she falls into rhyme, ending the letter,

never mind faded forests, Austin, never mind silent fields - here is a little forest whose leaf is ever green, here is a brighter garden, where not a frost has been, in its unfading flowers I hear the bright bee hum, prithee, my Brother, into my garden come.

Do I remember right that Mom had the Dickinsons in mind when she named me Austin?



Built up over “all the Years,” potential energy converts to kinetic. Action at the first stanza’s end approaches communion: “I trembling drew the Table near - / And touched the Curious Wine - ”

So this is what it’s like, she thinks, the unlooked-for feast.

I felt a similar wonder when Mom and I brunched that last spring. Approaching Noon. A communion of sorts. And because she would die that year, a last supper.



The speaker in George Herbert’s “Love (III)” (1633) struggles to acclimate to being wined and dined by Love. To being served, instead of serving, which is all he thinks he deserves.

               . . . let my shame
       Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
       My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
       So I did sit and eat.

For metaphysical Puritan poet Edward Taylor, the occasion of taking the Eucharist is the rarest privilege and pleasure. It is the entrance, inclusion into the Church, Christ’s body, “Infinity.” At the same time, Infinity enters—“Confinde” in, “Conjoyn’d” with—Finite you.



Every meal Mom served but didn’t eat was a reminder of her unmet desire to feel desired.

’Twas this on Tables I had seen -
When turning, hungry, Home
I looked in Windows, for the Wealth
I could not hope - for Mine -

Is this someone who has grown accustomed to feeling excluded (a self-fulfilling prophecy?), to shifting for herself, living off of glances, Love’s crumbs, so many meals of the imagination? Or am I projecting?

In her poems, Dickinson gives Hope feathers but remains marked by “the Seal Despair”; enshrines the noun but balks at the verb. During the one year she lasted at Mount Holyoke College (then, Seminary), one of the first US women’s colleges, when regularly pressed for her salvation status, she slotted herself, every time, with the “no-hopers.”

Did she refuse communion as well as conversion?



To hear Mom tell it, her whole life she was on the outside looking in. The wrong frame of body and mind, she internalized the lack, the lie, the disparity between her mother’s lavish hosting and financial precarity, between her father’s gentility and philandering.

She could fill a friend with hope, could fill instantly, immoderately with the hope of friendship, yet maintained that, unlike the lucky elect who have a “halo” (something like a guardian angel), she decidedly did not.

Growing up, she and her best friend would trade lines reciting Dickinson’s 1861 “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (Fr 260).

Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one’s name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!




Like Dickinson, Mom was famous for her correspondence—beautiful longhand, confiding, ebullient, perceptive, playful letters.

“Bash says, ‘Hi,’ I guess,” she reports of the rescue cat, in one of the few letters I have. I’m freshly twenty-one, living in New York City the summer before my senior year of college.

Bobbie treated him just like the Lion King he thinks he is. He now loves to sit at the door to the balcony and stare at ole Sergeant. Sergeant would play, but all Bash knows is how to fight.




It was letter writing—obligatory “thank-yous” for Christmas and birthday presents—where I first started to find my voice.

Dickinson’s 1851 letter to her brother, written when she was twenty, bursts at the seams with invention, a kind of Orphic testing ground.

I have tried to delay the frosts, I have coaxed the fading flowers, I thought I could detain a few of the crimson leaves until you had smiled upon them, but their companions call them and they cannot stay away - you will find the blue hills, Austin, with the autumnal shadows silently sleeping on them, and there will be a glory lingering round the day, so you’ll know autumn has been here, and the setting sun will tell you, if you dont get home till evening.

Note the desire not just to capture but control.

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AUSTIN SEGREST is the author of Door to Remain, winner of the 2021 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize. Groom, a new collection, is out in April 2025 with Unbound Edition Press.


VOLUME 57 No. 4