Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 173rd installment, featuring Anna Rollins, author of Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl. - Sari Botton
P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.
Anna Rollins is the author of Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl. Her groundbreaking debut memoir examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites. Her writing has appeared in outlets like The New York Times, Slate, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Joyland, and more. She’s an award-winning instructor who taught English in higher education for nearly 15 years and a 2025 West Virginia Creative Network Literary Arts Fellow. A lifelong Appalachian, she lives with her husband in West Virginia where they’re raising their three small children. Follow her on Substack and Instagram @annajrollins.
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I am 37 years old, and I’ve been writing since childhood.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl was published in December, 2025.
What number book is this for you?
This is my debut.
Famished is a groundbreaking debut memoir that examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
My book is a memoir that also includes research and reporting (the research and reporting show up in the last third of the book).
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
Famished is a groundbreaking debut memoir that examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites
What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
When I was a creative writing major in college, anytime I would go to compose for class, what naturally came out of me were narratives about food or my body or God. But for a lot of reasons—internalized misogyny and fears about talking about faith in more diverse settings—I would write those narratives, put them aside, and then turn in literally anything else.
A lot of the time, that “literally anything else” wasn’t very good, because my heart wasn’t behind it. So even though I was a creative writing major, I didn’t allow myself to write what I actually cared about. I thought those interests would be considered silly or juvenile, or that they wouldn’t be understood by the larger group.
I went on to study applied linguistics in graduate school, and I became a writing instructor in higher education and ran a writing center. I did that for nearly fifteen years. I helped other people become writers, but it wasn’t until I became a mom—and specifically during the pandemic—that I really allowed myself to follow my own interests in my writing. I gave myself permission to write about what I cared about and to be myself on the page, in part because I felt so isolated by quarantine and new parenthood. I needed a place to breathe, and I found that place on the page.
That writing during quarantine resulted in this book. After I wrote it, I took online workshops, learned how to publish in popular outlets, and started trying to build a platform that way. I published over fifty essays in two years, which led to connecting with my agent, signing with her, and selling the book. Since then, I’ve been building platform and trying to find my audience for Famished.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
The hardest part by far was not the writing of the book, but the thinking of it as a product for a particular audience that would exist in the marketplace that they might want to purchase.
Writing the book itself was fun, but thinking about how to angle it and sell it was tough. I never realized that writing the book is one thing, and wanting the book to sell in a traditional marketplace is another.
I wasn’t just thinking about craft; I was also thinking about the zeitgeist and about cultural conversations, and that part of the process feels less pure. I’m someone who would like to think of myself as an artist, and at first I turned my nose up at turning my art into a product that could be bought and sold. But marketing is its own kind of creativity—there’s an art to trying to build platform and find audience with integrity.
When I was a creative writing major in college, anytime I would go to compose for class, what naturally came out of me were narratives about food or my body or God. But for a lot of reasons—internalized misogyny and fears about talking about faith in more diverse settings—I would write those narratives, put them aside, and then turn in literally anything else.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
I changed all the names in my book, including the names of my children and my husband. For many of the people I knew growing up, I used composite characters. For example, there’s a childhood friend in Famished named Jessica, and Jessica isn’t one person—she’s a composite of five different people.
That felt important to me, not just for narrative flow, but because I wanted to preserve narrative truth without telling intimate stories about other people that might be revealing, or not mine to tell.
I ran everything about my husband past him. Because he’s a main character later in the book, his opinion felt very important to me. I also shared the final version with my parents and told them I was willing to rewrite or exclude anything they weren’t comfortable with. For the most part, they were very open to me telling the story as it is.
I think it’s a great gift to have the people who love you give you permission to tell your story when it also involves them. It’s something I’ll be forever grateful for.
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)
Ottessa Moshfegh is a huge inspiration for me. We share some similar life experiences, and I’ve listened to many interviews with her. She writes about disordered eating with an incredible honesty and viscerality. She seems to take pleasure in forcing people to look at parts of themselves—or parts of society—that they might not feel comfortable looking at. That’s a value I hold in my own writing, too.
I take pleasure in making people uncomfortable—not for the sake of discomfort, but because I want people to look at hard things and truly grapple with them. I think that value comes across on the page in Famished.
Another writer who deeply influenced me is Susan Burton. She wrote Empty, which is about living with both binge eating disorder and anorexia. She’s also a producer at This American Life and produced the podcast The Retrievals. Much of her work centers on women’s pain and how women’s pain is often disbelieved.
Her writing is incredibly spare, and she’s spoken openly about feeling embarrassment—especially around writing about eating disorders. She’s talked about resisting that subject because it can feel like it isn’t serious enough, like people won’t respect it, and yet it’s something she can’t get away from.
The way she writes about disordered eating was deeply inspiring to me because she dispels so many clichés and stereotypes. She implicates herself—she’s unflinching in that self-implication—and that’s something I aspired to in Famished. I didn’t want to write a narrative that was just “poor pitiful me,” or only about how society or men or religion harmed me. I wanted to portray myself as an agent who has also harmed—someone who is not just prey, but has also been hunter. It was very important to me not to write a narrative rooted only in self-victimization.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
Write the first draft for yourself. Don’t worry about what your parents will think or what your friends will think. Really let loose. Let yourself do whatever you want to do on the page. You may say things you would never want anyone to read, and you may cut those things later. But don’t self-edit at the beginning.
Give yourself permission to play—to be inappropriate, to push boundaries. You don’t have to take all of that all the way to publication, but you do have to grant yourself spaciousness at the beginning.
And don’t just focus on everything that’s coming later. If I had known how long it was going to take, or the sheer amount of work it would require to get Famished published—platform building, collaborations, even how building platform and developing myself this way would affect other parts of my professional life—if I had anticipated all of that, I’m not sure I ever would have started.
It has been totally worth it. I’m so glad this book is in the world. I think it will help people, even though helping people isn’t what I set out to do. I set out to write a good story that was true and honest. But I do think it’s going to help people, because I think truth and honesty usually result in good.
Still: if I had realized all that was going to go into it, I never would have started. So just focus on the next step.
What do you love about writing?
I love sitting down and being surprised by what I think—by the connections I make on the page. I love when images crop up that contribute to meaning, not because I forced them, but because my brain naturally made them. I love the magic of that.
What frustrates you about writing?
I find that anytime I sit down to write with the aim of pleasing a particular audience, I become frustrated. I don’t like grappling with imaginary audiences. I get frustrated when I’m thinking about writing for more than an audience of one, which is myself.
I can do it—that’s part of being a professional writer. You do tailor messages for an audience. But I notice that when I’m doing that, some of the magic, some of the particular sparkle, goes away.
What about writing surprises you?
I’m always surprised that I have more ideas. When I have periods of really prolific output, I sometimes think, oh, there’s probably nothing else—I’ve dried myself up. But that’s never true. I often need to rest after intense writing, but there’s always more.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?
I wrote most of Famished during nap time. Occasionally I had longer stretches with childcare, but many of my favorite parts were written in those small windows. My very favorite part of the book was written at a Starbucks while I was waiting for my children to finish practicing for a Christmas concert at their school.
Parents weren’t allowed to listen because there were too many adults and not enough parking spaces, so I went to a nearby Starbucks and wrote for about forty-five minutes. That writing became the beginning of the book, and it was the part that helped sell my proposal.
Because I have children, I write in small chunks of time. And I actually think that constraint has led to stronger writing. Giving myself those windows has helped my writing practice.
I didn’t want to write a narrative that was just “poor pitiful me,” or only about how society or men or religion harmed me. I wanted to portray myself as an agent who has also harmed—someone who is not just prey, but has also been hunter. It was very important to me not to write a narrative rooted only in self-victimization.
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
Walking definitely supports my writing. A lot of the time, I’m working out a problem on the page while I’m on a walk. Napping supports my writing too. Sometimes I’ll ask myself a question before a twenty-minute nap, and when I wake up I somehow have the answer and write it down.
I also like to play the piano and watercolor—often with my children—and those things replenish me as well.
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
I don’t know what’s next, though I do have several larger projects in process. I have the beginnings of an essay collection that explores girlhood through the lens of various Olsen twins movies. I also have a draft of a reported memoir about women, work, and dependency that interrogates the tradwife–girl boss binary. And I have a vision, along with some very rough scenes, of a doctor’s wife murder mystery.
Love Anna and love FAMISHED!
I really resonate with what you say about not writing a narrative rooted in self-victimization. Honest narratives should be both, "this happened to me," and "I did this." Otherwise, we're not fully exploring the truth of how our actions and the actions of others have interacted to create our reality.