Cravings: A Sensual Memoir

In Cravings Jyl Lynn Felman, acclaimed writer and performance artist, offers us her family stories. But they're not the stories you might expect from a midwestern Jewish family.

The youngest of three sisters in a Jewish American family in Dayton, Ohio, Jyl Lynn Felman understood early in life how to get what she needed in a family that couldn't speak about feelings. The Felman sisters expressed their longings in dramatic ways: One sister became bulimic, and Jyl learned at age fourteen that hyperventilating would award her a special relationship with her mother.

As a child Jyl was obsessed with the "F" word. As an adult she shoplifted: Throwing clothes off the rack onto her wheelchair-bound mother's lap, she ran out of a department store, shouting, "Out of the way, my mother's going to be sick!" Later she writes about how her mother's enforced silence from Parkinson's disease triggered her own unspoken needs.

In this memoir filled with extraordinarily vivid images of her obsessive love for her mother, Felman writes of her own cravings in the sensual experience of her childhood - the taste of her mother's cooking, the feel of her touch. As an adult, she craves the delicious and forbidden shrimp cooked by her lesbian lover. Through her family stories Felman offers a fearless and original tale of the universal desire for love and connection.