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I have probably grappled with the matter of appetite my whole life — a lot of women do; we’re taught to do battle with our own desires from a tender age, and reinforcements are called in over time on virtually every front — but if I had to pinpoint a defining moment in my own history, I’d go back twenty-three years, to an otherwise unmemorable November evening when I made an otherwise unmemorable purchase: a container of cottage cheese.

Innocuous as it sounds, this would actually turn out to be a life-altering event, but the kind that’s so seemingly ordinary you can’t consider it as such for many years. Certainly, I didn’t see anything remarkable happening at the time. I was nineteen years old, a junior at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, vaguely anxious, vaguely depressed. I was also, less vaguely, hungry. This was 1979, Thanksgiving weekend. I’d gone home to see my family, then returned to campus the next day to write a paper. My roommates and most of my friends were still away, I didn’t especially feel like slogging over to the campus cafeteria to eat by myself, and so I put on my coat and walked up the block to a corner grocery store, and that’s what I bought: a small plastic tub of Hood’s cottage cheese and a solitary package of rice cakes.

Cottage cheese, of course, is the food God developed specifically to torture women, to make them keen with yearning. Picture it on a plate, lumpy and bland atop a limp lettuce leaf and half a canned peach. Consider the taste and feel of it: wet, bitter little curds. Now compare it to the real thing: a thick, oozing slab of brie, or a dense and silky smear of cream cheese. Cottage cheese is one of our culture’s most visible symbols of self-denial; marketed honestly, it would appear in dairy cases with warning labels: this substance is self-punitive; ingest with caution.

I didn’t know this back then, which is important to note. Naturally thin, I’d never given my weight much thought before, and although I knew plenty of women who obsessed about their thighs and fretted over calories, I’d always regarded them as a rather alien species, their battles against fat usually unnecessary and invariably tedious, barely a blip on my own radar. I, in turn, had very little personal experience with cottage cheese. I’d never bought cottage cheese before, I’m not sure I’d even eaten cottage cheese before, but on some semiconscious level, I knew the essential truth about cottage cheese — it was a diet food — and on some even less conscious level, I was drawn to it, compelled to buy it and to put it in the mini-refrigerator in my dorm room and then to eat it and nothing else — just cottage cheese and rice cakes — for three consecutive days.

And a seed, long present perhaps but dormant until then, began to blossom. A path was laid, one that ultimately had less to do with food than it did with emotion, less to do with hunger than it did with the mindset required to satisfy hunger: the sense of entitlement and agency and initiative that leads one to say, first, I want, and then, more critically, I deserve. So as inconsequential as that purchase may have seemed, it in fact represented a turning point, the passage of a woman at a crossroads, one road marked Empty, the other Full. Not believing at the core that fullness — satiety, gratification, pleasure — was within my grasp, I chose the other road.

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One of the lingering cultural myths about gender is that women are bad at math — they lack the confidence for it, they have poor visual-spatial skills, they simply don’t excel at numbers the way boys do. This theory has been widely challenged over the years, and there’s scant evidence to suggest that girls are in any way neurologically ill-equipped to deal with algebra or calculus. But I’d challenge the myth on different grounds: Women are actually superb at math; they just happen to engage in their own variety of it, an intricate personal math in which desires are split off from one another, weighed, balance, traded, assessed. These are the mathematics of desire, a system of self-limitation and monitoring based on the fundamental premise that appetites are at best risky, at worst impermissible, that indulgence must be bought and paid for. Hence the rules and caveats: Before you open the lunch menu or order that cheeseburger or consider eating the cake with the frosting intact, haul out the psychic calculator and start tinkering with the budget.

Why shouldn’t you? I asked a woman that question not long ago while she was demurring about whether to order dessert at a restaurant.

Immediate answer: “Because I’ll feel gross.”

Why gross?

“Because I’ll feel fat.”

And what would happen if you felt fat?

“I hate myself when I feel fat. I feel ugly and out of control. I feel really un-sexy. I feel unlovable.”

And if you deny yourself the dessert?

“I may feel a little deprived, but I’ll also feel pious,” she said.

So it’s worth the cost?

“Yes.”

These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake — add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem — and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow. Hidden within that thirty-second exchange is an entire set of mathematical principles, equations that can dictate a woman’s most fundamental approach to hunger. Mastery over the body — its impulses, its needs, its size — is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability, and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem. Desires collide, the wish to eat bumping up against the wish to be thin, the desire to indulge conflicting with the injunction to restrain. Small wonder food makes a woman nervous. The experience of appetite in this equation is an experience of anxiety, a burden and a risk; yielding to hunger may be permissible under certain conditions, but mostly it’s something to be Earned or Monitored and Controlled. e = mc².

During the acute phases of my starving years, I took a perverse kind of pleasure in these exhibitions of personal calculus, the anxious little jigs that women would do around food. Every day at lunchtime, I’d stand in line at a cafe in downtown Providence clutching my 200-calorie yogurt, and while I waited, I’d watch the other women deliberate. I’d see a woman mince edgily around the glass case that held muffins and cookies, and I’d recognize the look in her eye, the longing for something sweet or gooey, the sudden flicker of No. I’d overhear fragments of conversation: debates between women (I can’t eat that, I’ll feel huge), and cajolings (Oh, c’mon, have the fries), and collaborations in surrender (I will if you will). I listened for these, I paid attention, and I always felt a little stab of superiority when someone yielded (Okay, fuck it, fries, onion rings, PIE). I would not yield — to do so, I understood, would imply lack of restraint, an unseemly, indulgent female greed — and in my stern resistance I got to feel coolly superior while they felt, or so it seemed to me, anxious.

But I knew that anxiety. I know it still, and I know how stubbornly pressing it can feel, the niggling worry about food and calories and size and heft cutting to the quick somehow, as though to fully surrender to hunger might lead to mayhem, the appetite proven unstoppable. If you plotted my food intake on a graph from that initial cottage cheese purchase onward, you wouldn’t see anything very dramatic at first: a slight decline in consumption over my junior and senior years, and an increasing though not yet excessive pattern of rigidity, that edgy whir about food and weight at only the edges of consciousness at first. I lived off campus my senior year with a boyfriend, studied enormously hard, ate normal dinners at home with him, but permitted myself only a single plain donut in the morning, coffee all day, not a calorie more. The concept of “permission” was new to me — it heralded the introduction of rules and by-laws, a nascent internal tyrant issuing commands — but I didn’t question it. I just ate the donut, drank the coffee, obeyed the rules, aware on some level that the rigidity and restraint served a purpose, reinforced those first heady feelings of will and determination, a proud sensation that I was somehow beyond ordinary need. I wrote a prize-winning honors thesis on two hundred calories a day. The following year, my first out of college, the line on the graph would begin to waver, slowly at first, then peaking and dipping more erratically: five pounds up, five pounds down, six hundred calories here, six thousand there, the dieting female’s private NASDAQ, a personal index of self-torture.

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Who has the best features? This was a little game, conducted several times and always with the same results, in seventh grade, the time when so many of life’s little horrors begin. A very pretty and popular girl named Jill, a leader of the in-crowd, organized the event during recess, gathering seven or eight of us around her on the steps by the school’s entrance and beginning the scrutiny. My friend Jen always got best skin, rosy and smooth. My friend Nina got best hair, thick and blond. Jill gave herself best eyes, I think, but I may just be guessing (she did have beautiful eyes, large and dark and framed with the most naturally thick lashes). Me, I got prettiest hands, which felt bitterly disappointing at the time. Hands? Hands didn’t matter. Who cared about hands?

If you could change any one thing about your looks, what would it be? We played this, too, frequently: Oh, I’d have Jen’s skin, we’d say. I’d have Nina’s hair, I’d get rid of these freckles. Once, I mentioned something about wanting curly hair instead of straight hair, and a girl looked at me and said, “If I were you, I’d get rid of those little nostril veins.” I didn’t even know I had little nostril veins, but as soon as I got home from school that day, I looked in the mirror and sure enough, there they were: several tiny distinct red squiggles, horrifyingly visible, creeping down the skin from inside my nose to the base of each nostril.

These were early exercises in gaze-training, a way of coaxing the eye outward instead of inward, of learning to experience the body as a thing outside the self, something a woman has rather than something she is. From seventh grade on, we would hone this skill, breaking the body down into increasingly scrutinized parts, learning to see legs and arms, belly and breasts, hips and hair as separate entities, most of which generated some degree of distress, all of which were cast in hierarchical and comparative terms, viewed in relation to others: my hair versus Nina’s hair, my eyes versus Jill’s eyes; this needs fixing, that needs hiding. Pore by pore, we learned to take ourselves apart.

There’s no question that this way of thinking is reinforced in the world beyond seventh-grade school yards, that the art of self-dissection receives constant visual support, that it’s part of consumer culture’s lifeblood. Thick auburn tresses cascade across a magazine page, shiny and rich with Pantene shampoo. An enormous Maybellined eye stares out from a TV screen, each lash glossy and distinct. A calf stretches across a billboard, lean and taut in an $800 Jimmy Choo pump. American companies spend more than $200 billion each year hacking women’s bodies into bits and pieces, urging comparisons between self and other, linking value to air-brushed ideals, and as the girls in my seventh-grade class graduated to high school and beyond, the imagery around us would only grow more specific, more pummeling, more insidious. Models would become more thoroughly eroticized, presented in more states of obvious arousal, with more full-out nudity and more undertones of violence; the ideals they presented would become more specific and out of reach, with more and more body parts exposed and subject to critique (butt, arms, hips, and abs as well as the traditional breasts and legs) and ever more Byzantine configurations of beauty presented (bodies with no fat but huge breasts; delicate bodies with muscular limbs; fifty-year-old bodies that still look twenty-five).

Even more dramatic would be a shift in the pitch of imagery, the level and nature of the bombardment. Around the time I began starving, in the early eighties, the visual image had begun to supplant text as culture’s primary mode of communication, a radical change because images work so differently than words: They’re immediate, they hit you at levels way beneath intellect, they come fast and furious. When televisions first appeared in the 1950s, the image on the screen used to change every twelve to fifteen seconds. By the eighties, the speed of change had increased to about seven seconds. Today, the image on the average TV commercial can change as quickly as once every 1.5 seconds, an assaulting speed, one that’s impossible to thoroughly process or integrate. When images strike you at that rate, there’s no time to register the split-second reactions they generate, no time to analyze them or put them in their proper place; they get wedged inside, insidious little kernels that come to feel like truth.

I am not used to harboring such a wide variety of conflicting emotions at one time. Usually, it’s one feeling at a time, maybe two. Anxiety here, contentment there. A dash of melancholy on a bad day; a flash of joy on a good one. By Friday, and persisting well into this week, that simple synaptic system was all out of whack, consciousness on overload. This may be normal, but it’s also deeply disorienting. The magnitude of the physical devastation; the fear about what it may unleash; the sense of sudden vulnerability; the reach of the grief, each life lost touching an incalculable number of other lives: This is more than an ordinary brain can process, and so the mind is left to flit from one sensation to another. It cannot land on just one, it cannot absorb them all.

Which is why the neurons seem to be firing from all directions. I feel enveloped in safety, insulated within my own little house and also deeply jittery. A plane flies overhead and I freeze: What is it? Who’s on it? Is it about to crash? I feel compelled to watch footage of the towers collapsing over and over and over and then compelled to look away, not sure what’s voyeurism and what’s an attempt to grasp the ungraspable. One emotion surges only to be supplanted by its opposite.

A blind man tells a CNN reporter how his guide dog, a yellow Labrador retriever with the most noble gaze, led him to safety down 87 flights of stairs, and the heart melts at the miracle, man and his brave attendant. Moments later, an executive breaks down in sobs on camera, 700 of his employees unaccounted for, among them his own brother, and the heart tightens and sinks, a stab of pure sorrow. The most heartening pride at human kindness mixes with despair at human hatred, often in the same instant. A woman I run into tells me she started to weep without warning on a subway train in downtown Boston and that a total stranger, a man sitting beside her, took her hand and held it, simply and firmly, for the duration of the ride. She felt so touched by this display of compassion she cried even harder, but then, when she left the subway station, she saw fresh graffiti on a wall: NUKE ISLAM.

How to reconcile all of this? I, a woman who’s never responded to an American flag with anything more stirring than benign indifference, feel deeply, surprisingly, wholly patriotic and also, perhaps less surprisingly, deeply skeptical, mistrustful that our political and military response will be anything but rash, expensive and short-sighted. I feel protective and defensive about the depth of hatred toward America, a mama bear guarding her cub, and I feel humbled, aware that we’ve played no small part in earning and fomenting that animosity. And I also feel ashamed, embarrassed by the self-constructed cocoon of ignorance and complacency I’ve been living in: Until last week, I could not have spelled the name Osama bin Laden, let alone told you what degree of threat his organization represented.

Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so this thrust into complexity exhausts. Too many feelings competing for head space, no happy ending in sight, no tacit belief that our minuscule attention spans will protect us this time, and little solace from our ordinary opiates — movies and sports and computer solitaire. The people I talk to feel an odd, almost adolescent yearning for leadership, craving and mistrusting it in the same breath.

Some of us feel compelled to reach out — give blood, light candles, sign petitions, anything! — and simultaneously compelled to retreat, edges of paranoia leaking in, talk of terrorists in the backyard. I feel catapulted from one extreme to another: protected one minute and vulnerable the next, heartsick and then detached, connected and then estranged, so full of goodwill one moment I’d like to hug the guy at Starbucks who pours me my coffee, so irritable the next I’d like to slap the man who cuts in front of me while I’m trying to pour milk. Mostly I feel unmoored, some rock of permanence and safety having given way to shifting sands, the familiar now eerily unfamiliar. Sirens sound different, scary and consoling at the same time. Work feels irrelevant. Normalcy as yet undefined.

I suppose this is what people mean when they talk about being stunned — this gamut of feeling, which overwhelms the psychic system, leaves you feeling exhausted and powerless and unable to tease out one emotion from the next — and I think the response is both human and frightening. Surely, it’s one of terrorism’s intended effects, to literally stun our morale, to blow up strength and will along with buildings, and the reaction is hard to counter.

On Saturday, still feeling blank and enervated, I spent part of the afternoon at a gathering of people who met to talk about caring for a mutual friend, a man who’s dying of cancer at the age of 49. The lens shifted suddenly, the unfathomably wide panorama of disaster yielding to a much more personal and individual close-up of tragedy, and it suggested something to me about the numbing effect of emotional overload, which can so easily mutate into a kind of hopeless despair. I did not particularly want to go to this meeting; I drove there feeling fragile and depressed, but I showed up anyway, and sat in a room with 20 other people, and faced a loss in a communal and reflective way. We talked about how we felt about watching our friend die, what we were scared of. We talked about practical things we could do: cooking meals, doing laundry, spending time with him.

Unlike the thousands of lives so hideously obliterated without warning, this man and the people who love him have an opportunity to approach death consciously and with foresight, to say things that need saying, to help one another without the mobilizing impetus of disaster. This, too, is exhausting work, but it’s important work, its value immediate and tangible, and it reminded me that the line between feeling stunned and being passive can be very thin. I can give blood. I can send money to relief organizations, I can write letters and sign petitions. I can also be present and active in my own small world, which is a gift that cries out for recognition, even from this stunning roar of mixed emotion.

This is fertile territory. There are juicy details about news personalities (Dan Schorr as a back-stabbing sexist) and amusing asides about the special challenges faced by feminine reporters (chasing down stories, literally, in high heels). There are also heftier observations about the interplay between journalism, politics, economics and culture, which Stahl is singularly well-equipped to address. She has witnessed firsthand the various ways in which presidential administrations and the press use, benefit from and antagonize each other; she has seen news organizations radically reshaped by new technologies, financial pressures and sources of competition; as both a working mother and a woman in a once male-dominated field, she has watched, and been a part of, seismic cultural shifts involving women.

Stahl comes across in her work as highly ambitious and rather frantic, the kind of person who thrives on pressure and rarely stops long enough to invite insight. “Just when you have time to contemplate how you feel,” she writes, in what may be one of the most inadvertently self-revealing lines of the book, “wham! — a story breaks that blots out every second of your life.” If her book has a central flaw, it’s that her narrative often has the same frenzied, underprocessed quality, feeling more at times like a chronicle of change than a considered analysis of it. She tends to fire off descriptions of news stories, one after the other, pausing briefly to raise larger, more essential questions (What does it mean that Sam Donaldson is considered assertive while she’s considered bitchy? How should journalists handle the blurring line between news and entertainment?), then dashing off to the next press conference, the next “Face the Nation” interview, the next contract negotiation. The overall effect can be choppy and overwhelming: You wish she’d take a vacation, sit back and reflect rather than report.

Stahl’s more personal descriptions have a similarly underdeveloped feel. She characterizes the bulk of her 40s, for example, as “a decade of rage,” a time dominated by personal fury and bouts of laryngitis, but she never explores the real sources of her anger; nor does she comment on the apparent connection — familiar to many women — between rage and voicelessness. Her domestic life gets the same choppy, fits-and-starts treatment as her professional descriptions: nods here to family trips; nods there to interactions with her daughter; brief accounts of major life events (a husband afflicted with clinical depression, a brother with malignant tumors on his vocal chords) that often have the hurried feel of asides.

By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes. As the title of her book suggests, Stahl is more intent on describing her career than her inner life, but without some sense of who she really is, without some understanding of how the external dramas have shaped the internal, you’re left a bit disoriented and a bit hungry, wanting to know less about Stahl the journalist and more about Stahl the person.