Anna Rollins on Purity and Diet Culture

An interview with the author of FAMISHED: ON FOOD, SEX, AND GROWING UP AS A GOOD GIRL

Once in a blue moon you meet people in the book world who share a little something with your own background, as if you went to Sunday school together and your families hung out afterward at the town diner.

Within ten minutes of meeting Anna Rollins, I knew her book, FAMISHED: ON FOOD, SEX, AND GROWING UP AS A GOOD GIRL, would change the life of any woman who read it (psst, pre-order here). Anna’s experience of growing up inside the twin ideologies of purity and dieting is, sadly, an extremely common one.

We conducted this interview over e-mail and I’m just so delighted to share it with you all. Again, pre-order here. This book is going to knock you sideways.

Anna on the living room couch where she wrote much of her memoir (while her kids napped).

Tell us a little about FAMISHED and why you wrote it.

If someone had asked me twenty years ago to guess what I would eventually write a book about, I would have said something like, ‘a book about food, sex, and God. But no way will I ever write that — because I would be too scared.’ When I was in undergrad studying creative writing, everything I naturally was interested in had to do with these topics. But then when I would go to turn something in for my workshops, these topics would feel too sensitive, too vulnerable, and I would end up writing something else.

Eventually, I worked through my fears of having my obsessions perceived by others -- in part because I had to. Around the time my second son was born, I had a traumatic postpartum experience (I detail this in my book) that led to a faith crisis. The beliefs I'd held about my own body and womanhood were making it difficult to continue on in my faith tradition. Writing this book -- narrating my personal story, deep diving into research, and speaking with dozens of other women who'd grown up in similar backgrounds -- helped me deconstruct the moralism, perfectionism, and prosperity gospel I'd been taught in my religious upbringing.

How did you start writing the memoir? Did you have a moment of inspiration or was it a slow burn?

I started working on the memoir during the pandemic. I'd certainly been writing toward it before then, but the pandemic was the catalyst for me to take my story seriously. I was newly postpartum, and my entire family had been through multiple health crises before the world shut down. My husband was an essential worker, so I was teaching remotely from home and trying to parent a baby and a toddler in the midst of it all. But I had this moment where I, quite frankly, felt my own mortality. I realized that I could die -- that we could all die. And I didn't want to get to the end of my life without telling this story.

So, even though I had so little time, I worked in the tiniest chunks (dictating scenes through voice notes as I pushed my sons on swings in the backyard, working after my children's bedtimes or early in the morning, you name it -- I found moments where I could write because I felt like I absolutely had to).

What has your spiritual journey been like? What was it like while writing the book? Now?

I grew up Baptist, and I attended a private Christian school that leaned fundamentalist. I was a very good Christian girl: quiet but ambitious in church, small but bold in my faith (imagine little me with big blue glasses and frizzy brown hair winning Awana clubber of the year, and then going home to proselytize Christianity to strangers on internet message boards). Though I didn't know it at the time, I struggled with scrupulosity (religious OCD), and I turned myself inside-out, grappling with belief and faith and whether my doubts damned me. It was excruciating. I coped with these private crises with disordered eating behaviors.

When I went to college (a public university in my home state), I began to search for relief in the form of less religious rigidity -- but I was still very involved in campus organizations like Cru and RUF. My husband and I connected in one of these organizations. We married young, and we were actively involved in our evangelical congregation. During my early adulthood, I was certainly unpacking white Christian nationalism, and I was disgusted by the way conservative politics had infiltrated so much of the church. But while I was frustrated by the lack of nuance I saw in evangelical spaces, I still identified as evangelical.

I had a pretty significant faith crisis after my middle son was born. At the time, my husband became severely ill, and looking back, he, too, suffered from scrupulosity. He wanted to give away all our possessions for the sake of the cross; he was convinced he committed the unpardonable sin. It was earth-shattering. And at the time, I remember just thinking, is this what Christianity does to people? Does it just wreck them?

I was ready to walk away from it all. The pandemic gave me some relief from going to church, and that break was really healthy for me. I wrote my book in the midst of this. When I began my memoir, I wasn't sure how it would end: I didn't know if I would remain a Christian or not. I think this is probably apparent on the page -- my narratives are often told with little commentary. I try to approach my story with little judgment. But in the process of unpacking (deconstructing?) all that I'd been taught, I experienced a really arresting encounter with grace and forgiveness.

I continue to unpack the moralism, fundamentalism, and prosperity gospel that I grew up with. I am still a Christian, and I remain in many evangelical spaces, though 'evangelical' is a label I'm hesitant to give myself because it is so bound up with far-right politics (something I do not align with).

What has your relationship with your body been like? What was it like while writing the book? Now?

My book examines the rhyming scripts of evangelical purity culture and diet culture. Growing up as a Christian in the 90s/00s, I was taught that a good girl was small, submissive, and quiet. I learned to value fear, discipline, and control, but that left little room for risk, surrender, and faith. Like many women who grew up in the midst of "the war on obesity" (and all the fatphobia that resulted from it), I struggled with disordered eating behaviors.

My husband and I were committed to waiting until marriage to have sex -- but when we got married, even though I intellectually knew that sex was sanctioned as right and good, my body was unable to let go. For about half a decade, I suffered from a psychosexual condition called vaginismus (this condition is widely connected to purity culture trauma). Vaginismus causes involuntary spasming of the pelvic floor muscles, and this makes penetrative sex incredibly painful and often impossible. I sought out help from medical professionals, but it took me a while for someone to take my problems seriously. For many years, I just thought my body was broken, and I felt like a failure as a woman.

Eventually, around the time of my faith crisis, I sought help for both disordered eating and sexual dysfunction. And as my relationship to my body began to heal, this impacted what I believed about God, too. This is something I detail at length in my book.

You live in West Virginia, not exactly a pipeline to agents in NYC. I know it took some years to find an agent, so I think people will be interested to hear how that went, what kinds of struggles you encountered, and how you landed with Morgan Strehlow at the Bindery Agency.

So, my memoir started out as just my personal narrative. But eventually, after I received some interest from agents who suggested I broaden my scope, I began to report the book out.

I connected with women who grew up in evangelical purity culture, and I asked them the question, "how did your experiences in evangelical purity culture impact your relationship with your own body?"

One woman I interviewed was Morgan Strehlow. She was not a literary agent at that time -- but months later, she reached out to me and told me she was taking a position at the Bindery Agency. She said she'd been following my writing online (I'd been publishing dozens of essays trying to get agent attention), and she said she couldn't stop thinking about my book after we'd finished our interview. She invited me to submit my book proposal to her. I sent it on her first day on the job, and she ended up signing me. I was her first client and the first book that she ever sold.

What are you working on next?

I have a few projects. I have a rough draft of a memoir about motherhood, work, community, and deconstructing the individualism in the trad wife/girlboss binary. I also have a collection of essays that examine girlhood through the lens of the Olsen Twins. And I'm playing around with a few ideas for children's books, too.

Thank you, Anna!

Readers, please feel free to post your questions for Anna in the comments. She’d love to hear from you.

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Anna Rollins is the author of Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl (out December 9, 2025 from Eerdmans). 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, Salon, Joyland, and more. She’s also written scholarly articles about composition and writing center studies. She’s an award-winning instructor who taught English in higher education for nearly 15 years. She is a 2025 Tamarack Foundation for the Arts 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 or at http://annajrollins.com.