Food, as well as hunger, is an important motif throughout the novel. It emerges in particular in Olive’s relationship with food. Olive is a “big” woman, in many senses, and she associates at least part of her size with her age and how she eats. She has always been tall. However, “the business of being big showed up with age; her ankles puffed out, her shoulders rolled up behind her neck, and her wrists and hands seemed to become the size of a man’s” (62). Though Olive admits to minding her appearance, “at this stage of the game, she is not about to abandon the comfort of food” (62).

The motif of food is interwoven with The Necessity of Human Connection. Olive’s comments about hunger help build the complexity of this motif in this context. In “Starving,” Olive asserts to a young woman with anorexia, “I’m starving, too. […] We all are” (95). In “Ship in a Bottle,” Julie Harwood recalls a lesson from Olive, her former math teacher: “I always remember she said one day, ‘Don’t be scared of your hunger. If you’re scared of your hunger, you’ll just be one more ninny like everyone else’” (195).