"We Were Hungry" by Chris Dennis in Best American Essays 2023

Sometimes you come across an essay that's so original in its writing and construction it puts you on the floor, and that's how I felt when I read "We Were Hungry" by Chris Dennis (originally published in Astra Magazine). The piece is about growing up poor, what the author on Twitter calls "rural consciousness," and addiction and recovery. The central conceit of the piece is the narrator writing a letter to McDonald's, which is the place he went when he was hungry, strung out and looking for love or simply a bathroom to do drugs in. 

The narrator introduces the essay by asking "What is a third place when a person has no first or second place?" (referring to "a place that is not home and not work but still wants us to stay awhile, to feel, even, a sense of belonging," according to his friend who has to define it for him). This question, of trying to find belonging when you've grown up with adverse childhood experiences in an unsafe place, haunts the essay. The hunger that drives the narrator and his sister is both a physical and a spiritual one, and ironically, when they have nowhere to go, McDonald's takes them in. "Is this what love looks like?" he asks in a kind of mock-awe. "Neither of us was able to recognize it." Even as the writer finds a semblance of safety in McDonald's, with sympathetic workers giving him and his sister free food, Mickey D's is a stand-in for love and their hunger is never satisfied, because after all fast food always leaves you wanting more, is designed to hook you, in fact. "When we were young, you dressed yourself up like a clown," he writes. "We longed to crawl inside of that clown, into a place where we could eat and be eaten forever ... A craving only leads to another craving."

In the midst of this semi-serious ode to the Golden Arches, the author suggests that he and his sister will never get well as long as they're caught up in cycle of poverty and part of a broken family. The narrator's relationship with his sister is one of the sweetest, most wrenching aspects of the piece. They act as each other's family, as protectors, when their own parents can't be there for them. "My sister and I stood in the way of so many things that might have damaged the other: car rides with strange men at 3 a.m., drugs from people too eager to sell them, loneliness," he writes. "My sister stood between me and danger." He describes their relationship as "like a dream of childhood. Drugs were a way of pretending we had no body at all, or that we were just a body and nothing else, or that our bodies were a third place where anyone could come and go without paying." And perhaps my favorite line of all: "What is a sibling but proof that you weren't alone through the worst of it? A witness. A fire wall against the gaslight of childhood. 'I was there, too,' she says." 

I think that's so true of siblings and the people that we grow up with -- they remind us of the hard times, the stuff we want to forget but need to remember to heal. Siblings ground us, take us back to who we were and always will be. And like the narrator says, they protect us, too. At the close of this essay, the narrator, his sister and McDonald's make up a kind of beautiful, dysfunctional family. Sadly, while the writer is in recovery from addiction (his bio lists him now as a social worker who helps people in addiction recovery), he describes his sister as still "in a crater on the moon of chaos." What an image. Great essay.   

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