Feasting on Air is a fairy story about a young woman told to hold her tongue, or better still bite it off. Its theme is the silence, asexuality, fasting and muteness that are the price of her rite of passage from the undersea world to the dry land of adult human sexuality. It is, partly, about anorexia nervosa. It is about how the young woman grows increasingly aware of how dangerous, but how imperative it is to lose rather than lose her tongue.