The Running Body by Emily Pifer, selected by Steve Almond as the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, is a memoir of addiction, body image, and healing, through the lens of a long-distance runner.
Pifer’s debut memoir wrestles and reckons with power and agency, language and story, body dysphoria and beauty standards, desire and addiction, loss and healing. Pifer employs multiple modes of storytelling—memoir, meditation, and cultural analysis—interweaving research, argument, and experience as she describes how, during her time as a collegiate distance runner, she began to run more while eating less. Many around her, including her coaches, praised her for these practices. But as she became faster, and as her body began to resemble the bodies that she had seen across start-lines and on the covers of running magazines, her bones began to fracture.
The Running Body interrogates the stories we tell ourselves and the faultiness of memory. Fractures, figurative and literal, run through the narrative as Pifer explores the ways bodies become entangled in stories.