Food and Loathing: A Life Measured Out in Calories by Betsy Lerner
Everyone hates a fat woman. Or is it that a fat woman thinks everyone hates her? Or does a fat woman simply hate herself?
As someone who’s measured her worth in dress sizes, waistbands, and, when in the midst of bravery, the hard-core truth of pounds, I’ve felt all of the above. We are a harsh country, filled with both self-loathing and a Calvinist push towards walking off, dieting away, running away from, and when all else fails, surgically sucking out unwanted fat.
I recently re-read (even re-bought, when I couldn’t find my copy) Food and Loathing by Betsy Lerner. From far too young, Lerner’s existence rested on her body size—real and perceived. The book begins thusly:
“It is 1972. I am twelve years old. It is the first day of sixth grade, and I am standing in the girls’ gymnasium waiting to be weighed.”
If your flesh doesn’t crawl with those words, if you don’t want to either go running for a cream cheese smothered bagel, or conversely, vow to stop eating as of tomorrow, this book will stillinterest you, but you may not swallow it whole.
The hatred of our flesh often has no bearing in reality. One of my best friends in the world begins each day pinching her flesh with callipered fingers and living for her daily-rationed cookie. She is tight and muscled and yet lives each day as though a sorcerer might drop fifty pounds on her at any moment.
Do I understand this?
I do.
I grew up with a thin mother who lived for leanness and beauty. My sister’s body mirrored hers. To the day she died at eighty, my mother would ask, “how’s your weight” each time we spoke, as though my ‘weight’ was a living-breathing entity separate from that which she liked about me.
I sloughed her words off with sarcasm and sighs, still my life was frozen in moments: My mother hiding cookies in a pot on the top of the cabinets. (I got exercise climbing up.) Swiping the icing from the middle of the Entenmanns, until the cake became thinner and thinner (but not me.)
We’re hated, we hate ourselves, and we learn to sneak our food. I devoured cookies that I hid in the bathroom hamper.
Betsy Lerner joined Overeaters Anonymous in junior high, where she learned to divide food into forbidden and good. She became a compulsive eater or a compulsive dieter, depending on the day, the month, and the moment. When binging, real life was always a day away. When dieting, she considered herself abstinent—except that sex became her comfort.
Mixed in for Lerner, was her struggle with depression and anxiety, finally ending up in a New York mental hospital after a suicide attempt, where, after years of being ill-treated by shrinks, she is diagnosed as bi-polar. This is presented neither as an answer to her relationship with food, nor as separate. It is part of her ongoing puzzle.
Food and Loathing is not a self-help book; it’s no guide for losing weight. Nor is it a companionable hug for staying heavy. It’s a mirror. It’s looking back, looking forward, or looking at who you are right this moment. Betsy Lerner tells that particular story very well.
Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp
“It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.
This didn’t happen easily, or simply, but if I had to pinpoint it, I’d say the relationship started to fall apart the night I nearly killed my oldest friend’s two daughters.”
Thus begins the prologue of Caroline Knapp’s memoir, Drinking: A Love Story.
Why are we—why am I—so fascinated by stories of drug and alcohol abuse? There but for the grace of God go I? Because, lacking luck or God’s grace, there went too many in my family? I could easily write a top ten list for my favorite drinking books or drug movies.
There are good reasons why I turn to this genre, why I tended bar for many years, and why in those groups I led for violent men, I had a secret sadness for those broken by cocaine, Jim Beam, and crack. My father succumbed to the life soon after turning 35. I grew up at a time when it was all there for the asking. At seventeen, I walked down the street and a young man said, “Yes or no?”
“Yes,” I said. He smiled, popped something in his mouth, and went on his way.
America has a love-hate relationship with drinking and no one outlined this teeter-totter better than Caroline Knapp (who, sadly, died of lung cancer in 2002) a successful journalist and columnist, a magna cum laude Ivy Leaguer, a daughter of upper-class Cambridge Massachusetts, who drank herself into oblivion.
With honesty and writing so good it disappears before your eyes, Knapp takes us deep into her secretly out-of-control world.
“Between the day I knew I had to stop drinking and the day I finally did, I cried almost all night.”
I am lucky enough not to have struggled with an addiction to drugs or alcohol—though I think I only skated away from it through a combination of luck and having a weak stomach—but I struggled with cigarettes in this way. I loved smoking. Stopping terrified me. Reading Caroline Knapp’s book helped me stay away.
This is the thing about memoirs. Despite the mocking that goes on about over-sharing, I believe that those brave enough—like Knapp—to share, offer us a wonderful gift. By reading them, we can get a me too, and have hope. We can gasp in gratitude at our luck at our own lives, and perhaps have more empathy for those who fell over grace’s line, or perhaps we can grasp these stories as a helpful hand offered.
Growing up in a family where secrets reigned, without books I’d have had no clue that the entire world wasn’t made up of Cleaver, Cosby, and Brady families. Every day I silently offer gratitude to authors for writing out their lives. Today I send a message to Caroline Knapp. Thank you, Caroline, for your brave book.
Angry Fat Girls by Frances Kuffel
A book that digs deep and delivers the bones of an author’s truth—whether a memoir revealing the facts or a novel delivering emotional authenticity—is apparent upon the reading. These are the books that pop me in the heart or provide moment of reality mirrored back.
I thought about this as Frances Kuffel took me on a ride through honesty with Angry Fat Girls. Kuffel’s first memoir, Passing for Thin, detailed her 188-pound weight loss in exquisite detail. This follow-up reveals her subsequent gaining back of over half those pounds (and the stories of friends struggling with the same issues.)
Kuffel does what few do: she writes from the bottom out. She gives weight numbers and dress sizes and reveals both the self-pity and dark humor of any woman who wakes up each morning waiting for the scale to tell her who she is.
“My resume is full of facts that dance crazily across a contrary map of truth.
Take for instance, the fulfillment of my life-long desire to publish a book. I had no subject for a book until I lost 188 pounds, going from a size 32 to a size 6, after forty-two years of obesity. It was sold and published. Destroying the satisfaction I should have taken from yeas of my writing apprenticeship took cunning and craft.
But I did it. By the time I sat next to Bob Greene while Oprah grilled Winona Judd on wht whya and hows of her rotundity, my upper arms and breasts felt like overstuffed sausage meat in my size 16 red velvet dress. I had terrible gas from the chocolate-covered almonds I’d eaten the night before and was full of resentment because sharing the green room meant I didn’t dare eat the pastries they provided for the guests.
Needless to say, the camera did not turn to me for my thoughts on the matter.
Where do people get the courage to write like this? Do they know the gift they offer the world when they show their scars?
