Food and Loathing: Think Again
"Blah blah blah. I am sick of despair. It is so
magazine-model-looking-apathetic-and-underfed-and-stoned-and-exactly-the-same-as-all-the-other-wan-and-sickly-models. Forgive me for being chipper, but despair is desperately dull
— Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia"
In Food and Loathing: A Lament , book editor turned literary
agent, Betsy Lerner recalls the scars of her youth -- namely her
obsession with food, her interminable struggle with weight, and the
blow to the self-esteem such battles incurred.
Yes, what we have here is yet another memoir -- excuse me, Lament -- on
disordered eating suitable for a made-for-TV movie.
Lerner's chronicle opens with the sixth grade: she is the overweight
twelve year-old, fearful of gym weigh-ins and cruel fat jokes; a girl
constantly reminded by her mother that if she were thin, she'd be
perfect. "Hitting the chart with her rubber-tipped pointer, the science
teacher recited a little trick to remember the body types: the
ectomorph eats to live, the mesomorph eats and lives, and the endomorph
lives to eat," Lerner writes. "Did I live to eat? Was the act of
stuffing my face my raison d'etre?"
Though no real reason is given for why Betsy is heretofore overweight,
puberty only makes it worse. She befriends the boys who aren't
interested in dating her to stave off potential rejection and
humiliation; she learns that one of the rules of adolescent life,
especially among young girls, is that boyfriends trump girl friends. "I
had lots of friends. I was funny, I was generous, I was reliable.
Though I didn't know it at the time, I was becoming your standard-issue
fat friend."
And thus the saga begins. Lerner takes the reader through her years
mired in Overeaters Anonymous meetings, bad shrinks, and suicidal
depressions. Of course Overeaters Anonymous is only a band-aid cure and
Lerner's binge eating habits and dwindling self-esteem issues persist
over the years. By the age of 15, again over-weight and severely
depressed, she finds herself sitting in a psychiatrist's office with a
prescription for lithium in one hand and a manic-depressive diagnosis
in the other.
Betsy maintains her "fighting weight," -- a range a person considers an
acceptable or ideal, during college through the cyclical methods of
binging and "abstinence." Yet, still depressed, Betsy begins seeing a
bastard of a psychiatrist who torments her with parables and refers to
her as "the boy who cried wolf."
One evening she finds herself walking the ledge of a window.
Psychological intervention leads her to an elongated stay in a
psychiatric hospital, where her food and self-esteem issues are
divulged, where she finally is able to mourn for a younger sister who
died many years prior.
If you're starting to think you've been here before, you have. Lerner's
book takes a drastic turn toward the trite, coming off as a cross
between Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and
Bulimia, and Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation. This in
fact, might be a winning combination, but Lerner's writing is prosaic.
She has neither the humorous poignancy nor eloquent writing style of
Hornbacher, neither the acerbic wit nor uncanny bitchiness of Wurtzel.
Worse are the constant references to Sylvia Plath. She even, at one
point, uses the term "bell-jarred." Come on, Ms. Lerner, you were an
editor. Let your work speak for itself.
The rest of the story is cathartic. Betsy comes to accept her
fluctuations with "mood and food," she marries her best friend, and has
a baby girl.
And then something rather disturbing happens, something that seems to
rescind all the life lessons Betsy has learned along the way. The last
few pages of the book discuss her concern for her four year-old
daughter, concern that she too might have a weight issue.
The doctor says it is something they both will watch. But have we not
learned anything? Learner has, supposedly, in these 290 pages come to
understand her personal obsession with food as more often than not
contingent upon emotional turmoil; she has come to deal with her
disordered eating; she has come to see it as behavioral not genetic.
Yet she is already worried, perhaps a bit hyper-sensitive, to potential
weight problems in her four year-old. This is, unfortunately, how
eating disorders begin. We seem to have come full circle in the worst
way.
Eating disorders are a major problem in our society; the terms anorexia
and bulimia have become but jargon to our lexicon. Memoirs on or books
about eating disorders are indeed crucial in convincing those who
suffer to seek help and to dissuade those who are contemplating the
trammeled path into hell to turn around.
Lerner's book seems to offer no real help to those individuals. It is
just one woman's story of weight obsession that we have seen time and
again. There is no punch to the writing. There is no real poignancy. It
is a Lifetime Movie of the Week that proves, while every person has a
story to tell, some just aren't meant for print.
— 19 March 2003
