Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (2 page)

I wrote this book because I believe some people will recognize themselves in it—eating disordered or not—and because I believe, perhaps naively, that they might be willing to change their own behavior, get help if they need it, entertain the notion that their bodies are acceptable, that they themselves are neither insufficient nor in excess. I wrote it because I disagree with much of what is generally believed about eating disorders, and wanted to put in my two cents, for whatever it's worth. I wrote it because people often dismiss eating disorders as manifestations of vanity, immaturity, madness. It is, in some ways, all of these things. But it is also an addiction. It is a response, albeit a rather twisted one, to a culture, a family, a self. I wrote this because I want to dispel two common and contradictory myths about eating disorders: that they are an insignificant problem, solved by a little therapy and a little pill and a pat on the head, a

“stage” that “girls” go through—I know a girl whose psychiatrist told her that her bulimia was just a part of “normal adolescent
2“The Body Politic,” in Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, ed. Barbara
Findlen, 75-84. A beautifully written, extremely insightful essay on the author's eating
disorder.

development”—and, conversely, that they must belie true insanity, that they only happen to “those people” whose brains are incurably flawed, that “those people” are hopelessly “sick.”

An eating disorder is not usually a phase, and it is not necessarily indicative of madness. It is quite maddening, granted, not only for the loved ones of the eating disordered person but also for the person herself. It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of deadly contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength. A wish to prove that you need nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and becomes a searing need for the hunger itself. It is an attempt to find an identity, but ultimately it strips you of any sense of yourself, save the sorry identity of “sick.” It is a grotesque mockery of cultural standards of beauty that winds up mocking no one more than you.

It is a protest against cultural stereotypes of women that in the end makes you seem the weakest, the most needy and neurotic of all women. It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, contained—and in the end, of course, you find it's doing quite the opposite. These contradictions begin to split a person in two. Body and mind fall apart from each other, and it is in this fissure that an eating disorder may flourish, in the silence that surrounds this confusion that an eating disorder may fester and thrive.

An eating disorder is in many ways a rather logical elaboration on a cultural idea. While the personality of an eating-disordered person plays a huge role—we are often extreme people, highly competitive, incredibly self-critical, driven, perfectionistic, tending toward excess—and while the family of an eating-disordered person plays a fairly crucial part in creating an environment in which an eating disorder may grow like a hothouse flower, I do believe that the cultural environment is an equal, if not greater, culprit in the sheer
popularity
of eating disorders. There were numerous methods of self-destruction available to me, countless outlets that could have channeled my drive, perfectionism, ambition, and an excess of general intensity, millions of ways in which I could have responded to a culture that I found highly problematic. I did not choose those ways. I chose an eating disorder. I cannot help but think that, had I lived in a culture where “thinness” was not regarded as a strange state of grace, I might have sought out another means of attaining that grace, perhaps one that would not have so seriously damaged my body, and so radically distorted my sense of who I am.

I do not have all the answers. In fact, I have precious few. I will pose more questions in this book than I can respond to. I can offer little more than my perspective, my experience of having an eating disorder. It is not an unusual experience. I was sicker than some, not as sick as others. My eating disorder has neither exotic origins nor a religious-conversion conclusion. I am not a curiosity, nor is my life particularly curious. That's what bothers me—that my life is so common. That should not be the case. I would not wish my journey through a shimmery, fun house mirror-covered hell on anyone. I would not wish the bitter aftermath—that stage we can never foresee when we're sick, the damaged body, the constant temptation, the realizations of how we have failed to become ourselves, how afraid we were and are, and how we must start over from scratch, no matter how great that fear—on anyone. I don't think people realize, when they're just getting started on an eating disorder or even when they're in the grip of one, that it is not something that you just “get over.” For the vast majority of eating-disordered people, it is something that will haunt you for the rest of your life. You may change your behavior, change your beliefs about yourself and your body, give up that particular way of coping in the world. You may learn, as I have, that you would rather be a human than a human's thin shell. You may get well. But you never forget.

I would do anything to keep people from going where I went.

Writing this book was the only thing I could think of.

So I get to be the stereotype: female, white, young, middle-class.

I can't tell the story for all of us. I wrote this because I object to the homogenizing, the inaccurate trend in the majority of eating disorders literature that tends to generalize from the part to the whole, from a person to a group. I am not a doctor or a professor or an expert or a pundit. I'm a writer. I have no college degree and I never graduated from high school. I do research. I read. I talk to people. I look around. I think.

Those aren't qualifications enough. My only qualification, in the end, is this: I live it.

If I bore you, that is that. If I am clumsy, that may indicate partly
the difficulty of my subject, and the seriousness with which I am trying
to take what hold I can of it; more certainly, it will indicate my youth,
my lack of mastery of my so-called art or craft, my lack perhaps of
talent
.…

A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point
.

—JAMES AGEE

1 Childhood

1974-1982

“
Well, it's no use your talking about waking him,” said

Tweedledum, “when you're only one of the things in his

dream. You know very well you're not real.” “I am real!”

said Alice, and began to cry. “You won't make yourself a

bit realer by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there's

nothing to cry about.” “If I wasn't real,” Alice said—half

laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—“I

shouldn't be able to cry.” “I hope you don't think those

are real tears?” Tweedledee interrupted in a tone of great

contempt
.

—Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
It was that simple: One minute I was your average nine-year-old, shorts and a T-shirt and long brown braids, sitting in the yellow kitchen, watching
Brady Bunch
reruns, munching on a bag of Fritos, scratching the dog with my foot. The next minute I was walking, in a surreal haze I would later compare to the hum induced by speed, out of the kitchen, down the stairs, into the bathroom, shutting the door, putting the toilet seat up, pulling my braids back with one hand, sticking my first two fingers down my throat, and throwing up until I spat blood.

Flushing the toilet, washing my hands and face, smoothing my hair, walking back up the stairs of the sunny, empty house, sitting down in front of the television, picking up my bag of Fritos, scratching the dog with my foot.

How did your eating disorder start? the therapists ask years later, watching me pick at my nails, curled up in a ball in an endless series of leather chairs. I shrug. Hell if I know, I say.

I just wanted to see what would happen. Curiosity, of course, killed the cat.

It wouldn't hit me, what I'd done, until the next day in school. I would be in the lunchroom of Concord Elementary, Edina, Minnesota, sitting among my prepubescent, gangly friends, hunched over painful

nubs of breasts and staring at my lunch tray. I would realize that, having done it once, I'd have to keep doing it. I would panic. My head would throb, my heart do a little arrhythmic dance, my newly unbalanced chemistry making it seem as though the walls were tilting, the floor undulating beneath my penny-loafered feet. I'd push my tray away. Not hungry, I'd say. I did not say: I'd rather starve than spit blood.

And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.

I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, “No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!” Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil skinny chick who hisses,
Don't eat. I'm not going to let you eat. I'll let you go
as soon as you're thin, I swear I will. Everything will be okay when you're
thin
.

Liar. She never let me go. And I've never quite been able to wriggle my way free.

Five years old. Gina Lucarelli and I are standing in my parents'

kitchen, heads level with the countertops, searching for something to eat. Gina says. You guys don't have any normal food. I say apolo-getically, I know. My parents are weird about food. She asks, Do you have any chips? No. Cookies? No. We stand together, staring into the refrigerator. I announce, We have peanut butter. She pulls it out, sticks a grimy finger into it, licks it off. It's weird, she says. I know, I say. It's unsalted. She makes a face, says, Ick. I agree. We stare into the abyss of food that falls into two categories: Healthy Things and Things We Are Too Short to Cook—carrots, eggs, bread, nasty peanut butter, alfalfa sprouts, cucumbers, a six-pack of Diet Lipton Iced Tea in blue cans with a little yellow lemon above the word
Tea
. Tab in the pink can. I offer, We could have toast. She peers at the bread and declares, It's brown. We put the bread back. I say, inspired, We have cereal! We go to the cupboard, the one by the floor. We stare at the cereal. She says, It's weird. I say, I know. I pull out a box, look at the nutritional information, run my finger down the side and authoritatively note, It only has five grams of sugar in it. I stick my chin up and brag, We don't eat sugar cereals. They make you
fat
. Gina, competitive, says, I wouldn't even eat that. I wouldn't eat anything with more than
two
grams of sugar. I say, Me neither, put the cereal back, as if it's contaminated. I bounce up from the floor, stick my tongue out at Gina.
I'm
on a
diet
, I say. Me too, she says, face screwing up in a scowl. Nuh-uh, I say. Uh-huh, she retorts. I turn my back and say, Well, I wasn't hungry
anyway
. Me neither, she says. I go to the fridge, make a show of taking out a Diet Lipton Iced Tea with Little Yellow Lemon, pop it open, sip loudly,
tttthhhpppttt
. It tastes like sawdust, dries out my mouth. See? I say, pointing to
Diet
, I'm gonna be as thin as my mom when I grow up.

I think of Gina's mom, who I know for a
fact
buys sugar cereal. I know because every time I sleep over there we have Froot Loops for breakfast, the artificial colors turning the milk red. Gina and I suck it up with straws, seeing who can be louder.

Your mom, I say out of pure spite, is
fat
.

Gina says, At least my mom knows how to
cook
.

At least my mom has a
job
, I shout.

At least my mom is
nice
, she sneers.

I clock her. She cries. Baby, I say. I flounce out onto the deck, climb onto the picnic table, pull on my blue plastic Mickey Mouse sunglasses, imagining that I am the sophisticated bathing suit lady in the Diet Lipton Iced Tea commercials, tan and long and thin. I lean back casually, lift the can to my mouth. I begin to take a bitter sip and spill it all over my shirt.

That night, while my father is cooking dinner, I lean against his knees and announce, I'm not hungry. I'm on a diet. My father laughs.

Feet dangling from my chair at the table, I stare at the food, push it around, glance surreptitiously at my mother's plate, her nervous little bites. The way she leans back in her chair, setting down her fork to gesture rapidly with her hands as she speaks. My father, bent over his plate, eating in

huge bites. My mother shoves her dinner away, precisely half eaten.

My father tells her she wastes food, that he hates the way she always wastes food. My mother snaps back defensively, I'm full,
dear
. Glares.

I push my plate away, say loudly, I'm full.

And all eyes turn to me. Come on, Piglet, says my mother. A few more bites. Two more, she says.

Three, says my father. They glare at each other.

I eat a pea.

about food, even as a baby. My mother was

unable to breast-feed me because it made her feel as if she were being devoured. I was allergic to cow's milk, soy milk, rice milk. My parents had to feed me a vile concoction of ground lamb and goat's milk that made them both positively ill. Apparently I guzzled it up. Later they gave me orange juice in a bottle, which rotted my teeth. I suspect that I may not even have been normal about food in utero; my mother's eating habits verge on the bizarre. As a child, I had endless food allergies. Sugar, food coloring, and preservatives sent me into hyperactive orbit, sleepless and wild for days. My parents were usually good about making sure that we had dinner together, that I ate three meals a day, that I didn't eat too much junk food and ate my vegetables. They were also given to sudden fits of paranoid