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Product Description
In this memoir, a bright, chubby girl believes that thinness is next to godliness and so attends one of the first meetings of Overeaters Anonymous in 1975. Her 20s are marked by yo-yo dieting, depressive episodes and a sadistic shrink. Then, just as her dream of being a writer is within reach, entering Columbia's prestigious MFA programme, she spirals into a suicidal depression and lands for a six-month stay at New York State Psychiatric Institute. There a young resident helps her take her first steps towards self-hood, unravelling the self-loathing of an eating disorder coupled with a paralysing mood disorder. He also helps her confront a tragic family secret - whose silence had enveloped an otherwise average Jewish middle-class family - and begin, finally, to heal. "Food and Loathing" is a book about how people use food to narcotise, to love and to escape. It's about therapy - the good, the bad and the down right destructive - and about every woman who spends too much of her life thinking about her weight and how she can forgive herself for living.
Amazon.com Review
As post-modern recovery memoirs go, Betsy Lerner’s account of compulsive overeating and decades' worth of yo-yo dieting may strike the casual reader as considerably less compelling than, say, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s similarly toned though far more solipsistic and seemingly endless diary of her affair with Ritalin, Now, More, Again.(The editor of Wurtzel’s breakthrough Gen X memoir, Prozac Nation, Lerner figured prominently as a character in the sequel.) Lerner’s admission that, "I am powerless over Hostess cakes, and my life has become unmanageable," may not seem to equate with the far more harrowing revelations recounted in so many gripping first-person dependency confessionals. But there are potentially hundreds of thousands of readers (both men and women, though there is a bit of a Bridget Jones-like assumption here that Lerner is writing primarily for the former) with whom the author will strike many a poignant chord as she charts a lifelong battle with her weight. She takes us from those all-too-familiar and universally mortifying school days (the book opens in 1972, when Lerner was a 12-year-old being weighed in front of her sixth-grade class in the gymnasium), through twentysomething years filled with sadness, unrequited love, and a pioneering membership in Overeaters Anonymous, to a bout with suicidal depression that resulted in a six-month stay at New York State Psychiatric Institute. Like Wurtzel, Lerner is at her best when she is turning her sarcastic and unsparing sense of humor on herself. ("In college, when I first encountered Descartes, it took me no time to translate his famous dictum into something I could relate to: I weigh x, therefore I am shit," she writes.) But she also shares with her celebrated protégé a recurring confusion between trying to relate with her readers via unflinching honesty and simply sharing too much uninteresting or irrelevant information. --Jim DeRogatis
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