Food and Loathing
A Lament
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Never before Food and Loathing has the intimate relationship between mood swings and food swings been so honestly chronicled. As a bright but chubby girl, Betsy Lerner believed that thinness was the key to success with friends and boys. By junior high, she had precisely divided the world of food into two camps: the dietetic and the forbidden. Becoming a member of the then-fledgling Overeaters Anonymous, she formed a cult-like devotion to the program and lost fifty pounds in a matter of months, only to gain it all back and more. "I am powerless over Hostess cakes," she writes, "and my life has become unmanageable."
Her twenties are marked by yo-yo dieting, depressive episodes, and a sadistic shrink who dubs her "the boy who cried wolf." Then, just as Lerner begins to realize her dream of becoming a writer, entering Columbia's prestigious MFA program, she spirals into a suicidal depression and lands at New York State Psychiatric Institute. There, a young doctor helps her take her first steps toward selfhood and unraveling the dual legacy of compulsion and depression.
A powerfully rendered story for anyone who has every wielded a fork in despair or calculated her worth on the morning scale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lerner's first book, The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers, offered funny and frank talk from a publishing professional. In this follow-up memoir she reveals her lifelong struggle with compulsive eating and mental illness. A literary agent and former editor, Lerner joined Overeaters Anonymous at age 15 and rigorously adopted the 12-step program. A year later, she was prescribed lithium, though side effects soon forced her to quit the drug. Unmedicated and with an insensitive therapist, Lerner began her inevitable descent. While enrolled in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University, she came close to committing suicide, and this desperate act led to her voluntary admittance to the psych ward at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Her experience there and at the New York State Psychiatric Institute is the heart of this sincere book. Lerner's descriptions of fellow patients and hospital staff, the day-to-day routine of "the bin" and her therapy sessions are poignant and darkly comic; she emerges months later with a keen understanding of the psychology that drove her there and a newfound desire to live. In her epilogue Lerner writes: "It took a lifetime of tomorrows struggling with the scale and severe mood swings before I was accurately diagnosed and properly treated." Neither happened in the hospital. According to Lerner's current doctor, "All needed was lithium" (albeit, an adjusted dosage); hospitalization was a "waste." Whether or not readers agree with this assessment and Lerner herself has doubts her lament is a triumph.
