Homesick
A Memoir of Family, Food, and Finding Hope
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- $0.99
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- $0.99
Publisher Description
This startlingly plainspoken and unflinching first-person account by the niece of fashion icon Ralph Lauren details a wrenching struggle with anorexia and bulimia -- and speaks powerfully to a widespread failure by the medical community to understand eating disorders.
With captivating blue eyes and dark hair, Jenny Lauren looked as though she'd stepped out of one of the glossy ads for which her uncle is famous. It was not long, however, before Jenny found herself in a world where it was easy to see herself as less than perfect. As a young dancer, she felt insecure that her muscular frame did not seem to measure up to the slim figures of the other girls. She was ten years old when she first starved herself. Although there were brief periods of recovery, Jenny spent much of her teens and early twenties bingeing, purging, and compulsively exercising. In 1997, her body finally broke down after years of relentless ravaging; her small intestine herniated. She could barely walk. But physician after physician told Jenny her ailments were largely in her head. Eventually Jenny's condition was connected to her eating disorder and the resulting strain on her digestive system, but it was too late -- irreparable damage appeared to have been done.
Although Homesick centers around Jenny's struggle with an eating disorder, as well as the dramatic surgery she was forced to undergo as a consequence, it is a much larger story that focuses on universal issues: the intricacies of family ties, the pressures of society, the search for selfhood, and ultimately, the power of finding hope. From the New York fashion shows to the art galleries of Santa Fe, from the Mayo Pain Management Clinic in Minnesota to the healing sanctuaries in Brazil, Jenny takes the reader on a cinematic odyssey to self-discovery. With flashes of wit and a knowing beyond its young writer's years, Homesick is a riveting and emotionally complex story of pain and tentative, hard-won recovery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This memoir about bulimia and its effects by Ralph Lauren's niece alternates between the gruesomely fascinating and tediously sad. Thirty-one-year-old Lauren, whose father (Ralph's brother) heads Ralph Lauren Men's Design, depicts in excruciating detail her odyssey through bingeing, purging, the debilitating sickness that ensues and her struggle to heal. Her story spans her life from the age of nine, when she's rejected by the prestigious School of American Ballet and subsequently embarks on her first attempt to starve herself into the perfect dancer's physique, to her torments as an adult running the gamut of traditional doctors and New Age healers as she tries to recover from a painful and depressing illness presumably brought on by her compulsive fasting, bingeing, purging and exercising. The pressure from her family to be beautiful and her alienation from her own body emerge as Lauren minutely describes her agonies over what she'll eat at each next meal, the clothing choices of everyone she meets and the intimate details of her bowel movements. This book raises the question of whether contemporary fashion standards pressure young women into the destructive behaviors of anorexia and bulimia. Lauren is intelligent, creative and a skilled writer, and she evokes empathy. She has a few encouraging epiphanies, as when, at age 30, she attends a Ralph Lauren fashion show and realizes, "The clothing is incredible as always, but who needs it?" The book's abrupt ending and dearth of conclusions, however, disturbingly portend that the reader may come away with more insights than the author.