Food And Loathing
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In FOOD AND LOATHING 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 twenties 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 program, 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 selfhood, 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.
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 - and even learn to love.
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.
