Food and Loathing
A Lament
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4.0 • 8 Ratings
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Publisher Description
This “razor-sharp memoir” (Entertainment Weekly) candidly explores Betsy Lerner’s twenty-year battle with depression and compulsive eating.
Never before has the intimate relationship between mood swings and food swings been so honestly chronicled. In Food and Loathing, Betsy Lerner vividly reveals the secret life of women and their self-esteem. Lerner tells the story of an adolescence on the outside looking in, watching her slim friends pair off, and believing the only thing between her and perfection was an extra thirty pounds. Joining one of the first groups of Overeaters Anonymous in 1975, she forms a cult-like devotion to the twelve-step program and loses fifty pounds—only to gain it all back and more.
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 being a writer, 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 toward selfhood, unraveling the self-loathing of an eating disorder coupled with a paralyzing 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.
For every woman who calculates her worth on the morning scale, this is her story, too.
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.
Customer Reviews
One of my favorite books
I’ve loved this book since I first read it in high school, the author is painfully relatable. Definitely recommend this to anyone who’s struggled to maintain a healthy relationship with food.