I read this book on a plane delayed on its way to Charleston. The plane sat on the runway, and I read one Shakespeare midterm, and then one chapter of Food and Loathing. As each bright yellow exam book was tucked away, graded, commented, student summed up, I would swoop back into Food and Loathing. There were moments I found so painful that I put the chapter down midway and opened a new exam instead, and only those of you who are teachers will realize what that meant in terms of depths of emotion.
At some point last year, I wrote a Pillowtalk on Fat Girl. That’s a book written absolutely from within the grip of food and loathing; the author, Judith Moore, never makes her way out. She opens that book with a furious blast of body self-hatred and she ends in the same state. Both of these books powerfully relate the power of food, the way food feels in the body and soul. In Lerner’s words: “the first bite of McDonald’s was like heroine, the salt and grease combining in a hot explosion that traveled right to the pain center and wiped it out. All feeling was numbed as the potato sticks, like tiny soldiers, decimated the emotional terrain, leaving me bloated, drugged, transported.”
Judith Moore also celebrated food as comfort and despair, as the only emotion that really mattered. Both of these memoirs are self-evidently true, if only because every American woman can attest to having a body that sometimes feels out of control. Unlike the details of Jonathan Frey’s made-up memoir, the shock of this book is not from improbable stories, but from how very common the stories and the emotions are.
Yet there is a difference between Fat Girl and Food and Loathing, a narratival distance in Food and Loathing that wasn’t present in Fat Girl. Perhaps because I have a small daughter, the tale of Betsy Lerner’s little sister, a tale which slowly grows in reader’s consciousness, as, I think, her fate became conscious to her as the author, took on a particular horror. This memoir is more like a novel. It also has a much happier ending. You know she’ll get through the despair and addiction to food: you can feel it in the measured way she offers parts of her sister’s story, parts of her own story.
By the end the author is doubtless still struggling with food, but it’s no longer her death sentence. This is a beautifully designed memoir: one that keeps you reading and reading, not because of the unendurable pace of bad events, but because Betsy Lerner has turned her life into a ballet with meaning. So we watch for the patterns she discovered in therapy: it reads, in truth, like something of a detective story. The mystery at the heart of Fat Girl is the horror of the bad mother. The mystery here, well, I’ll leave that up to you to discover!
We’ll start the Book Club discussion on May 15th-but let’s widen our scope. Try to pick up Fat Girl or Food and Loathing, if you can. But even if you haven’t the time, let’s talk about why food gains such an emotional wallop. When does food become more than necessary calories and turn into something that dominates one’s life and self-perception? See you May 15!
