Checking out the competition…
…that deal with eating disorders.
I was asked by a friend to compile a list of books that deal with the subject of eating disorders. This is just a preliminary version:
Bulimia: A Guide to Recovery by Peter J Cooper.
Fed Up and Hungry_ a series of essays on EDs edited by Marilyn Lawrence
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Woolf
Womansize by Kim Chernin and The Hungry Self by the same author which may be out of print.
Fabulous Figures by Rachel Swift – a humorous, critique of society’s obsession with aesthetic perfection.
Getting Better Bit(e) By Bit(e)_ (A Survival Kit for sufferers of Bulimia Nervosa and Binge Eating Disorders by Ulrike Schmidt and Janet Treasure
Some novels that deal with EDs:
The Passion of Alice by Stephanie Grant
Eve’s Apple by Jonathan Rosen
LifeSize by Jenefer Shute
About BED:
Sweet Death by Claude Tardat
She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb
And of course:
Second Star to the Right by Deborah Hautzig
The Best Little Girl in the World by Steven Levenkron (a tad too didactic IMHO)
Catherine by Maureen Dunbar
Oh, and OT: I now have a copy of Steven Levenkron’s The Luckiest Girl in the World. It is out of print but Amazon found a copy of it for me. it arrived a couple of months ago all the way from some second hand bookshop in the good old US of A! They are now scouring the continent on my behalf for a copy of Kessa so, fingers crossed!
Oh, and a book I have just finished reading called The Mermaids Singing by Lisa Carey (which I mentioned in another post) has an anorexia sub-plot. (more…)
I wonder which way round it was: did I betray my body or did my body betray me? Have years of abusing my body, be it bingeing, purging, starving and occasionally (very occasionally) over-exercising ruined me beyond repair. That’s the hardest thing to deal with: that I did all this to myself. And that I’ve left it too late to do anything about it. I took a fully functioning body and tried to destroy it. That’s sick, stupid and selfish. And now the body I’ve systematically abused for nearly the whole of my adult life is having its long, slow, excruciating revenge. Sometimes I think I am useful only as a cautionary tale.
Black Edged and Borderless
I was supposed to write about my mental illness last week but procrastination is my middle name and I didn’t get around to it. Another problem is that I am so ambivalent about it. I have a truly weird diagnosis – or rather, diagnoses – schizoaffective disorder and bulimia nervosa although like many bulimics I started out with anorexia – at least that’s what it says on my medical notes. I actually started out with binge eating disorder and ‘progressed’ to anorexia when others commented unfavourably on my weight. So I am like Churchill’s Soviet Union: A enigma within an enigma within an enigma. Basically, I am plain weird. I do weird things, say weird things, think weird things and for all of those weird things I take a bucketful of weird medication. And I hate it. Even those bucketfuls of medication don’t make me ‘like everybody else’. But then as a CPN once said to me ‘You will never be normal because there really is no such thing as normal.’
That made me feel better for about a quarter of an hour.
I love the way that even among the marginalized there is a hierarchy.
What’s that all about?
Is it ’cause I is ugly?
I’m so tired. Curl up and sleep. Deep. Never wake up.
And I didn’t choose anorexia/bulimia/schizoaffective disorder. I did not stop for them, they stopped for me.
Now the drugs don’t work · They just make you worse · But I know I’ll see your face again ·
Am I hopeless at everything I do?
Mental illness in a sentence: The universe is not your friend.
Did that do? Was it good enough for you?
Addendum: I went to L’s place for dinner on Friday and told her about ordering meds from over the net and she went and told my mother. I don’t know whether to feel betrayed or flattered that someone would take the trouble to do such a thing. Mother (a psych nurse) said that I should agree to into hospital to wean myself off them. Unlike most people I hate being in hospital. As soon as I arrive I am planning my escape. In my area they are quite heavy handed. The last time I ‘absconded’ they sent the police around to my flat. I was bundled in a van and dumped at the doors of the hospital like an unwanted parcel. The police, however, were for the most part professional and courteous. I don’t think returning escapees from mental asylums is a task they enjoy. And I can’t say I blame them.
Stolen From ASE-D
‘I don’t understand how I can be so unimportant. I want to believe that I deserve a chance, it is the rest of the world that seems to tell me I do not.
I know a lot of people here complain about weights and numbers and sizes and calories and foods and spoiler this and spoiler that but honestly those things do not trigger me at all.
The unequal distribution of love is my one and only trigger. Always has been and always will be. I don’t care if you post that you weigh 22 pounds. I don’t care if you shop in the infant section. I don’t care if you’ve eaten nothing but celery for 19 months. What bothers me is when someone cares about you, or is willing to help you, or when you have an opportunity and squander it, when you get some form of love and act like it is nothing worth having.’
How can I expect people to empathise with me or indeed me with them when I don’t even feel as though I have a right to inhabit this planet. My weird combination of illnesses means that I will never be fully understood. What then is the point of it all? What is the point of even trying? I can’t get past this wall I have built around myself. I am a prisoner in my own skin. Ugly and worthless. ‘You don’t belong here,’ says the voice in my head. ‘And you never will.’
I have a hidden twin.
Embedded somewhere
Deep within
And even the night,
Even sleep offers no respite.
She comes alive at dusk
And does not rest
‘Til the break of day
She invades my dreams
In a multitude of guises.
She is a hawk with talons of steel,
Savage and merciless and ravenous.
She is the evil spirit sucking me dry.
A pallid bluish green ghost.
A malevolent spiritual being,
A Roman deity. A rainbow. A butterfly
A fluttering moth, plain and brown
A flamboyant flake of crimson flame.
Sometimes she is an enchantress, an angel
Swelling as I shrink into myself
A swarm of black beetles.
Obscuring the moon
She pursues me through the dark forest
In which my nightmares dwell.
She whispers into my ear,
‘You are like the farmer’s prize heifer
Destined only to be sold at the cattle market
And milked for the rest of your life.’
…Liz Jones of The Daily Mail strikes again in this article. Ms Jones expresses her sympathy for women with anorexia but asserts that: ‘I have never been bulimic, thinking that particular illness too messy and self-indulgent… ‘, implying that both bulimia and anorexia are chosen by the sufferer. ‘Which eating disorder would you like today, Ms Jones?’ No one ever asked me that question. I wonder if she is aware of the existence of a subtype of anorexia called ‘purging anorexia’. I also wonder if she is aware that many women who become bulimic have a history of anorexia. Having suffered, at various times in my life, from both illnesses I found this article less than helpful. Making anorexia sound like a lifestyle choice further trivializes and simplifies an illness that both society and the medical profession have trouble taking seriously enough in the first place. Well done, Liz! You’re about as helpful as the Maginot Line.
Addendum: And I’m just a tad pissed off that Liz Jones, someone who uses her profession ‘journalism’ as a form of therapy and who is one of the most self-indulgent people I have ever encountered (irl or online) has the audacity to castigate an entire group of people who suffer from a genuine psychiatric disorder as ‘self indulgent’. Look in the mirror, Ms Jones, and you’ll see the very personification of ‘self indulgence’. And she hasn’t even bothered to research the illness she so casually dismisses. The paragraph I quoted above concludes with this: ‘But the truth is I saw my three-week experiment of eating ‘normally’ as a bout of bulimia.’ The word ‘bulimia’ is a Greek word roughly translated as ‘ox hunger’. It is a widely acknowledged misnomer. Just like ‘anorexia’ when, roughly translated means ‘loss of appetite’. To be officially diagnosed with Bulimia Nervosa the patient has to fulfill several diagnostic criteria one of which is ‘Bulimia nervosa is harder to spot than anorexia because many with bulimia have a relatively normal appearance. Those with bulimia always purge, but they don’t always do it by vomiting.’ Eating three thousand calories a day is not bulimia, Ms Jones, unless you regularly purge. Something a proper journalist should have researched. I do not know whether Ms Jones sees herself as a ‘journalist’, a ‘diarist’, an ‘editor’, or a ‘columnist’ and frankly I do not particularly care. All I know is that calling sufferers of a very real, distressing illness ‘self indulgent’ is hideously irresponsible and someone who writes for a newspaper that regularly castigates female celebrities for failing to be ‘good role models’ for their ‘fans’ should be painfully aware of this.
I have just found out who Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s mate Liz Jones is. She is the fashion editor and columnist for The Daily Mail. She used to worship at the Altar of the Cult of Thinness and, if she is involved in the fashion industry, she still does. She is a former anorectic and used to be editor of Marie Claire, a magazine that also worships at the Altar of the Cult of Thinness. No doubt she passed on her ‘wisdom’ to any vulnerable young woman foolish enough to purchase that magazine. She doesn’t seem like the kind of person who spends a good deal of time in ‘Working Men’s Clubs’ watching ‘working men’ ‘swigging beer’: ‘Responding to beer-swilling blokes in Wibsey Working Men’s Club, in Bradford, who said on television that they had lost their place as the backbone of the nation because Asians were overtaking them, she wrote: “A snail with special needs would overtake this lot … It is patronising and not remotely useful to treat the white working class as though they are all helpless, giant toddlers in need of conservation.’
I cannot find any evidence that Ms. Jones is of ‘working class stock’. I’m willing to bet that the working men she expresses such contempt for have contributed more to society that she ever will. I wonder how many young women’s lives have been destroyed as a result of the tyranny of slenderness promoted by the magazines she has worked for. She clearly doesn’t believe young women are ‘in need of conservation’ either.
I once called Polly Hudson of The Daily Mirror ‘Vacuous Bimbo Extraordinaire‘. Well, sorry Polly love, you’ve just been usurped. Step up to the stage, Ms. Jones, to accept your new title.
Addendum: I’ve found out why Nobby is called ‘Nobby’! Good old Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobby_Clark
So Sick of Drowning 