Real Stories of Anorexia Challenge Stereotypes

Besides covering New York’s cultural institutions, the New York Sun’s arts reporter, Kate Taylor, has written about a no less important, though perhaps more somber, subject: eating disorders. Anchor Books has just published an anthology that she edited, “Going Hungry: Writers on Desire, Self-Denial, and Overcoming Anorexia.”In addition to Ms. Taylor’s introductory essay, “Going Hungry” includes essays by 18 writers, including Jennifer Egan, Joyce Maynard, Louise Glück, and Francine du Plessix Gray. The Sun sat down with Ms. Taylor to talk about her new book.Q: Why were you interested in compiling a book about anorexia?A: I myself was anorexic for two different periods — first when I was 11 and 12, and then in college. In my junior year of college I was hospitalized. I was very resistant to going to the hospital, partly because I was in denial about how ill I really was, but also because I had a very disdainful attitude toward other anorexics, and I was horrified by the idea of having to meet some of them. I imagined that the other patients in the hospital would be all young, privileged — female, needless to say — and pathologically superficial.In fact, when I got there, I found a very diverse group of people: all ages, all socioeconomic backgrounds, and a wide variety of life experiences. Many people had very difficult family backgrounds: Some had had to put a parent into drug rehab; some had been either literally or effectively abandoned. They all had very real reasons for needing a coping mechanism, which their eating disorders had become. This started me thinking about how much more varied — and in a way, more serious — real stories about anorexia are than the kind of silly things you read in tabloids about people like Nicole Richie or Mary-Kate Olsen. Though, in fact, I bet those celebrities have sadder stories than we’ll ever know, too.How did you find the contributors for the book?In lots of different ways. One of the two male contributors, Rudy Ruiz, is the brother of a friend from college. Another contributor, Latria Graham, I found through the public relations office of the center where she had been in treatment. Several people I pursued after reading something they had written elsewhere about their illness. It took a lot of research to find people whose stories were varied and who were willing to write honestly about such a painful subject.I should add that no one in the book is still actively suffering from anorexia; I felt that that would be both inappropriate and counterproductive. Anorexia seriously distorts your thinking, so you can’t have much useful insight into your experience until you’ve recovered.What is anorexia about? Is it largely driven by the unrealistic images of women’s bodies propagated by the press and the fashion industry?Our society’s valorization of thinness certainly sets the stage for anorexia to exist, but the illness is about something much deeper. What generally happens is that someone starts to restrict her eating, for whatever reason, and discovers that this gives her a feeling of power and achievement. In its early stages, starvation actually triggers a kind of hyperactivity and euphoria, as your body goes into a “fight or flight” response. For me, in college, it really was like a drug: I became addicted to being hungry.Is anorexia still a big problem? I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but I think of it as being kind of 1982.It’s funny you would say that. That was sort of when pop cultural and media interest in it first peaked. To give the history in a capsule: Anorexia was formalized as a diagnosis in 1873. Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th century, it was seen through the lens of many different interpretations. In the 1910s and ’20s, for instance, doctors believed it to be a purely physical illness, in which weight loss was caused by endocrine imbalances. In the 1940s and ’50s, it was given a Freudian interpretation: Anorexics were supposed to starve themselves out of a paranoid fear of becoming pregnant. In the 1960s, experts, who included Hilde Bruch and Salvador Minuchin, started looking at anorexia in the context of both family dynamics and changing social pressures on women and girls. They founded our modern, psychological understanding of anorexia.Bruch wrote her first book about anorexia in 1973 and a second, more popular one in 1978. In between, the social context surrounding the illness itself completely changed: Suddenly, it was something that was talked about in popular magazines and was described as being “epidemic.” In 1981, the first television movie about anorexia aired. In 1983, Karen Carpenter died of heart failure, caused by her long-term anorexia, and that attracted a lot of attention, too.Do you believe that anorexia is genetic?I think the research so far is very preliminary and doesn’t show much — certainly not as much as some popular articles have suggested. Clearly, genes are a significant contributing factor, just as they are for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other mental illnesses. But whether there is a specific gene for anorexia — frankly, I doubt it.Do you ever completely recover from anorexia? Or is it sort of like alcoholism, where it’s always something you have to watch out for?Well, the fact that I myself relapsed in college suggests that a person can develop a kind of susceptibility. But I do think it’s possible to recover fully. You have to physically recover first; that’s a complete minimum. But, as for the psychological susceptibility, I think you can grow out of it. You reach a stage of life and maturity where you realize that you can get a much deeper gratification from accomplishing things in the real world than from starving yourself.

Real Stories of Anorexia Challenge Stereotypes

Real Stories of Anorexia Challenge Stereotypes

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