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________________A FORMER ANOREXIC PONDERS
________________THE FAMILY ORIGINS
________________OF EATING DISORDERS.
BY JENNIFER EGAN | My stepsister Marcia and I share an occasional lust for high grease breakfast foods, and over pancakes and eggs recently, she told me something interesting. Marcia's daughter, Drennan, was with us -- a wily, emphatic little girl who, at 4 years old, is young enough that one can still spell words in her presence and elude -- just -- the clamp of her curiosity. S-E-X is a big one, of course. Marcia is careful to spell out the name of her ex-husband, Drennan's father, when speaking of him with anything but the warmest affection. I was surprised, though, when Marcia mentioned that she'd been on a D-I-E-T. "Why did you spell it?" I asked. "Oh, I don't even want her thinking about all that," Marcia said. We both looked at Drennan, who was smacking her lips over fried eggs and hash browns. I didn't have to ask what Marcia meant by "all that." We are both 35, members of the vanguard generation of disordered eaters. When Marcia and I were children, no one had heard of anorexia; I first encountered the term at 13, in 1975, in a magazine article about a girl who had emaciated herself for reasons no one understood. I remember her picture: somber, willowy, standing on a bathroom scale, her shoulder blades jutting out like wings. I looked at her and felt my whole being compress into a single strand of longing. I wanted that. Anorexia. And I got it, not in so dire a way that I was hospitalized with feeding tubes -- or even close. But at 14, when I began losing weight precipitously, I inculcated myself into the cult of food consciousness and its attendant elations and despairs. I joined the ranks of girls and women whose notebook margins are dappled with obscure sums -- apple, 100; bagel, 200; frozen yogurt, 150 -- women for whom countless meals are fraught with the tension of trying to eat less than anyone else, who keep a section of their closets full of "skinny" clothes that radiate desire and reproach, who cancel doctor appointments because they're afraid of being weighed that day, for whom "You look too thin" is perceived as a radiant compliment and a growling stomach and a light head inspire feelings of triumph. These rituals, and many others, were to circumscribe my thoughts and behavior for the next 15 years. It can be eerie, in light of our presumed uniqueness, to discover how closely the experiences of one's contemporaries parallel one's own. I've heard many women my age say, "I wanted to get anorexia," or even, "I learned how to make myself throw up," as a prelude to prolonged and desperate struggles with bulimia. Many of my friends at the University of Pennsylvania were grappling with full-blown eating disorders; the rest were wary and self-conscious about food. How could they not be? In the women's restrooms at the Wharton Business School, where I sometimes studied at night, food containers often lay right next to toilets. Donut boxes, Twinkie wrappers, ice cream containers -- these remnants of desperation frightened me the way nightmares do, grotesque distortions of things that are, at bottom, deeply familiar. Here, eating no longer bore any relation to nourishment or even to pleasure: It had been reduced to a brief complication in the process of purgation, of emptying oneself. My mother, who graduated from Vassar in 1959, finds these stories incomprehensible. "We'd order in plates of French fries and hamburgers, and we'd just eat it all and go to bed," she says. "We were all a little overweight by today's standards, but I don't remember that troubling me in the least." Marilyn Monroe was the beauty who floated in the minds of my mother and her friends, voluptuous, pillowy. "The models in the fashion magazines were skinny, but no one cared about them," my mother says. "They were anonymous." But attitudes toward food were the least of the differences between my mother's college years and my own. "There were certain people who planned to have careers," she says, "but the rest of us majored in English or something, and the idea was that you would get married. I thought I'd never have to earn a living. I'd be an even more ornamental accessory." This promise -- that in exchange for being lovely and well educated, my mother would be taken care of for life -- was one of many the world failed to keep. By 26, she found herself divorced with a 2-year-old daughter. It was 1965. Women only five or six years younger than she were studying at universities awash in demands from all quarters -- for equality, for opportunities -- demands my mother had never thought to make. The world that she and her Vassar friends had been groomed to inhabit had vanished from under their feet. NEXT+PAGE: When feminine power went from Marilyn Monroe to Twiggy
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ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE STREETER
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