Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
TWO
STARVED One of the curious aspects of middle school is how extraordinary the pain feels, even when the affliction is quite mundane. The wrong pair of jeans, your unpronounceable last name, a paper wad thrown by a popular boy that hit your back during an assembly. Has anyone ever suffered like this? My mother used to tell me all kids were struggling. Even the bullies. “It’s such a tough time for everyone,” she would say, and get a tsk-tsk look, like she was talking about Ethiopia. A nice perspective, I suppose. But I was pretty sure my unhappiness was worse than everyone else’s. In sixth grade, I walked home alone every day. In the quiet hours before my brother returned from football and my parents returned from work, I rooted around our cabinets for new kinds of comfort. Graham crackers. Chunks of cheddar cheese melted in the microwave for exactly seven seconds, the moment the sides began to slump. Sips of occasional beer weren’t enough anymore. I needed the numbing agents of sugar and salt. Becoming a binge eater in a house like mine wasn’t easy. You had to get creative. My mother bought natural, oily peanut butter, but if you swirled a spoonful with molasses, you had something approaching a Reese’s. Four tubes of cake icing sat on the fourth shelf of the pantry, and I squirted a dollop in my mouth each day. But my new comfort also brought a new pain. “You’re getting fat,” my brother told me one day, as I watched Oprah on the couch. He and I didn’t speak much anymore. He stuck to his room and his Judas Priest. But he had an older sibling’s homing device for sore spots. “Fat” was the meanest word you could call a girl. The absolute worst thing in the world. My first diet started in seventh grade. My cafeteria lunch shrank to iceberg lettuce dribbled with low-cal ranch dressing. I loaded up on Diet Cokes. Three, four a day. After school, I grape-vined to Kathy Smith’s aerobic workout. I confined myself to frozen Lean Cuisine dinners. Cheese pizza. Cheese cannelloni. Cheese lasagna. (The same three ingredients, rolled up in different shapes.) The diet craze of the 1980s was a nationwide tornado that left leg warmers and V-hip leotards in its wake. Even my food co-op mother bought a book listing calorie counts, and I memorized those entries like Bible passages. I couldn’t tell you much about John 3:16, but I knew Blueberry Muffin: 426. The misery of calorie restriction is well documented, but what people rarely mention is that it’s also a bit fun. How much hunger can I tolerate? How much joy can I withhold? What a perverse pleasure, to be in charge of your own pain. My extreme dieting became a power struggle with my mother, just like the extreme amount of Wet N Wild makeup I wore or the extreme number of sitcoms I watched every afternoon. I was the dish thrower in our house now. The good part about weight obsession, though, is how it bonded me with other girls. Quite a few of us were sweating in unitards by then. Two of my friends told me about lying in bed one afternoon in their bathing suits, circling trouble spots on each other’s body with a permanent marker. And when I heard that story, I thought: That is love.
- Page 3 and 4: Begin Reading Table of Contents New
- Page 5 and 6: PRELUDE
- Page 7 and 8: The guy isn’t bad-looking. Slight
- Page 9 and 10: WOMEN WHO DRINK I was 33, and lying
- Page 11 and 12: she did not get—but I’ve never
- Page 13 and 14: In my 20s, friends called with that
- Page 15 and 16: I discussed roofies with Aaron Whit
- Page 17 and 18: a while, a columnist would come alo
- Page 19 and 20: ONE
- Page 21 and 22: when no one was looking, and I woul
- Page 23 and 24: steps, not talking. As much as my f
- Page 25 and 26: Our home was on a major artery thro
- Page 27 and 28: She’d transformed, like Olivia Ne
- Page 29: I threw up seven times. Hunched ove
- Page 33 and 34: more successful her eating disorder
- Page 35 and 36: orrowed. She couldn’t miss the si
- Page 37 and 38: To make it more confounding, Miles
- Page 39 and 40: efused to be won. I drank cup after
- Page 41 and 42: DRESSING IN MEN’S CLOTHES I start
- Page 43 and 44: coffee. But that seemed like a very
- Page 45 and 46: you to imperil our amazing friendsh
- Page 47 and 48: I FINALLY GOT a boyfriend near the
- Page 49 and 50: FOUR
- Page 51 and 52: The production guy passed my desk a
- Page 53 and 54: drank myself to the place where I w
- Page 55 and 56: ehind me, and told him I was moving
- Page 57 and 58: my Harp as soon I walked in the doo
- Page 59 and 60: FIVE
- Page 61 and 62: “Your key, mademoiselle,” said
- Page 63 and 64: My friend Meredith lived in an apar
- Page 65 and 66: “This was fun,” I said. He was
- Page 67 and 68: OF COURSE. OF course I’d gone to
- Page 69 and 70: like you should not be crying,” h
- Page 71 and 72: SIX
- Page 73 and 74: When the bottle was drained, I’d
- Page 75 and 76: But no, really, I had it this time.
- Page 77 and 78: off a gargantuan diamond. I thought
- Page 79 and 80: INTERLUDE
TWO
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