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The seventeen chapters of this book contain fourteen stories of anorexia
and/or bulimia, and three stories of obesity. The slant toward disorders of
emaciation is very probably due to the choice of celebrities as
contributors. There aren’t any Hollywood A-list megastars here, but these
interview subjects are all established in their fields and speak from
experience about the pressures that the entertainment industry – aided and
abetted often by their own dysfunctional family backgrounds – puts on its
players. As Catherine Hickland observes: “For actresses our looks are like
our instruments; we are hyperaware of appearance, weight, and beauty.” And
so we learn of obsessive dieting, and obsessive exercise, and of the
delusion that one is always “fat” even though one’s bones stick out, and of
the rediscovery of the ancient Roman trick of vomiting, and of the ruinous
consequences of that method for the teeth, and much else that is hidden from
the eyes of those who are uninitiated into eating disorders.
The standout piece in the collection is by the jockey,
Shane Sellers, winner of more than 4,000 horse races and more than $130
million in purses. He did everything that anorectics and bulimics do, on a
daily basis, but framed as an iron professional discipline, not as a
neurosis. His essay is a revealing look into the brutal world of the
jockey’s locker room, where there’s a basin alongside the toilets for
“heaving,” and a sweat box for “pulling” pounds of water out of the body in
order to make riding weight. It is a system that promotes bulimia, and it
kills people. After rising to the top of this regime, Sellers became an
outspoken reformer, advocating (and sometimes winning) changes in track
rules to protect jockeys’ health.
There aren’t any similar reformers among the
anorectic/bulimic actresses in the book, agitating for changes in the
Hollywood horse-racing business to promote a more reasonably-sized,
healthier image of women. But a number of the interview subjects here have
done much good by campaigning and touring to speak out about their own
eating disorders, and by so doing, they have helped break the silence and
isolation in which many non-celebrities suffer the same ordeals. There’s a
good deal of comparison here of eating disorders with alcoholism and other
drug addictions, and the contributors have a diversity of theories about the
nature, cause, and cure of their conditions. Except for the obese comedy
writer and actor Bruce Vilanch, who cheerfully denies that he has a problem,
they have all experienced a sense of recovery, and all say that they are
able now to eat in a healthy middle way, without starving or bingeing. They
testify to a great diversity of recovery pathways, such as anti-anxiety
medications, psychological counseling, nutrition therapy, dialectical and
cognitive behavior therapies, will power, self-discipline, surgery, and a
handful who used 12-step. The book sometimes tests the reader’s patience
with the contributors’ narcissism – what do you expect from celebrities? –
but it is, all the same, a useful and readable collection of anecdotal
material about its topic. – Marty N. 11/8/2006 |
LifeRing
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