Food and Loathing: A Lament - Hardcover

Lerner, Betsy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743221834 ISBN 13: 9780743221832

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Synopsis

The author traces her lifetime struggle with an eating disorder and depression, describing how her size and self-esteen were intertwined, her experiences with support groups and therapy, her education, and the family secrets that haunted her recovery.

About this title

Review

As post-modern recovery memoirs go, Food and Loathing, Betsy Lerner's account of compulsive overeating and decades' worth of yo-yo dieting, may strike the casual reader as considerably less compelling than, say, Elizabeth Wurtzel's similarly toned though far more solipsistic and seemingly endless diary of her affair with Ritalin, Now, More, Again. (The editor of Wurtzel's breakthrough Gen X memoir, Prozac Nation, Lerner figured prominently as a character in the sequel.) Lerner's admission that "I am powerless over Hostess cakes, and my life has become unmanageable", may not seem to equate with the far more harrowing revelations recounted in so many gripping first-person dependency confessionals. But there are potentially hundreds of thousands of readers (both men and women, though there is a bit of a Bridget Jones-like assumption here that Lerner is writing primarily for the former) with whom the author will strike many a poignant chord as she charts a lifelong battle with her weight.

Lerner takes us from those all-too-familiar and universally mortifying school days (the book opens in 1972, when she was a 12-year-old being weighed in front of her sixth-grade class in the gymnasium), through twentysomething years filled with sadness, unrequited love and a pioneering membership in Overeaters Anonymous, to a bout with suicidal depression that resulted in a six-month stay at New York State Psychiatric Institute. Like Wurtzel, Lerner is at her best when she is turning her sarcastic and unsparing sense of humour on herself. ("In college, when I first encountered Descartes, it took me no time to translate his famous dictum into something I could relate to: I weigh x, therefore I am shit", she writes.) But she also shares with her celebrated protégé a recurring confusion between trying to relate with her readers via unflinching honesty and simply sharing too much uninteresting or irrelevant information. --Jim DeRogatis, Amazon.com

Review

Alice Elliott Dark author of "Think of England" and "In the Gloaming" "Food and Loathing" is a favorite meal to be savored -- although it's hard not to gobble it up at one sitting. Betsy Lerner writes about her struggles with extra pounds and depression with humor and sensitivity. As a writer, she's at her fighting weight on every page.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743221834
• ISBN 13: 9780743221832
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288