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My second favorite form of masochism is shaming myself for failing to adequately starve myself, which was long my favorite form.
After I wrote the first draft of this essay, my editor asked why I read so many books about eating disorders in the first place. I tried to think of a morally sound reason, but maybe there isn’t one.
I used to reach for eating disorder media with some tangled combination of motivations: morbid curiosity, desire for a shared experience, desire for pain or validation or validation-via-pain. I watched YouTube videos and ignored trigger warnings: “What I eat in a Week [TW: Restriction/5000 calorie binge].” I felt physically sick for days after watching some of these videos, unable to focus on work because I had dissociated to avoid the despair or entrapment they made me feel. Once I stopped pretending to have recovered while maintaining a fear of salt, sugar, fat, carbs, straws, gum, uncooked vegetables, sleeping less than eight hours a night, eating after 6pm, dairy products, elevators, strength training, and anyone catching sight of my body when I wasn’t sucking in my stomach, I swore off eating disorder media. I wanted distance from it. I didn’t want this experience to define me.
That lasted about a year, until I decided to attempt in my undergraduate thesis to write in a meaningful way about my eating disorder. I thought writing about pain could give it meaning while giving me legitimacy as a writer, and this was my pain. When I look back at that work, it feels wrong. Much of it is self-serious in a way that’s hard for me to read. Despite knowing this narrator is going through the most difficult experience of her life, I want to tell her to lighten up. I don’t know who this writing is for. Who would it help? More importantly, who would it hurt?
For a while after that, I thought that no one should write about eating disorders at all because there was no way to do so without somehow glamorizing them. I was simultaneously starting to doubt the importance of recovery itself. I thought about my eating disorder and got rebellious and stubborn: And what if I want to be sick? Why is it so important that I get better?
It was amid these uneasy questions, this doubt, that I picked up a series of books about eating disorders from the past four years. First was Anna Shechtman’s The Riddles of the Sphinx, which combines memoir and narrative journalism to explore the connection between Shechtman’s experience with anorexia to the history of women crossword puzzle creators. Next, Emmeline Clein’s Dead Weight, an essay collection that weaves together the author’s own experience with broader discussions of eating disorders in literary figures and pop culture. Finally, Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed, a novel whose protagonist’s life revolves around self-starvation rituals. I read these books hoping they would bring back a sense of right and wrong. I needed help. I wanted someone to not just tell me how to feel about my illness but to make me believe it. Neither of the nonfiction books gave me this assurance, but Broder’s novel did.
To ask the question, “Is there a helpful way to write about eating disorders?” implies that there is also a wrong way to do so. If seemingly any way you could approach the subject risks crossing that line, the easy answer is to prescribe silence. But not writing about eating disorders can make the experience even more confusing, shameful, and isolating than it already is. The question also elides the fact that books about the subject can have many different purposes, and it presumes that the same tactics will produce the same effects on all readers.
I came to these books as someone for whom the appeal of disordered eating has always been largely an aesthetic one. My eating disorder was a form of self expression. It gave the people to whom I felt inferior a reason to take me seriously. Especially for those of us who spend too much time online, and for those of us who have found meaning in the way we style ourselves, society appears as a collection of intersecting aesthetics; and ascribing to one of them is often the most effective way to communicate in primarily visual media like TikTok, Instagram, and the streets of Brooklyn. Having read and listened to friends’ and strangers’ experiences with disordered eating, I know I am not alone in holding onto an ideal of tragic beauty that I thought I could have for myself via an eating disorder. While readers may identify a great deal or not at all with the subject matter in these books, this was the place that I was reading from: that of a style-minded (or blinded) C-list recoveree with lingering inferiority issues.
Few writers want to make people sicker (I should hope, anyway), but not everyone’s goal is to advocate recovery. Some writers aim to explain the disease to those outside of it. Shechtman’s book is directed at a wider audience than just those who have suffered an eating disorder, focusing on the connection between her anorexia and interest in crossword puzzles. Other writers hope to expose one of the disease’s less explored aspects—to make those in the throes of their own disorder feel less alone. The essays in Dead Weight span a variety of topics—less discussed eating disorders, the ineffective structure of many ED recovery programs, the danger of prescribing Wellbutrin to patients with a history of disordered eating—and therefore could benefit a variety of audiences. But Clein opens the book with an address specifically to readers who, like herself, have experienced an eating disorder. She is “writing this for and through all the girls who died sororal deaths,” which includes “deaths from eating disorders . . . and deaths from botched plastic surgeries. Dying of the demands of womanhood, the fascism of femininity.” She calls these readers her sisters. Other readers are allowed, but her sisters are the target audience—it is for them. A later paragraph begins, “An aside, and I’m just talking to my sisters now: I want you to know I know how much it hurts, the hunger and the misunderstanding and the things they write about you, and I know how smart you are.”
If my own reading is any judge, Broder’s Milk Fed would be largely boring and certainly less humorous to someone who doesn’t identify closely with its protagonist and narrator, Rachel, and the eating disorder her life orbits. The novel places the reader inside Rachel’s disordered mind and uses both humor and sympathy to explore the eating disorder that has sucked the color from her life and the atrocious mother-daughter relationship that led her to start starving herself in the first place. Since the reader is inside Rachel’s head, and her head is filled with little besides thoughts of when and how she will next eat and wishes for validation from her emotionally abusive mother and thin coworker, anyone who does not relate to her preoccupation could become bored out their minds.
I don’t believe Clein or Shechtman intended to harm me or any readers. In fact, they adhere to common harm reduction strategies. One strategy is born from the fear that one’s writing will be “instructive”: We advise the writer to avoid specifics. Avoid numbers. Don’t tell readers how many calories you ate in a day. How much you weighed. Do not detail a meal plan. Another strategy: emphasize how dangerous this illness can be.
Clein seems convinced by these strategies when she tells us that she wants to be different from the “cautionary tales turned guidebooks and novels turned scripture . . . I’m trying my best not to give too many numbers or cite names or other potentially triggering details.” She seeks to attack the hierarchy of eating disorders with a mix of scary statistics and abstract or metaphorical statements. When writing about her own EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified) diagnosis, she says that those with this diagnosis are “read as unserious disciples, toying with disorder instead of actually falling ill. This, despite a lifetime mortality rate rivaling anorexia’s and EDNOS patients scoring ‘just as high on measures of eating disorder thoughts and behaviors as those with DSM-diagnosed anorexia nervosa and bulimia.’” She tells us how many people have died from different eating disorders, tells the stories of people who have died of bulimia or opted for euthanasia after their anorexia was deemed terminal. Shechtman, too, ties disordered eating closely to death, writing, “The anorexic, then, is just another person trying to be a better version of herself. That she risks death in so trying is the most disastrous paradox of the disease.” Of course, nonfiction affords an emphasis on statistics to prove a point, but these authors go further, their rhetorical choices painting eating disorders in a grim light, death hovering over the sentences.
These strategies are logical, but they offer shallow protection for those of us who find illness itself alluring. Many writers and ED recoverees have acknowledged “wellness culture” as rebranded diet culture, but fewer have noted the opposite: that showing the unwellness of an eating disorder can be just as much of a draw. The commercialization of “wellness,” as an aesthetic, feels so dystopian some of us were bound to look for an escape. Just as in the ’90s, when heroin chic appealed to a generation sick of the consumerism that the ’80s shoved down their throats, illness today may feel oppositional, a counter-aesthetic to a world where six year olds are hooked on anti-wrinkle creams.
Since I never actually wanted to be well—I wanted an aesthetic, a look, an aura—telling me that I was at risk of a multitude of health conditions, by authors or my own doctors, could not deter me. The brain can refuse logic like oil in water. Clein’s and Shechtman’s writing did scare me, but this type of fear was appealing. Perverse though it may be, when Shechtman writes that her eating disorder did not make her “perfect,” as she hoped, but rather “cause for concern,” that sounded even better to me. Pulling up the prevailing beauty standards as the rotting root of disordered eating ignores the validation that illness itself can provide.
Rather than shy away from details that could be deemed “instructive,” Milk Fed is so rich in details of its protagonist’s daily consumption that it might as well come with a meal plan. “Breakfast One” is nicotine gum, which Rachel buys “on eBay, stale and discounted,” mixed with water from the shower where she chews it. “Breakfast Two” is 190 calories, composed of “an 8-ounce container of 0% fat Greek Yogurt with two packets of Splenda mixed in, as well as a diet chocolate muffin top” which she is “so emotionally dependent on . . . that I feared what would happen in the event of a shortage.” Her first lunch is a Subway salad that sounds revolting, sauceless but for salt and pepper. Her second is sugar-free frozen yogurt, which she consumes mostly inside the yogurt shop at a table facing the wall.
Milk Fed scared me, too, but not all fear hits the same. Broder ignited my fear by depicting Rachel’s eating disorder as mind-numbingly boring. Embarrassing even. The thought of giving up so much life for something that didn’t even make her interesting, didn’t make anyone jealous of her perfection, was terrifying. Broder doesn’t belittle Rachel or her trauma, but her eating disorder itself appears pathetic, and she is not its perfect victim. Her behavior is odd and shrouded in shame. Her chance at a personality is flattened by an obsession with food and her body. When Miriam, her love interest, comes over, Rachel tells the reader that she chose her outfit because it made her look thin. She wanted “to remind Miriam of what I was and what she was in that old competition between women . . . If I was going to be vulnerable, express that I wanted her, then I needed to already be some kind of victor.” She is relatable to the cruelest, most pitiful, and least sensible corners of a disordered mindset. From Broder’s descriptions, it’s hard to imagine someone wanting to be like Rachel, and as for myself, I fear becoming her—returning to her, if I’m honest.
No one forces Rachel to recover, partly because she is alone in her life, a cardboard box of disordered eating habits she built for herself with the help of her mother. Her eating disorder is not presented as a life-or-death situation, nor is it built with words that make it validating. Her therapist asks her if she is “satisfied with just surviving” or “do you want to get well?” Rachel responds, “I’m well enough.” It’s her life, and if she wants to stay sick, no one is going to force her out of it. I once wanted an eating disorder to make people take me seriously, and Broder would not give me the satisfaction of seeing that happen for Rachel. Milk Fed was the first book I have read in years that made me want to continue recovering not because I “should” but because of how it was portrayed in comparison to being ill.
Beneath a writer’s commitment to or renunciation of these harm reduction strategies, their ability to sway an aesthetically-minded reader in particular relies on something more innocuous: their word choice. When I read about eating disorders, the way writers characterize the illness, the language and connotations they build around it, are more impactful than their explicit claims or stated purpose.
Even as Clein follows the harm reduction playbook, her words had me considering if recovery is all it’s cracked up to be: She wants to “give something to sad girls . . . that sounds like a symphony or a screamo band or a country song to cry to, cacophonous and guttural and probably trying too hard. I want to drape the living skinny, sexy, sad girl in hazard lights instead of letting her corpse soak up the spotlight.” Avoiding particular details can be well-intentioned, but it naturally leads a writer to steer instead into dramatic metaphors, the flowery language of desolate yearning. Words that don’t have positive connotations but do have beautiful ones. “Symphony,” I think. “Cacophonous.” Don’t get me started on “soaking up the spotlight”—my eyes have glazed over in a fantasy. Instead of numbers and diet regimes, Clein tells us about sad girls’ “lyrical wails.” Her essay on binge eating begins: “Girl after girl eats trash. Trash? the intrigued interlocutor asks, as in, junk food? No, and now their eyes are wet, glistening.” The presence of an “intrigued interlocutor” is as desirable as the “glistening” eyes. This writing style is more alluring, more constructive of the disordered eating ideal—the aesthetic of the illness, if not the reality—than anyone telling me how many calories of which foods they eat in a day.
When Clein spends several sentences beautifying the word “anorexia” itself—it “tasted holy, at least when I said the word aloud, whispering it in bed . . . That x sound, slinky”—this is not precisely intentioned poeticism. It’s indulgent. The anorexics at an outpatient center are characterized as “the stars, with their spiky shapes and gravitational pulls, attracting yearning gazes and disciples in the waiting room, dispensing cigarettes in the parking lot”; Clein’s anorexic friend, whom she was attracted to, has legs like “brittle sticks that might crack.” Even if Clein does not condone this characterization, her language makes me aspire to be like these girls. This holy, slinky, whispering, spiky, gravitational, yearning, brittle figure evokes mystery, a savior complex and victim complex, and individualism, too. This is someone who doesn’t need or want anything outside of themself, not even sustenance. When I read these words, I see myself from outside: I don’t think about how it would feel to be one of these girls; I think about how badly I want to be described in the same way they are. Clein tells us she is trying, in her writing, “to harmonize with a ghost choir” of “sisters” in disordered eating. Girls who have “longed to lick another’s pain off their tongue, taste their sweat and feed them chocolate.” The words are rich and sexy. They make me want to relapse in the same way that Pete Doherty saying “You’re in my veins, you fuck” to Kate Moss makes me sort of want to shoot up, you know, in the name of passion. (If you want to talk more about glamorized self-destruction . . .).
Shechtman, too, focuses more on her disordered mindset than on what an eating disorder actually looks like. Her book is nonfiction, but she constructs a narrative: She started starving herself because she wanted to become a “complex character,” which she claims to have achieved, despite being “miserable” afterward. During her disorder, she “felt a thrill of triumph over my appetite and my shape, but I didn’t know what kind of Pyrrhic victory it would be. Within six weeks of fasting, I had lost weight and control of a disorder that was meant to be a display of self-control.” We don’t see much of that loss of control, and instead she tells us that despite the pain of it, she found it “fascinating.”
I recognize that they are some of the deadliest mental illnesses out there, so you will have to forgive me for saying this, but: We need to take eating disorders less seriously. When we write about eating disorders, when we talk about eating disorders, as “fascinating,” we give them a power that we should instead aim to strip from them.
I try to read books about eating disorders with my head on straight, giving writers the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t trying to make me want to relapse, even if their words nudge me back toward old habits. In her essay “Skinny, Sexy, Seizing,” Clein exposes the danger that the antidepressant Wellbutrin poses specifically to patients with a history of disordered eating. She describes how it can in fact feed into disordered behaviors, and criticizes doctors for prescribing the medication without thoroughly interrogating a patient’s history. I tried to read this essay how I was supposed to, to take away the point that Clein intended, but what stuck with me was the repeated description of the drugs as “happy, sexy, skinny pills.” I had an overwhelming desire, which I had not had before, to get the medication. (If you see me at the pharmacy picking up a prescription next month, know that I also know it might not be what’s best for me.)
Shechtman knows that to read with an eating disorder is, often, to misread. She references Abigail Bray, who describes eating disorders as “reading disorders,” a diagnosis Clein and I both prickle at. As Clein describes, people with eating disorders are often picking up exactly what diet culture is putting down. But Shechtman has a point that the people we imagine ourselves to become when we starve are often ill-conceived. Some readers can’t be scared straight by somber talk of death and hospitalization but will be scared by the revelation that the aesthetic they are chasing is itself a lie.
As an abstraction, misery appeals; it’s when it is concrete that we see it for what it is. Despite how “chilly”—not “freezing” or “frigid”—Rachel’s yogurt parlor of choice is, she eats there to be alone and preserve her specific “style and rhythm” of yogurt eating: “First, I licked around the sides of the cup to get the melty parts. Then, I put spoonful after spoonful of the cooler stuff in my mouth and squeegeed it back and forth between my teeth to liquify it.” “Chilly” and “melty” don’t quite have the same aesthetic connotations as, say, “cacophony” and “ghost choir.” It’s hard to imagine “squeegee”-ing anything beautifully.
Rachel laments the days when she “opened the wrapper [of her protein bar] at my desk ‘just to sniff it,’ and gobbled it up.” She eats her dinner “hunkered down” in her kitchen. After taking laxatives, she spends the day “out of commission, hopping from toilet to toilet like a manic toad.” She describes tea with a teaspoon of milk as “like a ‘milkshake,’” and I laugh at her sad little life, even as I see myself in her. When she talks about the joy of eating meals with as many separate “parts” as possible, I begrudgingly admit I understand this completely. I hate my eating disorder through Rachel. I do not take her detailed meal plan as instructive precisely because she lays it all out for me without the romantic language or the thrilling mystery of abstraction. Because she “gobbles” and “hunkers.” She “hops” like a “manic toad.” Broder doesn’t even give her the cigarettes of Clein’s anorexics, instead nicotine gum that she keeps, unwrapped, in her purse, which is kind of gross and certainly weird. The character who gets to coolly smoke cigarettes is Miriam, who is “undeniably fat.”
In the past, I have tried to project an air of tragic beauty when talking and writing about my own disordered eating. It’s hard not to, but I would like to cut that out. So, well, here are some experiences: I didn’t go to college parties for two years because I was scared that getting fewer than eight hours of sleep would mess with my digestion. I forgot about everything besides food. I stopped caring about writing, fashion, reading, art. I have never respected not caring as a point of view, but there I was without hobbies, preoccupied by inputting into my Google Calendar whatever on the dining hall’s menu had the least, um, everything. I chain-chewed gum until I got scared of that too and swore it off for years. I binged on unflavored protein powder mixed with water, which I shoved into my mouth as if trying to caulk a hole. I cried about how bloated I was. While trying to make myself more desirable, I also lost my own ability to desire: Zero sex drive for some three years, none of that fun excitement you get from having a crush on someone. And no, through all of this I was not cool. I was not mysterious. I was not adored. If anyone was secretly in love with me, it was a very well-kept secret. I still did not have a million friends—one reason I started down this path in the first place was because I lacked social skills from a young age and thought being thin was the only way I could convince anyone to like someone with no social capital.
I identify with Rachel because, within her disorder, she is an embarrassment to herself, and she knows she is acting freaky, even if she can’t stop. When Miriam fills her frozen yogurt cup over the rim, despite Rachel yelling at her to stop, Rachel spends a ridiculous amount of brain power figuring out how to dispose of the extra yogurt. She takes it to the trash can, but the can’s only opening is a little slot. She must use her phone to “tap the spoon and release the blobs of yogurt into the slot.” When a coworker—“the little shit”—catches her, she feels “violated, disgraced.” She knows how odd her behavior looks. She eats her yogurt “in self-disgust and peace.”
My eating disorder also got me into the most embarrassing situations of my life. In high school, I didn’t eat breakfast until I heard one YouTuber say you had to eat within fifteen minutes of working out or “all your progress would be lost.” That isn’t true, by the way. But I panicked and started packing pitiful breakfasts made of things I deemed safe: a Mason jar full of nuts, frozen fruit, and whatever “superfoods” I’d convinced my mom to buy for me that week (cacao nibs, goji berries, spirulina powder). For fear it would look “weird” to eat in the locker room, I went into a bathroom stall and opened my jar on the toilet. I took a bite, but the nuts were crunchy and impossible to chew quietly. If someone came in and heard me eating in the stall, that would be even more embarrassing than eating in the open locker room, so, naturally, I opted for a greater possibility for embarrassment than either of the two: the shower. I got in, took off all my clothes (it would look weird for me to be fully clothed in the shower stall), and turned on the water to mask the sound of my chewing. This went fine until another woman walked into the locker room and made eye contact with me through the shower curtain’s plastic window as I spooned low-carb raw ingredients into my mouth. I look back on this and wonder at what kind of misfiring must have been going on in my neural pathways to get me there.
Rachel is not aesthetically appealing until she recovers. When she fantasizes about becoming a person I find interesting, someone I look up to, it is not someone who is thin but someone without an eating disorder at all. She imagines “an alternate universe, to be some other Rachel who only wore clothing with elastic waistbands, sweatpants and parachute pants. In that world, I could inhale and exhale freely. In that world, I would cut my hair short, wear red Air Jordans and custom gold Air Force 1s, hooded sweatshirts, blazers and skinny ties, backward baseball caps. I would reflect casual confidence and power, a bit of nastiness, still Jewy. I’d be like a Beastie Boy circa 1989.”
Awareness of aesthetics cannot save everyone, but it might save readers who have not been convinced that illness isn’t a validating choice. I am not calling for an overhaul of every eating disorder writing harm reduction strategy. Just recognition, and maybe an update for readers like myself, trapped in a culture of aesthetics as statements, style as selfhood, where the choices you make as a consumer can feel like the greatest power you have. Don’t remind me that starving won’t give me control nor belonging nor political power. The logical part of my brain knows that, but she’s passed out in the passenger seat as of late. Take the vision of myself that I’m driving toward and evaporate it like the mirage it is. The emptiness that remains just might scare me toward something real.
Erin Evans is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Spike, Vestoj, and is forthcoming from Bomb.
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