Susan Burton, an editor at This American Life, wrote this memoir about her adolescence and early twenties that has a recognizable cadence and rhythm of storytelling similar to the popular weekly public radio show. Her story has four acts, relating to preadolescence, when she begins menstruating early, high school years, college years, and finally, the beginning of career and young adulting. Woven through these years are four threads: her bodily development, with its meaning for her; her intellectual development; changes in her family; and how each of these threads defines her. All of this, the emotional consequences of each of these changes and their impact on her self-identity, becomes expressed through her eating behavior. All the challenges of her parents’ divorce and geographic distance, the family tensions preceding the break up, her handling of the move and adjusting to changes, early menstruation, social adjustments, everything seemed to find expression in body image and the need to control food intake.

Burton shows how anorexia and binge eating are two sides of the same coin, and offers her analysis of how that worked for her. I don’t wish to oversimplify what must be a complex relationship, but it appears that control over food was the means of controlling everything else that was uncontrollable in life. Social acceptance in Colorado as a teen after leaving her home in Michigan meant trying to re-invent herself to gain acceptance and friendships. Being slender seemed to be the means to this. Burton identifies Seventeen magazine as a major influence in this regard. Her familial attitudes toward weight and food was also a significant factor. In college, the pendulum swings from anorexia to binge eating, as Burton has a shadow life haunting grocery stores and eateries in her college town of New Haven, CT. Bingeing on sugary and high carbohydrate foods filled her to the point of sickness, yet she never purged as bulimics do. Her form of purging was to take long runs the next day. The daily cycle starts interfering with her studies, but Burton manages to push through and complete her degree. Meeting her future husband, as well as some straight talk from her mother and aunt help Burton to pull it together in her senior year at Yale, and get on a better track. Unfortunately, during a European trip with her future husband and another friend, a chance encounter with a slender friend from the past sends Burton back into anorexic behavior. It really isn’t until her late thirties that she starts to truly confront the roots of this destructive behavior, and begins, with a therapeutic relationship, to tease apart the strands that became tangled so long ago.

Burton admits that she presently is able to live just above anorexia-level of consumption, even with a rewarding marriage, family, and career. The addictive quality of anorexia and bingeing is so pernicious, so insidious, that it is a mind game to attempt to normalize one’s relationship with food. Unlike other addictions like alcohol or drugs, one cannot give it up, not to make those addictions sound easy. One has to have a relationship with food, make peace with food, eat to live. Once also has to make peace with one’s bodily size, although it has been shown that eating disordered people have an inaccurate assessment of their body’s size, often believing that it is much larger that in reality. Our society screams messages at us about what an ideal body should look like, with adolescent girls especially feeling the judgement harshly. All women must find a way to navigate relations with self, others, self-identity and food. Food as comfort, food as entertainment, food as nourishment, food as family time, food as reward— all these relationships and more must be worked out.

Burton brings interesting insights to all of this, in a most personal way as she writes to discover where her relationship with food went so wrong. Every woman has to find her path through this thicket as well, so many should be able to relate with her struggles. It is an inspiring book. I can imagine mothers and their young adult daughters finding much to discuss here. Highly recommended.