The-F-Word.org

I cannot go through this again
I cannot go through this again
I cannot go through this again
I cannot go through this again…

The words fade and give way to a synthetic drizzle of the melody, piano following along in the background. Together, they create the calm static of a dreamlike state, where all is zen. You’re floating oh-so-comfortably…

…and then, without warning, the rest of the band hits the ground running with its assault of drums, guitars and more synth. You are suddenly shattered back to chaotic reality.

“A-with a-teeth-a,” Trent Reznor sings with a venegance only he fully understands. I picture him literally biting the object of his passion and ripping it to shreds with the intensity of emotion matched in his voice.

She will not let you go
Keeps on and on
She will not let you go
Keeps on and on
This time, I’m not coming back
(she will not let you go)
-Nine Inch Nails, With Teeth

If I ever needed a song that described my emotions during the first year of my recovery, it was this one. Put simply, I was a mess. My state of mind changed rapidly from “I’ll never purge/starve/put my body through this shit again” to chaos and self-destruction. I never knew what would flip my emotions upside-down, for better or worse; sometimes it depended on the hour, the minute, the anything.

Everything felt like punishment. If I ate, I felt disgusted with any feelings of satiety I might have given myself. If I didn’t eat, I knew I wasn’t doing what I was “supposed” to be doing as a part of recovery, and therefore I felt like crap about that as well. If I had it both ways and ate/purged, the emotions doubled in their intensity each way. No matter what I did, I couldn’t win. At least with the eating disorder, I knew what I could expect. In this mess called recovery, I still felt like a prisoner to my eating disorder, only now I was attempting escape, getting caught, and paying what seemed like even more brutal consequences than what I was dealing with before.

I hated everything. I hated myself for getting into this mess in the first place, for my lack of understanding the world – and myself – without an eating disorder. I hated gritting my teeth and moving forward with recovery, because dammit, it was hard, and I felt absolutely clueless about whether I was really getting better or if I was completely fooling myself (and everyone else). What if everything I knew was a complete farce? I felt alien in a world where everything should have felt familiar, but the rules had changed, and I no longer knew the rules. Once I thought I had them re-learned, there was always that one little exception where, of course, I screwed everything up. Or so it felt.

As much of an emotional roller-coaster 2005 was for me, I had two inspirations that guided me. The most important was my husband, Patrick, who I met in October 2005. He didn’t miraculously save me from my woes, as he can attest, but he helped me help myself by making me feel worthy of being saved. Even when in doubt, that kept me going in the years that have followed.

The other inspiration was With Teeth, the Nine Inch Nails album released in May that year. The timing and theme of this album couldn’t have come at any better time for me. After a four-year absence from releasing new music and touring, Reznor finally revealed his biggest project ever: putting himself back together.

A  near-fatal heroin overdose woke Reznor up; he realized he would lose himself to drug and alcohol addiction if he didn’t stop. He checked himself into rehab and endured a detox that “makes him shudder to this day.” He’s been sober since June 11, 2001.

Reznor warmed slowly to writing new music. He wasn’t sure if he had anything to say now that he was sober and questioned his future in the music industry altogether. However, a renewed clarity surfaced once the process began. Eventually the words came together and Reznor recorded With Teeth, the soundtrack to his journey of re-defining himself.

Learning that Trent Reznor, a musician whose music I had adored since the age of 13, had undergone his own process of recovery, sparked inspiration in me. It not only gave me a new appreciation for his music, but I also developed a deep sense of respect for him as a person – not just for surviving, but for speaking openly about his addictions and the journey back. It was exactly what I needed. He returned from his own private hell stronger than ever…and so could I.

I listened to With Teeth for about a year straight with little interruption from other music on my playlist. Every song resonates with some stage of recovery, from the confrontational “Don’t you fucking know what you are!” in the song You Know What You Are? to “What if everything around you isn’t quite as it seems?” in the ending track, Right Where It Belongs. In the same way that I identify with certain songs because I listened to them repeatedly when I was active in my eating disorder, this album became my recovery anthem. The title track, With Teeth, represents the turning point for when healthier days started outnumbering the disordered days. The album as a whole is not only Trent’s story of moving forward, but it became embedded into the soundtrack of my own story as I took a leap of faith and kept going myself.

How has music played a role in the course of your disorder and recovery?

If I could travel to any part of the globe, India would be it. But as much as I love Indian food and culture, I’m not all that hip on Bollywood and the representation of Indian women in film. Luckily reader Kara (a.k.a. Filmi Girl) is a big fan. About 15 years ago, a friend gave her a cassette tape with the soundtrack from the 1980s hit Bollywood film Maine Pyaar Kiye. She was hooked. A few years later, she began watching the films the songs were centered around, and after realizing that her real life friends were uninterested in hearing her gush about Aamir, Preity and Rani, she started a blog. The 30-year-old librarian now spends her limited free time reading about her latest interest and watching large amounts of deliciously, over-the-top Indian films.  She guest blogs today about the ever whittling waistlines of Bollywood actresses.

I began watching Bollywood movies about 10 years ago. Amidst the colorful songs and costumes and dramatic storylines, I began to realize something else that appealed to me about these movies – the actresses were all of normal and healthy weights. By “normal weight,” I don’t mean Hollywood normal, I mean real life normal. From Madhuri Dixit, whose ample thighs supported her beautiful dancing to Kajol’s sturdy tomboyish frame to Karishma Kapoor’s gawky slimness, the actresses all appeared healthy and well nourished. Being beautiful included a variety of different weights and shapes and sizes, rather than a single hard-to-achieve standard.

Yet, something disturbing has happened over the last few years, the variety is disappearing and in its place has taken root something very familiar – the new global standard of beauty.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I just watched the trailer for Precious, a new sledgehammer of a film by executive producers Tyler Perry and Oprah, and it sent chills down my spine.

The film is based on the book, Push, by Sapphire, about an abused fat teenage black girl in Harlem, and seems to encapsulate the range of feminist topics: domestic abuse, racism, sizeism, poverty, sexual assault, illiteracy… I’m not a fan of Tyler Perry’s fat-lady drag slapstick comedies, but it appears as if his and Oprah’s role is mostly that of lending it their public support. The film appears to depict the stereotypical “black welfare queen” (played by Mo’Nique), but while the inspiring teacher (Paula Patton) is near supermodel perfection, at least she isn’t the tired “Nice White Lady” cliche. And newcomer Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe, who plays Precious, is an Actual Fat Woman and not some thin star swimming in a fat suit. The film opens in theaters in November and is said to be an Oscar contender.

An amazing display of body diversity at the West Indian-American Day Parade held yesterday in — where else? — New York City

(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The parade recalls the Carnivals of the Caribbean, which began (as we know them) after the abolishment of slavery.  Slaves, who were formerly barred from the lavish costume balls and feasts of the wealthy Spanish, French and British aristocracy, celebrated their new freedom by lampooning their former masters and mimicking the elaborate dress and behavior of the European gentry.   Today’s women in barely-there bikinis represent a liberation of a different kind.  As quoted in the New York Daily News:

The dancers weren’t naked, but there were plenty of sequined bikinis strutting down the Brooklyn parade route to calypso and reggae beats.

“We wine and we gyrate to the pulsating music,” said Barbadian-born Susan Dottin, 39, of East New York, Brooklyn, who wore a blue-and-gold feathered bikini and a headdress as she proudly waved her Barbados flag.

“You’re getting loose, you’re feeling no hangups, nothing, no inhibitions. It’s just about having a good time.”

Natasha Barnes has noted the “systematic paring down of an elaborate thematically inspired costume tradition that has given way to ‘Rio-styled’ Carnival pageantry in which spandex and string bikinis dominate” that occurred during the 1980s. In her essay, “Notes on Women and Spectacle in Contemporary Trinidad Carnival,” the rise of scantily clad female masqueraders and sexually explicit calypsos appear to be a point of contention among West Indian scholars as to their ascribed social and feminist implications.*

Feminist or not… a group of confident women of all shapes and sizes who aren’t afraid to show their fat, thin and in-between bodies before a crowd of two million people?  Amazing.

* Barnes, Natasha. “Body Talk: Notes on Women’s Spectacle in Contemporary Trinidad.” Small Axe 7 (March 2000): 93-105.

In conversations on body image and eating disorders, black women are often left out of the debate– it’s assumed that by virtue of their skin color, black women are somehow rendered immune to those ubiquitous pressures that plague white women (I would argue that the reverse might also be true: that because of racism, black women are even more conscious of and sensitive to how they present themselves and are perceived by others.) Here’s a round-up of recent news that shows that while no one ethnic or cultural group has a monopoly on eating disorders and/or body image insecurities, distinct social forces act in altogether different ways in influencing the self-esteem, health and happiness of women of color.

_____________________________________________

Remember the study from a few months back in which it was found that black girls and girls from low-income families are more likely to develop bulimia than their wealthier white counterparts?  Playwright and screenwriter Stephanie Armstrong is helping to fill a gap in the noticeably lacking eating disorder memoirs genre with her new book, Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat: A Story of Bulimia. Armstrong — now a recovered, married mother of one in her mid-40s — documents her descent into bulimia in her early 20s and describes her struggles as a black woman with a disorder consistently portrayed as a white woman’s disease, as well as why black women often do not seek traditional therapy for emotional problems.  The work is being hailed as the first book by and among black women about eating disorders.

The Boston Herald has some background information on the project here and be sure to check out Armstrong’s website at www.notallblackgirls.com.  The book, released Aug. 1, is available online at Amazon.

_____________________________________________

Check out the trailer below for Chris Rock’s new documentary Good Hair, set for release in U.S. theaters on Oct. 9.  The comedian extraordinaire was inspired to take a humorous look at the tangled political web of black women and hair after his daughter Lola came up to him crying and asked, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?”

For more on the the snarled politics of black hair, check out Dianne Longwood’s awesome post from last month. As she explains:

Few of us are truly at ease with the coarse hair texture that comes courtesy of our African roots. In the beauty spectrum, our natural hair isn’t even on the map. Given the option, most Black girls would gladly wake up with a full, flowing head of hair instead of the short, hard-to-grow variety that is often our birthright.

Men like hair, so women who don’t have much of their own go buy some. To be called fake sends the message: If you’re not born with it, you’re not worth it. This is reinforced when some Black people use now-common terms like “good hair” to describe hair with texture as far from African as possible.

_____________________________________________

Vogue Italia hoped to piggyback on the success of last year’s Black Issue by featuring a fashion spread of black Barbie dolls in its July magazine. The spread is, no doubt, inspired by Barbie’s 50th anniversary and comes on the heels of the introduction of Mattel’s new line of So In Style African-American Barbies that feature fuller lips, wider noses and curly hair. Vogue’s spread and the new black Barbies are meeting with mixed reactions from some black bloggers.

Writes Loryn Wilson of Change.org:

…I like the concept of using all Black Barbies in a Vogue spread. But I have to wonder if it is actually a step backwards. Barbies themselves use the white female body as a the prototype for beauty. Even the new Black Barbies do not have the hips, ass and curves that myself and other Black women possess. It’s great that Mattel has barbies of all shade, but what about all sizes? What taking into consideration that other races and ethnic groups have different ideas of what women’s bodies actually look like? The fashion industry often creates fashions, ad campaigns, and yes, even Barbie photo spreads that leave Black female bodies out of the equation and therefore, out of the question when defining what a “perfect body” looks like and who is able to possess it.

The Root’s Raven L. Hill counters:

Aside from the appearance, the doll’s interests are both fun and scholarly—one doll prefers science and drill team while another one likes art and journalism. The dolls come in pairs of big and little sisters to encourage mentoring relationships.

They may not be mirror-perfect, but they come closer to the fantasy than my childhood playthings… I would want these dolls for my daughter.

_____________________________________________

Share your own comments, related links and personal experiences in the comments below.

Despite arriving a few minutes late to a darkened theater for a Sunday matinee showing of The Time Traveler’s Wife, I could sense the wave of alkaline estrogen emanating from the half-filled gallery.  I issued a mental plea that director Robert Schwentke had not completely bastardized Audrey Niffenegger’s supernatural love story into a sappy yuck fest on par with The Notebook before Brandon and I quietly took our seats in a row between three white-haired octagenarians and a middle-aged mother and overly-chatty teenaged daughter.

The film co-stars Rachel McAdams as the lovestruck Clare and Eric Bana as Henry, a sometimes librarian with a genetic disorder that causes him to uncontrollably travel through time.  With her dazzling smile and girl-next-door innocence, I found McAdams’ casting to be an apt one and largely consistent with my mental image of her character, but that’s pretty much where my giddiness at seeing one of my favorite works of fiction transformed on the silver screen ends.  Frankly, as one who read the book with open-mouthed breathlessness, I was disappointed in the on-screen adaptation, which lacked the doomed romantic swooning and came off instead as kind of creepy.

All critiques aside, there was one unintended response to the film I found particularly interesting.  It comes after a 20-year-old Clare meets Henry at the library in what is a first encounter for him and one of many chance and much-anticipated meetings for her.  Despite his befuddlement, Henry succumbs to the hot-and-bothered Clare’s advances and come morning, a naked Clare’s backside is shown as she arises from the bed.  It was not Rachel McAdams’ modestly-filmed naked form that elicited the palpable gasp of shock from the audience, my own included; it was her prominent ribcage and xylophone-like vertebrae.  I could hear a wave of audible intake of breath at the same time I heard myself say, “Oh my god!”  The fragile, bird-like old woman in front of me muttered, “Ewww, look at her!” followed a nanosecond later by the (average-weight) daughter behind me who loudly whispered, “Ugh, she’s way too skinny.”  Ours wasn’t the only audience to have shivers run down our spines.  A commenter on EW’s Popwatch blog said:

to # 1 how is Rachel hot when she is flat-chested and her ribs was so scary in the movie. The audience and my gf gasped during the movie.Sorry I like my woman with meat not anorexic and whose chests are like guys.

NatePro of ProSportsDaily.com noted:

The only other thing worth mentioning is that while Rachel McAdams is cute, it’s completely ruined by a scene where you seen her naked bad, and discover that she’s so thin you could count all her ribs and most of the vertebrae of her spine. Literally.

I was there with two women, and we all kind of looked at each other to make sure we’d all seen what was basically her skeleton.

Commenter Allison at the Women & Hollywood blog also noted:

I was alarmed that when we briefly see her naked in the film, she is so thin! I could see her spine! I guess these actresses have to be extremely thin to get work. Sad.

I’m not going to go all tabloid and speculate if Rachel McAdams is OMG! anorexic! — even as I completely understand how it would be difficult for any woman to be successful in Hollywood without developing an eating disorder — because that’s beside the point here.  Advocacy groups, talking heads and media outlets incessantly bemoan the sad skinny state of Hollywood stars and the pressure for female celebs to be scary-thin but who or what exactly are driving these actresses to such extremes?  If this weekend’s audiences are any indication, it’s certainly not viewers.

The incomparable Diablo Cody is on the cover of the Aug./Sept. copy of Bust magazine.  The Candy Girl author and Juno screenwriter dished on her new horror film, Jennifer’s Body (named after a Hole song) and why the world needs to see more size-10 women naked.  Here’s a few highlights from Jill Soloway’s interview with Cody:

On Jennifer’s Body [For a brief synopsis of the film, read here]:

…I decided instead to write a genre movie that reminded me of The Lost Boys and all the kind of movies that I used to watch when I was growing up, in the ’80s.  And that’s what this movie is.  What really appealed to me was the idea of working with a female director [Karyn Kusama].  I’m sure somebody will prove me wrong, but I had never heard of a woman director and a woman screenwriter creating a mainstream horror film.

…It’s really about girl-on-girl crime.  It’s Mean Girls taken to an extreme.  When the alpha girl becomes cannibal-like, nitpicking is no longer enough.  Now she has to literally consume flesh…  She eats men.

…The movie also references eating disorders.  Jennifer’s eating habits revolve around a binge-purge cycle.  She actually throws up before she eats.  She’s possessed.  She vomits disgusting black bile on her victims before she eats them.  But in one of my favorite scenes, she’s binge-eating out of her refrigerator.  I thought to myself, “Man if we aren’t getting that across…”  I was happy about that.

On feminism, nudity and self-image:

I’m a 31-year-old feminist in Ugg boots and a T-shirt, so it’s funny to me when anyone accuses me of trying to be sexy or cute.  I couldn’t do that if I fucking tried.  I’m full-on rocking this post-feminist-academic-stripper attitude because I’m trying to confront, not titillate.

…I have no shame about nudity and I feel like nudity is confrontational in a way.  Maybe the world needs to see a size-10 woman naked.  Maybe they need to see my cellulite.  I kind of feel that I would love to put that out there.  Any time I do a red carpet, I feel vaguely confrontational.  I feel like, “All right, now somebody’s going to come onto the carpet who doesn’t have a stylist, who did her own hair and makeup, who’s wearing a $25 dress from H&M.  I have cellulite.  I have big hips and big thighs.  And you have to look at me.”  I feel like people have to pay attention to someone who would typically be invisible.

Remember SELF magazine’s supposedly altruistic study last year in which it found that 65 percent of women between the ages of 25 – 45 have an eating disorder and 75 percent of all American women endorse some unhealthy thoughts, feelings or behaviors related to food or their bodies? Yeah, apparently Photoshopping the hell out of your cover model has absolutely nothing to do with these numbers. Nope, none whatsoever.

Or so says SELF Editor Lucy Danziger, who openly bragged about the magazine’s manipulation of the ironically titled “Total Body Confidence” September edition cover model Kelly Clarkson.  Brace yourselves for some ridiculous logic (or lack thereof) and outrage here… We’re not talking about retouching a flyaway hair or a random zit; we’re talking digitally downsizing a size 12 to a size 4.

Danziger defended her actions by insisting that the deceitful editing was actually “meant to inspire women to want to be their best,” and hey, it’s okay because she’s done it herself, no biggie, right?  No matter that a number of studies have shown that, as one eating disorder awareness group concluded:  “Thin, sexualised and digitally enhanced images of women are linked with women’s experiences of poor body image, depression and anxiety and eating disorders. The images contribute to self-harming behaviours and not performing well academically.”

Danziger wheedles and backpedals her way around the obvious ethical issues here by insisting:

Did we alter [Kelly's] appearance? Only to make her look her personal best. Did we publish an act of fiction? No. Not unless you think all photos are that. But in the sense that Kelly is the picture of confidence, and she truly is, then I think this photo is the truest we have ever put out there on the newsstand…  She is happy in her own skin, and she is confident in her music, her writing, her singing, her performing. That is what we all relate to. Whether she is up or down in pounds is irrelevant (and to set the record straight, she works out and does boot-camp-style training, so she is as fit as anyone else we have featured in SELF). Kelly says she doesn’t care what people think of her weight. So we say: That is the role model for the rest of us.

So, according to Danziger, “personal best” = thin  And while Kelly says she doesn’t care what people think of her weight, SELF sure does.  It’s not Kelly’s weight that’s “irrelavent” here; it’s her talent.  The irrational hypocrisy of presenting the weight-carefree Kelly as a “role model for the rest of us” when obviously her talent and accomplishments aren’t good enough for her to make SELF’s cover in her own skin only gets even more neurotic.  Concludes Danziger:

A cover’s job is to sell the magazine, and we do that, every month, thanks to our readers. So thank you.

Your job: Think about your photographs and what you want them to convey. And go ahead and be confident in every shot, in every moment. Because the truest beauty is the kind that comes from within.

You got that, folks?  Feeling inspired?  True beauty comes from within… so long as the outside is thin.  And go ahead and be confident in every shot because, hey, there’s always Photoshop to shave off your big ass.  It’s in Danziger’s line about magazines selling covers that we get the only real flash of non-spinned honesty here, because let’s face it: There’s a reason SELF readers buy the magazine and it isn’t for its articles on body acceptance. Every edition offers a plethora of weight-loss tips and new diet plans designed to give readers the hope and often times illusory promise of thinness.  SELF photoshopped Kelly Clarkson because its readers have given them reason to believe that a thinner Kelly would sell more covers than a slightly-flawed, fuller-figured Kelly.  It’s the same reason Elle magazine Photoshopped Kelly and why a digitally-whittled Kelly also appears on the cover of her album.

Even more ironically, right below Kelly’s digitally-whittled physique is a teaser reading, “Want to Reach Your Dream Weight?  Find the Motivation Secrets That Will Work for You.“  Or, you know, a half-decent Photoshop artist.

Harriet Brown alerted me to this scathing piece by New York Times fashion writer Cintra Wilson on J.C. Penney’s new line of clothes, which includes plus-size and Big & Tall offerings.   Jezebel also called Wilson out on what is truly a mean-spirited, snark-filled critique on fat people.  Some gems from her piece:

It took me a long time to find a size 2 among the racks. There are, however, abundant size 10’s, 12’s and 16’s. I tried two fairly cute items…  Each was around $80; each fit nicely and looked good. I didn’t buy either because I can do better for $80, but if I were a size 18, I’d have rejoiced.

…To this end, it has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on. It’s like a headless wax museum devoted entirely to the cast of “Roseanne.”

…The petites section features a bounty of items for women nearly as wide as they are tall; the men’s Big & Tall section has shirts that could house two or three Shaquilles…

On her personal blog, Cintra Wilson simply can’t understand why fat –and thin– folks are up in arms about her oh, so hilariously funny sizeist snark.

I feel this article is in keeping with the generally irreverent spirit of Critical Shopper. It is a piece about the store itself and the clothes in it, and how they compare to other clothes in neurotic New York: what is the same/different about them, style-wise. J.C. Penney has had the foresight and genius to realize that plus-sizes are all but completely ignored in Manhattan, and because of this, they are going to make squillions of dollars.

It is actually a positive review, believe it or not.

She does go on to apologize, insisting that she didn’t MEAN to be an condescending snobby, self obsessed bitch (in so many words), but not before making it appear as if it is WE, the offended folk, who are just hyper-sensitive and overly literal:

My writing style is generally pretty scathing, even when I like something. Nothing is sacred in a Critical Shopper — and that’s why you read it.. But it’s not so fun, apparently, if you happen to take something irreverent I say about a mannequin or an inventory personally.”

In the piece, Wilson congratulates J.C. Penney for being so “remarkably smart” as to offer clothing to fit the general populous.  She writes:

This niche has been almost wholly neglected on our snobby, self-obsessed little island. New York boutiques tend to cater to the stress-thin, morbidly workaholic, Pilates-tortured Manhattan ectomorph.  But there are many more body types who vote with their hard-earned dollars…

Guess what? We also buy newspapers. I’ve always liked the Times‘ fashion coverage, but this piece has me considering “voting” with my “hard-earned dollars” on fashion coverage elsewhere.  Let’s all go enlighten Wilson on why it is her “positive review” is so very unprofessional, unclassy and uncalled for.

UPDATE: It looks like Cintra Wilson can dish it out, but she can’t take it.  She has now removed her “fauxpology” from her blog after receiving dozens of comments calling her out.  Instead, she thinks that this is all just “ridiculous” and that we should all just “remove the knot from [our] panties.”  Stay classy, Cintra.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Wilson has now posted what appears to be a sincere apology, which I, at least, accept although I doubt that it’s heartfelt. Of course, the true test of her sincerity will be when she edits the original piece to revise/remove the offending material.

Darn!  It looks like I just missed Harriet Brown on WHYY’s Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane.  Harriet was on the first hour of the show (10 a.m. EST) to talk about the emergence of fat acceptance bloggers, along with Rebecca Puhlman, director of research for the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.  Check out a podcast of the show here.

A couple other body acceptance activists have been featured in the news lately and several new memoirs on eating disorder recovery have recently been released.  Here’s a run-down:

• Rebecca Fox, author of Measure by Measure, was featured on WGLT radio’s Datebook last weekend.  Listen to the four-minute interview by GLT Arts Reporter Laura Kennedy here.
• Peggy Elam was interviewed for the August edition of PLUS Model Magazine.  Peggy is a psychologist, editor and publisher of Pearlsong Press, an independent publishing company of size- and HAES-friendly works of fiction and non-fiction.
• A job as a “slimming group leader” for an unnamed diet company spiraled into bulimia for Sue Gaskell. She’s now written a book called Eating Your Words that examines how the slimming group contributed to her eating disorder and how she overcame it.  It also gives advice for others on how to recover from eating disorders.  The book doesn’t appear to have been released just yet, but you can read more about it here.
• Food writer Sheila Himmel and daughter Lisa, who recovered from anorexia, teamed up to write a book on their experiences.  In their book, Hungry, the mother-daughter team document how Lisa’s eating disorder affected their entire middle-class family and how they, as a family, pulled her back from it.
• Monica Seles’ new book, Getting a Grip: On My Body, My Mind, My Self, is now out.  Seles, if you recall from a previous discussion here, struggled with binge eating disorder and depression and her new memoir chronicles her experiences and her recovery.  Anorexia and bulimia are popular among eating disorder memoirs, but binge eating disorder is a rare admittance for many owing to the stigma attached to it, thus making Seles’ book all the more significant.
• Restaurant critic Frank Bruni details his experiences as an overeater starting at a very early age in Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater, set for release on Aug. 20.  Bruni, who was only at most 20 pounds overweight at any given time in his life, also summarizes his struggles in this in-depth New York Times article.

Have you read any of these books?  Offer your reviews in the comments below or let us know of any other new reads on eating disorders or body acceptance I may have missed.