A Lumpy, Misshapen Book: Talking with Elissa Washuta
Elissa Washuta discusses her chapbook, STARVATION MODE.
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Posts Tagged: eating disorders
On the Joy of Watching My Coworker Eat Lunch
I want to enjoy something so thoroughly, like my coworker using his fingers to dig guac out of a burrito bowl.
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Fitting In
Without men around to impress, I discovered my own taste—what desire meant beyond the desire to be desirable.
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Everybody Is Fine: Talking with Jasmine Guillory
Jasmine Guillory discusses her debut novel, The Wedding Date, finding success, writing sex, and the revolutionary act of eating.
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Becoming Bodies
[W]e wanted something different from each other’s bodies than what was actually there, which might be why our bodies sometimes came together.
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How to Keep Score
I’m still working on this balance, and given that I only have about eighty or ninety years tops to get it right, I doubt I ever will.
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Thick and Thin
Today is not the day I can eat like a normal person and not tomorrow either. But maybe the day after that or the next one after.
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Setting aside Time for Magic: Talking with Myriam Gurba
Myriam Gurba discusses her new memoir, MEAN, her writing process, and why she has hope for patriarchy’s dissolution.
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Our Own Bodies: A Conversation with JoAnna Novak
JoAnna Novak discusses her novel, I Must Have You, eating disorders, and writing characters that challenge our expectations of how women should behave.
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It’s All Finger-Pointing at the Moon: A Conversation with Carolyn Zaikowski
Carolyn Zaikowski discusses her most recent book, In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse, the psychology of repetition, and honoring the power of language.
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Erasing the Girl: Why Don’t We Trust Women to Tell Their Stories of Disordered Eating?
I didn’t want to criticize her, or demand explanations from her. I just wanted to hear her speak.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Are great bookstores just good capitalism? People are more concerned with being fat than with eating disorders, if we go by the number of books in each respective section at one blogger’s local bookstore. A Tennessee bookstore will include a restaurant inside of it.
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Voices on Addiction: Shame Is a Treble Hook
Shame is a treble hook that tells me that 1) I not only fail but am a failure, that 2) I not only damage people but I am damaged, and that 3) I not only lie but I am a lie.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Straw House
“It’s not healthy, how you live. People aren’t meant to sleep all day. We need the sun. We’re meant to live in the sun.”
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The Insanity of Eating
I didn’t usually consider how the binge felt. I just ate until I couldn’t eat anymore.
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Sitting on Something
I’m still learning how to live after healing. I’m still healing.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Jen Pastiloff
I am good at making people feel safe.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Thunder, Thighs
Over one third of the women in my survey had been called “Thunder Thighs” at some point in their life. Many were still haunted by this. None of them interpreted “thunder” to mean “power.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Queen of Decay
I wish it had been: Amy was a brilliant and tortured artist. Lets explore her brilliance. Let’s watch her perform.
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The Rumpus Interview with Kara Richardson Whitely
Author Kara Richardson Whitely discusses her new memoir, Gorge: My Journey Up Kilimanjaro at 300 Pounds, surviving food addiction and the trauma of being molested, and what comes next.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Fat Girl’s Benediction
Why couldn’t I accept my body for what it wanted to be? It’s what I harped on the rest of the world to do.
...moreThe Last Frontier of Empathy
Not just eating disorders, but mental health in general, I think, is probably the last frontier of empathy in our culture. I’m not a journalist, I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a health care worker, but I am somebody who has been through this before and I’m also a writer. I think with that […]
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Broken Bird: Reflections on The Upside of Anger
We were both fighting with our mothers to be seen and accepted; it mattered to us as daughters that we had that kind of support.
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Litany for My Mother’s Body
My mother’s body horrified me. Nine years old, I watched her dress. Her belly was rippled and sagged and scarred—a used-up bag of nothing.
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Counting Bodies
The violences that women fear and the violences that women carry are violences of objectification, of involuntary disembodiment. The transformation of a human into a thing.
...moreFoodphobia
It’s easy to forget just how fraught our culture’s relationship with food is, until you see example after example of “food horror” piled on top of each other like so many potato chips. Which is to say that Future Shipwreck‘s supercut of negative depictions of food in the TV series Pretty Little Liars is strangely compelling and not […]
...moreRe-examining the “Dysfunctional Pleasure” of Eating Disorders
That the Ironman participant may be as vain or as emotionally distressed as a freely directed exerciser becomes irrelevant, because the Ironman race, like a Thanksgiving feast, takes place in the presence of many others pursuing the same extreme pleasure. It has finite, communally agreed-upon bounds. Thanksgiving lasts for only one day; an Ironman has three […]
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Halloween is Waiting
Every Halloween, the ghost of my 11 year-old self haunts me. She’s in the candy aisle at Rite Aid gorging on fun-size Twix bars. She’s wrapping candy corn lights around her neck. She’s trying on a vampire costume grinning through plastic fangs with a scraggly black wig in her eyes. She’s concerned about extra roll […]
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