Posts Tagged: eating disorders
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.
...moreCounting 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 […]
...moreRooms of Their Own
Three generations of women cope with isolation, grief, and sex, in the first novel by the celebrated story writer, Rachel Sherman.
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