eating disorders
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The 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…
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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.
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Foodphobia
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…
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Re-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…
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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…
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Rooms of Their Own
Three generations of women cope with isolation, grief, and sex, in the first novel by the celebrated story writer, Rachel Sherman.