Empty

by Susan Burton

Heavy by Kiese Laymon is a beautiful, devastating coming-of-age memoir about race, abuse, the mother-son bond, and compulsive eating and starving. The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray is a novel about how our family histories shape who we are, and its protagonist is a professionally accomplished Black woman in her forties who has bulimia.

I had always known I would get my period first. Not just first in my class or first among my friends. I would be the first girl in my generation, the first girl in the pool of girls eligible to begin.

There was no real reason I knew this. It was just a fact that I owned. I knew it the same way I knew my parents would get divorced. Someday I would be a child with the name of only one parent beside hers on the class list.

As an adolescent, I both envied the stable homes of peers and believed what I had was superior: not a neutral, dull mom and dad, but vital, beautiful, intelligent parents who struggled. Even as an adult, I am sometimes annoyed at those who emerged from calm homes and find myself clinging to an old attitude: I know things you don’t, that you will never know; this is my thing you will never have. But what confers power also creates distance: You wouldn’t understand.

My great-uncle Dick came out West from New York. He was B.J.’s brother.

I USED TO THINK my anorexia was idiosyncratic. That it grew out of my early fear of ingesting anything. Or that it was unconscious, even: My mother’s contaminated milk had primed my body against future incursions. But fear of poisoning can be a symptom of an eating disorder. I was typical in this way and so many others. One of scores of girls lingering over celebrity eating-disorder stories in magazines. There was nothing special about what I did.

I had broken a rule of life, standing at the counter, eating late. This was something that had never before occurred to me to do, but for years that followed, not eating at night would become a primary goal. I learned from magazines that I shared this goal with many women. How did we all come up with it independently, the kitchen counter, the sweets?

“But it does, honey,” she said. She was always doing that, saying “honey,” “sweetheart,” touching your wrist. Sometimes I tried it out. But I was awkward with endearments. It was like when a Mormon swore. They didn’t say it right, and you felt embarrassed for them.

First of all, I was sick of hearing about hormones. They were the excuse for everything in adolescence. They seemed to me less like chemical messengers and more like marketing tools. Second, there was the response’s

My favorite café was in the West Village. I’d sit there in a scrolled-iron chair with my notebook and a pack of cigarettes, and during those hours I was making resolutions to change but also actually thinking about things beyond that. During those hours I was not a girl defined by a problem. I was a freshman who had taken the train to New York City with a Joan Didion paperback and a spiral notebook and a pen.

Getting my period again at twenty-four marked the end of my extremes. I’ve never been so rigid or powerless again. But this was the end of a chapter, not a real and final end. I’m healthier than I was as a young woman, but “recovered”? No. I want to be clear about where I am. It’s not widely understood just how enduring eating disorders can be. For most of my adulthood I perceived my own problem as both intractable and illegitimate. And while I might have felt differently if more people talked about how tenacious this stuff is, what’s more important is that I might have felt differently if I had ever talked about it.