Authors and Their Books: Free Sept 19th: Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia: A Diary on How I Acquired my Eating Disorder

[Natasha]

Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia: A Diary on How I Acquired my Eating Disorder is free for the last day today.

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In 1989, aged nineteen, I was sporting a tattoo openly on my wrist, which starkly declared my unrequited love for my teacher, Miss Williams. It helped me survive the pain of being torn away from her at the end of my time at school. And it lead to my meeting a young woman my own age, Alex, onto whom I redirected much of my obsessiveness.

At nineteen, I was shouting out my attraction to other women whilst, at the same time, struggling with my sexuality and with coming out as lesbian. Brought up with Christianity, I believed it was wrong to be gay and that I needed to be cultivating a heterosexual identity. This book contains detailed accounts of clueless first sexual encounters with young men, not something I have ever come across in either fiction or non-fiction.

Alex was simply beautiful. And I was getting fat. My struggle with my body image, with my self-esteem, and with my sexuality began to find expression in food. Here too the immediacy of this diary bears out all the details, this time of the slide into a bulimic lifestyle. I never acquired the skill of making myself sick, so I needed to devise other means of ridding my body of food. I have received feedback from readers regarding how much the detail in this diary has helped them in the fight for recovery from their own eating disorders. The facts on the pages are a startling mirror.

I was thrilled to learn back then that I have a counterpart who lived two hundred years before me, an obsessive lesbian diarist, Anne Lister, who wrote in a secret code, based on the Greek alphabet, just as I did. Anne's diaries, deciphered and edited by Helena Whitbread, were published in 1988, just before I was living the events in this book. Helena Whitbread has endorsed my book and she and I are currently working on a Q&A article for publication.

This book is a love story, an eating disorder memoir, and an account of the effects that homophobia can have on relationships and on individuals.


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Download from Amazon UK.

Thanks,
Natasha