Food and Loathing

This “razor-sharp memoir” (Entertainment Weekly) candidly explores Betsy Lerner’s twenty-year battle with depression and compulsive eating.

Never before has the intimate relationship between mood swings and food swings been so honestly chronicled. In Food and Loathing, Betsy Lerner vividly reveals the secret life of women and their self-esteem. Lerner tells the story of an adolescence on the outside looking in, watching her slim friends pair off, and believing the only thing between her and perfection was an extra thirty pounds. Joining one of the first groups of Overeaters Anonymous in 1975, she forms a cult-like devotion to the twelve-step program and loses fifty pounds—only to gain it all back and more.

Her twenties are marked by yo-yo dieting, depressive episodes, and a sadistic shrink who dubs her “the boy who cried wolf.” Then, just as Lerner begins to realize her dream of being a writer, entering Columbia's prestigious MFA program, she spirals into a suicidal depression and lands for a six-month stay at New York State Psychiatric Institute. There, a young resident helps her take her first steps toward selfhood, unraveling the self-loathing of an eating disorder coupled with a paralyzing mood disorder. He also helps her confront a tragic family secret whose silence had enveloped an otherwise average Jewish middle class family-and begin, finally, to heal.

For every woman who calculates her worth on the morning scale, this is her story, too.