Product Description

With warmth, wit, and not a trace of self-pity" (Entertainment Weekly), Betsy Lerner details her twenty-year struggle with depression and compulsive eating in Food and Loathing, a book that dares to expose the insidious nature of women's secret life with food.

"Alternating between hilarious and heartbreaking" (People), Food and Loathing gives voice to one of the last taboo subjects and greatest stigmas of our time: being overweight. Lerner's revelations on the cult of thinness -- from the dreaded weigh-in at junior high gym class to the effects of inhaling Pepperidge Farm Goldfish at Olympic speeds -- are universally resonant, as is her belief that this is one battle no one should fight alone.

Essential reading for anyone who has ever wielded a fork in despair or calculated her self-worth on the morning scale, "Lerner's lament is a triumph" (Publishers Weekly).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #981284 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
As post-modern recovery memoirs go, Betsy Lerner’s account of compulsive overeating and decades' worth of yo-yo dieting may strike the casual reader as considerably less compelling than, say, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s similarly toned though far more solipsistic and seemingly endless diary of her affair with Ritalin, Now, More, Again.(The editor of Wurtzel’s breakthrough Gen X memoir, Prozac Nation, Lerner figured prominently as a character in the sequel.) Lerner’s admission that, "I am powerless over Hostess cakes, and my life has become unmanageable," may not seem to equate with the far more harrowing revelations recounted in so many gripping first-person dependency confessionals. But there are potentially hundreds of thousands of readers (both men and women, though there is a bit of a Bridget Jones-like assumption here that Lerner is writing primarily for the former) with whom the author will strike many a poignant chord as she charts a lifelong battle with her weight. She takes us from those all-too-familiar and universally mortifying school days (the book opens in 1972, when Lerner was a 12-year-old being weighed in front of her sixth-grade class in the gymnasium), through twentysomething years filled with sadness, unrequited love, and a pioneering membership in Overeaters Anonymous, to a bout with suicidal depression that resulted in a six-month stay at New York State Psychiatric Institute. Like Wurtzel, Lerner is at her best when she is turning her sarcastic and unsparing sense of humor on herself. ("In college, when I first encountered Descartes, it took me no time to translate his famous dictum into something I could relate to: I weigh x, therefore I am shit," she writes.) But she also shares with her celebrated protégé a recurring confusion between trying to relate with her readers via unflinching honesty and simply sharing too much uninteresting or irrelevant information. --Jim DeRogatis

From Publishers Weekly
Lerner's first book, The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers, offered funny and frank talk from a publishing professional. In this follow-up memoir she reveals her lifelong struggle with compulsive eating and mental illness. A literary agent and former editor, Lerner joined Overeaters Anonymous at age 15 and rigorously adopted the 12-step program. A year later, she was prescribed lithium, though side effects soon forced her to quit the drug. Unmedicated and with an insensitive therapist, Lerner began her inevitable descent. While enrolled in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University, she came close to committing suicide, and this desperate act led to her voluntary admittance to the psych ward at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Her experience there and at the New York State Psychiatric Institute is the heart of this sincere book. Lerner's descriptions of fellow patients and hospital staff, the day-to-day routine of "the bin" and her therapy sessions are poignant and darkly comic; she emerges months later with a keen understanding of the psychology that drove her there and a newfound desire to live. In her epilogue Lerner writes: "It took a lifetime of tomorrows struggling with the scale and severe mood swings before I was accurately diagnosed and properly treated." Neither happened in the hospital. According to Lerner's current doctor, "All [she] needed was lithium" (albeit, an adjusted dosage); hospitalization was a "waste." Whether or not readers agree with this assessment-and Lerner herself has doubts-her lament is a triumph.-- needed was lithium" (albeit, an adjusted dosage); hospitalization was a "waste." Whether or not readers agree with this assessment-and Lerner herself has doubts-her lament is a triumph.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Lerner has struggled with her weight all her life, and in this honest and straightforward memoir, she chronicles her battle. Especially sensitive about her weight during her adolescence, Lerner goes to Overeaters Anonymous. Through hard work and abstinence, she is pleased to find herself shedding the extra pounds and turning the head of a cute boy she meets on her summer trip to Israel. The weight comes back in high school, though by college she's lost the excess again. During her ongoing struggle, a grossly incompetent psychiatrist chips away at her confidence, and even her admittance to graduate school in writing does not lift her plummeting self-esteem. Spiraling into depression, she finally checks herself into a clinic. There, she faces some difficult truths about herself and must find the determination to live. Released after six months, Lerner returns to her writing program and goes on to become a successful editor. Lerner's openness about her struggles and her strength of character will inspire anyone battling to overcome a mental disorder, a weight problem, or any other personal obstacle. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Funny, Smart, Compulsively Readable
This is a terrific read. Lerner has such a light touch, and such a delightfully wicked sense of humor, that anyone will empathize with her story: she's not just a fat girl looking for love and attention, but an extremely intelligent and self-aware person struggling with questions of meaning and worth. Her shocking swings up and down the scale are, for Lerner, swings between life and death, and between meaning and meaninglessness, hope and hopelessness. This memoir is one of the best I've read.

I can think of about five people I want to buy this book for -- it would make a wonderful gift for anyone who's struggled with weight, depression, or any kind of existential angst.

Insightful for the skinny, comforting for the fat
Betsy Lerner, has done us all a service. Those of us who are thin and have never struggled with weight, get our eyes opened as to what the other "world" is like. To quote a blurb on the back of the book "It broke my heart in 1,000 places". And those of us who have friends and relatives who struggle with being more than 100 lbs overweight, will want to rush out and buy this book for them, because here FINALLY is a book written by a "FAT" (actually former fat) person who describes in detail the pain "FAT" people experience.

Betsy is good at drawing you into her world, and making you feel as if you are observing her struggle (almost as if you were seeing it played out on the big screen.) The fact that she overcame her stay in the mental institution and the stint with the grossly inept therapist, and then rose to the place she is now, is encouraging to say the least.

I recommend this book for anyone who knows anyone who has ever been in O.A. And to anyone who would like to know the pain of the most discriminated against group in "American Society".

And of course, for those of us authors, who want to know what our editors, and agents really think of us, I highly recommend Betsy's other book THE FOREST FOR THE TREES.

Both books are good reads. Impossible to put down, once you start reading them. And the desire to tell other's about them, is...quite frankly, complelling.

Marsha Marks

A memoir of a young woman's mental illness and self-hatred.
"Food and Loathing," by Betsy Lerner, is ostensibly about a young woman's eating disorder and how it affects her self-esteem and her ability to cope with life. Lerner begins her memoir at the age of twelve. She is an affluent and bright girl from a loving family. However, Lerner is self-conscious about her weight and she believes that if she could only learn how to control her eating, she would be blissfully happy.

Lerner's adolescent years are filled with cigarettes, joints, a membership in Overeaters Anonymous and a fruitless relationship with an unsympathetic psychiatrist. Nothing that Lerner tries brings her peace of mind and she eventually sinks into a serious depression. She frequently indulges in binge eating. It takes a stint in a mental hospital and a caring psychiatrist to help Lerner diagnose her problem and gain some control over her life.

"Food and Loathing" is a searing and honest portrayal of a lost soul. Lerner floats unhappily through life for years, with no handle on what is wrong with her or how she can bring herself back from oblivion. She learns the hard way that the pleasures of life are too precious to give up without a fight. Although Lerner's book has little new to say either about eating disorders or mental illness, it is a competently written book that will appeal to readers who are interested in these two subjects.