AS A CHILD I developed a terrible fear of being anorexic. This was brought on by an article I had read in a teen magazine, which was accompanied by some upsetting images of emaciated girls with hollow eyes and folded hands. Anorexia sounded horrible: you were hungry and sad and bony, and yet every time you looked in the mirror at your eighty-pound frame, you saw a fat girl looking back at you. If you took it too far, you had to go to a hospital, away from your parents. The article described anorexia as an epidemic spreading across the nation, like the flu or the E. coli you could get from eating a Jack in the Box hamburger. So I sat at the kitchen counter, eating my dinner and hoping I wasn’t next. Over and over, my mother tried to explain that you didn’t just become anorexic overnight.
Did I feel that instinct, to stop eating? she wondered.
No. I really liked eating.
And why wouldn’t I? My diet, up to that point, consisted entirely of organic hamburger patties, spinach-and-cheese ravioli (which I called grass ravioli), and pancakes my dad made in the shape of mice or guns. I was told that eating, really eating, was the only way to become big and strong and smart.
Because I was little. So little. Even though my favorite foods were: Doritos. Steak. Sara Lee pound cake (preferably still half frozen). Stouffer’s French bread pepperoni pizzas, my Irish nanny’s shepherd’s pie, and huge hunks of goose-liver paté, eaten with my bare hands as a snack. My mother denies having let me eat raw hamburger meat and drink a cup of vinegar, but I know that both happened. I wanted to taste it all.
When I was born I was very fat for a baby—eleven pounds (which sounds thin to me now). I had three chins and a stomach that drooped to one side of my stroller. I never crawled, just rolled, an early sign that I was going to be resistant to most exercise and any sexual position that didn’t allow me to relax my back. But by my third birthday something began to change. My black hair fell out and grew in blond. My chins melted away. I walked into kindergarten as a tiny, tan little dreamboat. I can remember spending what must have been hours, as a kid, looking in the mirror, marveling at the beauty of my own features, the sharp line of my hip, the downy hairs on my legs, my soft golden ponytail. I still envy my own eight-year-old self, standing confidently on a Mexico beach in a French bikini, then breaking for nachos and Coke.
Then the summer after eighth grade I got my period. My dad and I were taking a walk in the country when I felt something ticklish on my inner thigh. I looked down to see a thin trail of blood making its way toward my ankle sock.
“Papa?” I murmured.
His eyes welled up. “Well,” he said, “in Pygmy cultures you’d have to start having children right about now.”
He called my mother, who rushed home from her errands with a box of tampons and a meatball sub.
I soon gained thirty pounds. Starting high school is hard enough without all your favorite nightgowns becoming belly shirts. But here I was, a slip of a thing suddenly shaped like a gummy bear. I wasn’t obese, but a senior did tell me I looked “like a bowling ball with a hat on.” According to my mother, some of it was hormonal. Some of it was the result of the medication that was keeping my obsessive-compulsive disorder in check. All of it was alien—and alienating.
This was the same year that I became a vegan. This was inspired by a love of puppies and also a cow who winked at me on a family vacation to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Rationally, I knew the cow was probably attempting to remove a fly on its lid without the aid of arms. But the wink, that seemingly irrefutable sign of sentience, stirred something in me—a fear of causing another creature pain, of not acknowledging their suffering.
I maintained the position for nearly ten years, occasionally lapsing into vegetarianism and beating myself up about it. When I was seventeen years old I even had a vegan dinner party that was chronicled in the style section of The New York Times—headline: “A Crunchy Menu for a Youthful Crowd!”—and catered by a now-defunct establishment called the Veg-City Diner. I wore my grandmother’s Dior, insisted on shoelessness (leather was a no-no), and explained to the reporter that, while I didn’t care much about the Iraq War, I was very concerned by our nation’s casual attitude toward bovine murder.
While my veganism began as a deeply felt moral position, it soon morphed into a not-very-effective eating disorder. I never thought of it as a diet, but it was a way to limit the vast world of food that I had once loved so dearly—I had the feeling I could go mad if not given any boundaries. I’d be like that guy who drank the ocean and still wasn’t satisfied.