Eating Myself is your story of a lifetime struggle with your weight. You had anorexia and bulimia for five years in your twenties, but that only takes up a fraction of the book. Why?
There have been so many books and articles written by former anorexics and bulimics and, while they are valid, I felt it important to cover new ground and to try and tell the story of a woman who has NOT got an eating disorder but for whom food and weight is nonetheless a daily issue. 90% of women in the western world want to lose weight, and certianly every woman I have ever met. My anxieties about mine have been a constant with me for as long as I can remember and yet I lead an ordinary life. I don’t binge and starve. I work, have a young family, run a household and see family and friends but every day I think about losing a few pounds and try to do so, succeeding sometimes, failing other times. I sincerely believe that, while the individual circumstances of my life differ, obviously, from other women’s, the internal soundtrack in my head about fat, the thoughts and feelings, are those of Everywoman.
What prompted you to write the book?
I was lying in the bath one evening a couple of years ago, and the idea just hit me in a blinding flash. I’ve always been very open and honest about my weight issues, even when I briefly had anorexia, I used to talk about it freely with friends, and I’ve written about my struggles occasionally in the papers. I’ve had so many thoughts about the what I call “normal-abnormal” women’s relationship with fat, that I suddenly felt the urgent need to write them down. I am not a doctor or expert or official social commentator so I don’t offer causes or even solutions. I am saying all women have food and weight concerns, this is just how it is. My feelings are the same as yours. You are not alone. Let’s talk about them. I wrote the book quite fast because it seemed such an obvious idea, I was scared someone would write it before me. I mean, when I was a single girl and keen to find someone to spend the rest of my life and have children with, I had all sorts of funny thoughts and ideas about the ghastliness of dating and smug couples and so forth, and then Bridget Jones came out. Clever Helen Fielding had the clever idea of putting it down on paper and I’d missed the boat. A few years later, married with three young sons, I was having all sorts of funny thoughts and ideas about being a juggling wife, mother and working person, and then clever Allison Pearson’s clever novel came out and I realised I’d missed another boat. I’m not suggesting my book will be half as successful as either of those but I do think the subject is one that literally millions of women of all ages and backgrounds can identify with. I was determined not to miss this boat!
Was it cathartic writing it?
Funnily enough, everyone asks me this question and I know the answer ought to be yes but I’m afraid it wasn’t at all. I was so familiar with all the observations, reflections, thoughts and feelings that I describe in the book that the mere act of keying them into a computer - although putting it that way is rather to denigrate the act of writing - wasn’t cathartic in the least bit. I was simply passionate to get it all down because I wanted to give that honesty to others and to offer them the opportunity to recognise that they aren’t the only ones to think as they do and in such a way that they never voice most of what they are thinking. I mean, it’s bloody boring, the internal voice, a lot of the time: “I ate pudding last night; better skip breakfast today”. We do occasionally mention it to friends but on the whole it just goes on inside us. My mission was to say the unsayable.
While it is a book about your lifelong relationship with food, it is also a memoir which incorporates descriptions of your bohemian upbringing and parents. Did you mean it to be so autobiographical?
Not at all! In fact it started out as an extended rant. When I sent the first draft of the first half to my editor, she passed it on to the head of Bloomsbury who wrote an e-mail saying she wanted it to be much more autobiographical. The book needed a stronger structure and I realised to make it altogether better I was going to have to take the plunge and be a lot more revealing about my past. That was hard. It is exposing and I have put an awful lot in, but on the other hand there’s an awful lot I’ve left out! Ultimately the power as to what to reveal and what not to reveal rested with me.
What did you leave out?
Details of my sex life, for example, though I refer to sex a bit. It might seem odd not to bare all in a book of this nature, in which body image plays such a large part and our quest to be thin has so much to do with us wanting to be attractive to men. But I feel that sex is private territory into which I will not stray, unfashionable of me though that may be.
How do you feel about your children reading the book in years to come?
Ambivalent to be honest. I’d like them to know about my childhood and the character of my extraordinary father who died when my oldest son was four months. Pop was in a wheelchair with muscular dystrophy but lead an astonishing life. He was born into an aristocratic family but was always a rebel. He was chucked out of Eton and Cambridge and in the sixties hung out with groovy pop stars like the Stones and photographers like David Bailey and the likes of Peter Sellars and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore; wore psychedelic ties and smoked his fair share of dope. He was a very powerful restaurant critic and became a travel writer. His disability bored him and he ignored it. So he crossed deserts and continents, having amazing adventures and making unusual friends all along the way. He had more friends than anybody has the right to have and was the most open-minded, least prejudiced man I have ever met and was a huge influence on me but was also a complex and difficult character and unusual father. I want my children to know all about him, and about my mother to whom they are very close, and to learn about me. The most thrilling stories for me as a child were those of my parent’s pasts. I hope the book will shed some light on the children’s own provenance. The flip side is them finding out about my rather daft preoccupations with myself and my weight and my various unhappinesses over the years. The fact is, they are boys and probably won’t be interested for decades, if at all, by which time they’ll be old enough to take it all on board.
Do you ever worry you’ll pass on your fat anxieties to them?
Yes I do, and in that respect I have been lucky in as much as I have not had daughters. Of course, boys are not immune to overly worrying about being fat but girls are obviously more prone. I would love to have a daughter but I would worry that she might pick up on my belief-systems and habits, as so many mothers are unwittingly doing to their daughters. Even with the boys, I tend to discourage them from too much chocolate and so forth, but the way I do it is to say, “No more chocolate, you’ll get spots and your teeth might fall out,” as opposed to, “You’ll get fat.” I spoke to a doctor the other day who said she is seeing more and more young girls presenting with erratic eating. She believes their “normal-abnormal” mothers are definitely a lot to blame. Food is such a basic nurturing factor in the parent-child relationship and can so easily become skewed. We don’t cook or eat as we used to and it is having an effect on our children. Expert after expert tells me that the best thing to do is to produce healthy, home-cooked family meals and to sit down and eat together, to make it as normal as possible and for mealtimes to be occasions for pleasure and conversation. Also, obviously, to encourage exercise and perhaps not to keep biscuits in the house! It sounds so simple and should be but can be so hard to achieve sometimes.
How are you currently with food and weight?
Normal-abnormal! I still keep a constant eye, obviously, and suspect I always will to some degree till I’m well into old age. Having children has helped me lose weight. Young boys are good for keeping you on your toes, literally. Chasing after them! Also, being more busy than my former self means I am a little more distracted from food than I used to be, with the emphasis on the “little”.
But you are not fat!
That’s what everyone tells me, and I do see that I shouldn’t really be whinging on, but all the old feelings of being fat remain. All I can really counter to people when they say I’m not fat is that I have spent most of my life heavier than I am now, and even though I’ve shed a stone or two, I still have the same old fear of putting it back on and I can’t shake off the idea that I could do with losing just a little bit more... If I am not fat - though I believe bits of me still are - it is precisely because I spend so much time battling against it. There’s nothing “naturally” thin about me. It’s all put on; it’s all down to my perennial awareness of any pound gained and trying to avoid it. Left to my own devices, I know I’d be a good deal fatter. It’s a fact.
What will you write next?
Sadly, no plans. I’m being rather distracted by moving house at the moment. I’m just praying that when we’re settled into the new one, I’ll be lying in the bath again one evening and something will suddenly strike me. A novel maybe. I’ll just have to wait and see.
Eating Myself is published by Bloomsbury April 3 2006 (£12.99) |
