An Apple a Day (6 page)

That Christmas, I had arrived back from university for the holidays in a desperate state, both physically and mentally. The journey, less than two hours from Oxford, had been a struggle: it was a bitterly cold December day and I shivered in my long winter coat. I walked from the bus stop to my parents' house in Camden, hunched like an old lady against the wind. I was dropping below 85 pounds at this point and I knew I was in trouble. I remember wondering whether I could hide the weight loss from my family, and how I'd avoid eating for the next couple of weeks.

I hadn't seen my little sister Alice for months—she'd been living in Rome with her boyfriend, Simone. She's barely two years younger than I am; we're very close and I was looking forward to seeing her. Al threw open the front door, all winter suntan and stylish Italian jeans, came forward to hug me, and burst into tears. The last time she'd seen me I'd been slim, and now here was this skeleton. She'd spoken to my mum while she'd been in Italy of course, she knew they were worried about my weight, but seeing it for herself was another matter. Now, in February of my year of this recovery challenge, I ask Al what she remembers of that night so many years ago. She replies, “You looked like a little sparrow, Em, totally fragile—like you'd snap in two. I hugged you and you were so thin I felt terrified.” Weight loss can happen very quickly once anorexia gets a grip. That winter, I was in free fall.

Was I aware, really, or is this just hindsight? At the time I thought I was hiding it well: I'd wear multiple layers of clothing, partly to hide my frame and partly to conserve my dwindling body heat. I wore leggings under my jeans, then vests and tops and sweaters and a hoodie. I wore scarves all the time. But of course I wasn't kidding anyone—the more layers you wear the more baggy and hollow you look. I simply couldn't get warm. I remember spending the entire Christmas holiday either curled up next to the radiator in the living room (burning my back), shivering in scaldingly hot baths, or lying in my bedroom under two duvets.

The guilt is immense and there are so many sad memories. Even though I was living independently by this point, away at university, then in my own flat in London, still the illness polluted my family. Almost every memory from my early twenties is colored with my parents' anxiety—and my own awareness of what I was putting them through. The fear in their eyes, the way they watched me constantly, pleaded with me. What could they do? They tried everything. They learned very quickly that there was no point in forcing me to eat, they knew they mustn't nag, they knew they had to keep encouraging me gently, reassuring me; meanwhile they had to watch their child getting thinner and refusing to eat. It's an awful thing to do to the people you love.

I think it's been particularly hard for my father. Dad was born in 1927 and he's an old-school gentleman: he leaps to his feet whenever a woman enters the room; he never wears brown shoes after 6
PM
; he can't understand why people walk around with their shirts “hanging out.” Even though he's the fittest, strongest eightysomething I know, and still runs his own publishing company, cycles all over London, and will take on any roofing, rewiring, or plumbing job my mother needs doing, still my father is from a different era. At the age of sixteen, he ran away from his aristocratic home in Buckinghamshire, abandoning a place
at Oxford University, and signed up as a trooper. He became a captain in the Royal Armoured Corps, seeing active service in Egypt and the British Mandate of Palestine. As children we always used to ask Dad to tell us about the war: when he talked about “leading his men” our hearts swelled with pride. As well as the Second World War, Dad has been through a lot: the suicide of both parents and his own stormy first marriage to an older Italian actress.

Then one day in his forties he walked into the Reading Room of the British Library, saw a beautiful young woman wearing a miniskirt—my mother—and Cleopatra eyeliner, her dark hair in a beehive. He held open the door for her, invited her for a coffee, and they fell in love. The course of true love wasn't exactly smooth, but they eventually married and had five children.

In other words, my dad has lived a lot. But for all his experience, I think anorexia is still a genuine mystery to him (and to many men). Back when Dad was a young man, the concepts of size zero and body dysmorphia simply didn't exist. In those days young women idolized Marilyn Monroe; they wanted curves and bosoms, not washboard stomachs and boyish hips. In the 1940s and 50s it was the hourglass shape that was sexy, not this modern, androgynous, straight-up-and-down figure. Dad is of that generation born between the two world wars in Britain, a time of rationing and hardship, loss and sacrifice and real hunger: Why would anyone willingly restrict a healthy intake of food?

My mother and I often joke that I'll never find anyone to marry because she's already found him. And that's the truth: not that I want to marry my father, but that I've spent my whole life looking for someone as kind, generous, and loving as he is. He would do anything for any of us, especially his girls, but in the face of anorexia he was powerless. To see me struggling with this invisible mental illness (and the all-too-visible results) tortured him.

I remember that Dad would buy me “treats”—as if I could be tempted to eat, as if delicious food could somehow overcome the irrationality of the eating disorder. I couldn't be “tempted”—it's just something that anorexia doesn't permit. Even after a long day working, even on the harshest winter evenings, he would put on his navy blue cashmere greatcoat and walk up to Camden High Street. It still breaks my heart to think of him coming back from Marks & Spencer with those bagfuls of treats. He would come into the house, bringing a rush of cold air from the dark wintry streets, and smile, call me “Emsie.” I'd be sitting at our large wooden table in the kitchen—the table on which Leonard and Virginia Woolf started the Hogarth Press, the table on which they printed T.S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
, and on which we've eaten every family meal for the last thirty years. Dad would find me drinking black coffee, huddled near the radiator, trying to concentrate on translating Chaucer to drive away the hunger pangs, and he'd unpack the green bags from Marks & Spencer: French cheeses—brie and camembert—wonderful salads, warm bread, fresh pasta, delicate pastries—anything to encourage me to eat. It smelled so wonderful and I was starving hungry and I would sit there, terrified.

* * *

But this terror doesn't stem from family hang-ups with food, I don't think. Yesterday, for example, another birthday (February and March are full of birthdays in our family), which means lots of birthday meals at my parents' house. I watch my brothers eating, or my father, and it's quite different from the way my female friends eat. On the whole, men seem to relish their meals. Watching them, I'm reminded of the point of food: it's fuel for our bodies and mind—it's a pleasurable sensation; it's delicious.

Often they hunch over their plates and really set about it: the whole messy, sloppy business of feeding time. Sure, they look like cavemen sometimes: licking their fingers, scooping up sauce with bread, eating in short, concentrated bursts, piling it in. Unlike most of the women I know, they don't pretend they're “not that hungry,” or toy with their food. They don't pause and lay down their knives and forks at regular intervals; they don't talk much while they're concentrating on stuffing their faces. I've noticed a lot of women, on the other hand, order delicate meals that don't amount to much—a few bites of steamed fish and a plain side salad—and then string out these meals with endless conversation. No wonder these lunches require large glasses of white wine. Obviously I don't do this kind of social lunching myself (friends have long since given up asking me to meet for lunch), but it doesn't look very hearty. I walk past cafés and restaurants where women are sitting together, chatting over plates of salads, and I wonder,
Is that all they're having?
I feel greedy for thinking this—but don't they get hungry and want to stop off for a sandwich on the way home?

In general, most men don't take much notice of what other men are having—they eat and then they stop. They order what they feel like eating, not what their friends order. In general, women are much more conscious of what their friends are ordering—and more importantly what they eat and what they leave on the plate (or tucked under a salad leaf). If men order fries they'll eat them—but not if they're not hungry. I've often seen Tom order a hamburger, and it'll come with a pile of French fries. This doesn't bother him in the slightest; if he's full from the hamburger, he just leaves the fries. He doesn't keep looking at them and fiddling with them and sneaking in one fry and then another. He either eats them or he doesn't, but it's no big deal.

My brothers and my father have also taught me a lot about how to eat. Enjoy your food and stop when you're full. Don't
fuss about. Surely this is the answer to obesity and anorexia and emotional eating—a natural relationship with food, a responsive attitude to one's own appetite?

If only the solution to anorexia were that simple. I can only explain it like this—the less you eat, the more scared you are of eating; the longer you starve, the more addicted you become to hunger, that clean, empty high.

What does anorexia give me, what is this high? It fills me with endorphins, adrenaline; it gives me a pure, healthy feeling, a buzz, a sense of achievement, a sense of control. The hunger is the drug. Forget cocaine, forget Ecstasy, this is the best high I've ever known. Logically, hunger should make you weak and listless, right? Not so with anorexia: the mania has always driven me to run faster, cycle farther, stay up later, read more, eat less. The longer you do it, the more you realize that anorexics are superhuman: I don't know what I've been running on all these years, but it doesn't seem to run out.

A reader wrote to tell me he had once tried to eat the same food (fruit and vegetables) as his anorexic girlfriend for a week, just to see what it was like. I don't know what the point of it was: to prove to her that she wasn't eating enough, to understand her eating habits for himself? By the first evening he was dizzy and in a foul mood—after a day of just grapes and carrots he seriously thought he'd faint on the tube home from work. The experiment was abandoned, he wrote, much to the relief of them both.

And yet it surprises me that everyone doesn't have anorexia. It's safe and measurable: it delivers. In such an unpredictable world, it seems like a logical way to live. My approach to eating—regimented, organized, every bite accounted for—doesn't seem “disordered” or abnormal. It would frighten me to eat as others do—that impulsive, unnoticed chocolate biscuit; the unscheduled slice of birthday cake in the office, the quick sandwich eaten on the hoof while waiting for the bus.

How can you eat like that? All those hidden extras—the lack of planning in food—I find it unsettling, erratic. Weight-loss experts have long known this: how easily people forget what they've eaten, how they underestimate their actual daily food intake. At the heart of my problem is this need to stay in control—and of course the ever-present fear of letting go. Honestly, I think everyone else is out of control. I can't relax around food; to me it's a risk, a flashing red light, a time to be vigilant.

I see people eating potato chips while walking down the street, or grazing on peanuts in a wine bar, and I just don't get it.

* * *

Part of this journey of recovery, and part of growing up, is that I have to accept I'm wrong. Simple as that. However much I believe that my (restrictive) approach to food is correct and that everyone else is excessive and out of control, I have to accept that the world sees it differently. Whatever I think is right—is wrong. This is unsustainable. Anorexia ruins relationships and wrecks your health. It traps you in a prison of your own making and isolates you from your family. I've done enough damage. I'll always carry the isolation inside me.

From the age of nineteen, as anorexia took hold, I avoided physical contact with my parents—it was simply too much to bear, too close. Back in the Oxford years, hovering in the kitchen around mealtimes, wanting the warmth of human company after months of self-imposed solitude at university, transfixed by the smell and look of food I couldn't eat, as well as by the heat from the oven, I'd talk to Mum and sometimes she'd reach out her arms. I wanted so much to admit that I was tired of fighting myself, to let her look after me, but the fear and vigilance kept me stiff and unhuggable. I needed to stay strong. I feared that if
I asked for help or let my guard down, even for a moment, I'd collapse completely. My fear of being weak and needy was linked to the fear of becoming fat and greedy (it still is). So this created a physical and emotional distance between me and the others, a distance I was unaccustomed to. As children, we'd fight to sit at Dad's feet for the bedtime story—he would read
A Christmas Carol
to the five of us, every December, the highlight of our year. I often cuddled my mum, occasionally even my brothers or sisters . . . but anorexia had made me so wary.

Even now when my mum and dad hug me, a little part of me still wonders if they're checking—checking for the bony spine, the jutting shoulder blades—the way they used to when I was hiding under all those layers of clothes.

* * *

Whenever I think about my family and anorexia, I think about birthdays. We make a big deal of birthdays in my family—not only us five kids and Mum and Dad, but now the husband and children of my big sister (Charlie, Virginia, Isla, and Theo) and the wife and children of my big brother (Katrina, Leonard, and Julian). So there are frequent gatherings at my parents' house and, inevitably, lots of food occasions.