An Appetite for Hunger

A new book on eating disorders shatters stereotypes about who's susceptible.

To most everyone, the prototypical sufferer is an insecure, sickly-thin, young, white woman who looks in the mirror and sees a fat girl. It is Karen Carpenter, singing the sad songs of the 1970s as she starved herself and finally died in 1983. It is so many Hollywood actresses, splashed across magazine covers, their pretty heads unwieldy on bodies the size of pins. It is the adolescent cross-country star, her breasts and period long gone, running her ropy body into the ground. It is an entire dorm of private-school girls, bingeing on junk food, then vomiting in the bathroom in shifts. Increasingly, it is a suburban teen who has found an online community of pro-anorexia Web sites and "thinspiration" videos so she can share secrets with others.

The image of an anorexic or bulimic person has NEVER been working class, over 40, certainly not male and definitely not black. Until now.

Anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders have spread beyond the core population of white, middle-class girls and into groups that were once considered invulnerable, according to Kate Taylor, editor of the new anthology Going Hungry: Writers on Desire, Self-Denial and Overcoming Anorexia (Anchor Books).

Taylor, a culture reporter at the New York Sun, was hospitalized for anorexia during her junior year at Harvard. She expected the other patients to be "pathetic, passive, probably former ballerinas with nothing more important on their minds than how many calories are in a carrot stick or a slice of diet bread."

But her peers at the hospital were very different. "The other patients defied all stereotypes," she writes. "Very few were young, rich white girls. At the first treatment unit outside Boston and in a later program in New York, I met anorexics who were middle-aged, who were mothers, who were African American, Latino, Orthodox Jewish and even male."

Most, she says, weren't the "perfect little girls" emphasized in popular culture, but real people with real problems—poverty, addiction, abandonment and sexual abuse. The collection of essays in Going Hungry reflects the diversity she saw, including the voices of two African-American women.

In her essay, "Finding Home," Maya Browne, a New York City writer and producer, discusses her long struggle with anorexia and bulimia, which she first chronicled in Essence magazine in 1993. Her story, and the study that accompanied it, helped break the silence on black women and eating disorders. Before that, African Americans seemed immune to these problems; they were viewed as a part of white women's craziness. In fact, compared to other women, blacks have a healthy self-image when it comes to weight. Our role models are a voluptuous Queen Latifah and curvy Mo'Nique, not the hangers on the runways who need some meat on their bones. We have a tradition of roundness; to our ancestors, a full-figured body symbolized health, wealth and fertility. Our relationship with food is just fine—often too much so.

But Browne's ground-breaking article in Essence showed that no race is immune. More recently in "Finding Home," she describes—in graphic detail—her own binge-purge drama during a holiday dinner.

"I had always loved Thanksgiving meals, but this particular evening the smell permeating the house—roast turkey, candied yams bubbling in pools of butter and brown sugar and pumpkin pie baking, with its golden–brown, buttery crust—filled me with terror." At the end of the meal, she excused herself and found a bathroom where she wouldn't be discovered. After locking the door, she stuck her finger down her throat and gagged.

"In exact reverse of the order I had consumed them, the turkey, stuffing, yams, pie, cranberry sauce and string beans came up. With a feeling of accomplishment, I flushed the toilet and turned to the sink to wash my hands." Browne's bio for the Essence piece described her as a recovered anorexic and bulimic. But, she admits in "Finding Home," "my battle would go on for another decade."

Now, she describes herself as vigilant about her weight, but says she has learned to eat well and value herself and her health. She occasionally notices a woman slip into the bathroom after a meal. "Once I would've felt a kind of twisted solidarity. But these days I look away: I take a deep breath and thank God that I am well. And then, sometimes, I even have dessert."

Latria Graham, who contributed "Black-and-White Thinking" to the Going Hungry anthology, describes how feeling out of place in her matronly dresses—while the other girls in her school wore designer jeans—led to bulimia. "I wanted to be like Hannah D.," she writes. "She was everything I was not: She was of medium height (not tall and gawky, like me) and medium build (not emaciated but not fat like me), and she had long, straight, brown hair. She was popular, all the boys liked her, and she didn't have to get braces to have pretty white straight teeth. White. Oh yeah…and she was white. There weren't many minorities where I grew up, so pretty much anyone I admired was going to be white."

What started as meal skipping and occasional throwing up, turned into full-blown bulimia, once Graham graduated from high school and landed at Dartmouth College. "The cafeteria was buffet style, which was dangerous," she writes. "If I had time I would eat, throw up, finish eating, sneak off to the science wing and throw up, then go the library before my friends caught up with me. Sometimes in my room by myself, I'd order meals from Steak-Out, and then throw up in a trash bag."

Eventually, Graham started cutting herself, which left raised, keloid scars on her arms. The weekend she told a friend that she wanted to set herself on fire, she was sent home from college on medical leave. After two treatment centers, Graham writes that she is better but that she still has bad days. She struggles to figure out who she is in a white-dominated world, where black women have few roles to play. "I could be the motherly black woman who feeds everyone, or I could raise my voice and be defined as a bitch."

Like the other stories in Going Hungry, Graham's doesn't end with a miracle. "God didn't perform a miracle and cure me so that I never think about food again," she writes. "But [He] performed a different type of miracle: He made it possible for me to get the help that I needed, and now, one year out of treatment, I've begun to believe in Him again."

Linda Villarosa is a regular contributor to The Root.