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I’m not sure if it was WWI or the Irish potato famine that caused my grandmother to be such an enemy of the plump, the chubby, the…fat. She passed this down to my parents who, especially my mother, were capable of judging an entire population based on their weight. When they visited me in Chicago they told me, “We love it here. Why is everyone so fat?” Which they weren’t except they were but who cares? My years of living in New York City during the eighties, one of the most fatphobic decades ever, being broke so I walked nearly everywhere but also like most New Yorkers took public transportation which burned plenty of calories.  I had seen eating disorders up close, a woman I stayed with in Paris kept horrible bits of food in jars all over her flat and often arrived at the end of a restaurant meal to eat scraps from the table.

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I was in an Uber headed to the airport when Rod Stewart’s raspy voice singing Tonight’s the Night filled the car with some of the most sexist, disturbing lyrics I’ve ever heard in my life. I came of age in the seventies. It sucked. Sex was everywhere and because of the lack of AIDS and a plethora of ways to not have a baby, it was offered the same way you might offer someone a glass of water. At least where I grew up. And then there was this.

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In 1982 I was twenty-five, my eldest sister was alive and well, my best friend had been killed four years earlier. I was trying to get sober, obsessed with my weight and men and my parent’s approval. I wanted to write and act and not drink again. I would drink again. My roommate would wake from her coma and recover because she was determined to take her life back. I wish I better understood how hard that was for her. From my perspective ( forty years plus ), this girl is a mess, funny, angry, needy, confused. Constantly doubting herself in terms of men and I can’t remember who 98% of these men she mentions were! Apparently, I was good at meeting them, not so good at keeping them in my life probably because I was spinning too fast to be held down. And, trying to figure out my father. A dead-end for sure.

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