An Apple a Day (10 page)

But even back in the 1980s and 1990s, when bursaries and scholarships were available (and we did benefit from financial assistance), I still don't know how my parents managed to put all five of us through the most expensive day schools in London. Our fees were paid, but then there was everything else: new textbooks, theater tickets, sports equipment, endless demands for money they must have struggled to meet. My brothers and sisters and I were interlopers in the midst of all that wealth.

I never went on the school trips: skiing in Verbier, archaeological digs in Greece, or lacrosse tours of China. As children we spent all our vacations in Europe—we'd load up the car and camper and “motor” to France and Italy. We would drive and drive and then park somewhere at night—not in a campsite but in a secluded turnout or a field of corn. Mum and Dad slept in the camper and the five of us slept in the car—two in the trunk, two on the backseat and one on the front seat. (Have you ever tried sleeping across a car hand brake?)

And I didn't get a convertible for my seventeenth birthday (although I did get a weekend job at Woolworth's). Katie, Philip, Alice, Trim, and I made our way from Camden Town to Hammersmith every day on the Northern and Piccadilly lines, a ragamuffin bunch of Woolfs, reading and arguing and eating Curly-Wurlies as we went.

These days St. Pauls's Girl's School is portrayed as a hotbed of eating disorders, but I don't remember it like that. No one seemed particularly thin or obsessive about her weight, or it may be I didn't notice, because back then I had no concerns about food. It's only fifteen or twenty years ago and yet it seems a different world. We just didn't have all the magazines and Internet images—there wasn't the intense scrutiny on every aspect of women's bodies, faces, hair, teeth, bunions, nails, wrinkles, skin color, tone, cellulite. Botox didn't exist—and getting a facelift was something mad old Hollywood actresses did at the age of ninety-five.

In a world without
Heat
or
Closer
, we read our favorite magazines,
Just Seventeen
and
Mizz
, religiously. The articles were all about sparkly eyeshadow and how to dance like Madonna—not diets or fitness regimes or how much women weighed. Once in a while we borrowed a copy of
Vogue
from someone's mum, but the models weren't as thin as they are now. Remember the “supers”: Cindy Crawford with the mole and Linda Evangelista with her brightly colored hair! As I remember it, we talked about our boyfriends, we smoked Silk Cut, we avoided double lacrosse and we terrorized our chemistry teacher.

I don't remember anyone skipping lunch, getting super-thin, or over-exercising; I don't remember any anorexic talk. Weirdly, in a recent session with my psychiatrist, I recalled sitting in the locker rooms at St. Paul's: it was morning break, I was with a group of friends, and we were all eating Mars Bars and sipping styrofoam cups of coffee from the vending machine. Then I remembered one of the girls stood up and went into the bathroom, and I heard her retching. She had been perfectly fine until that moment, and when she came out she asked who wanted to go for a cigarette. I now suppose she had bulimia, but did I understand that at the time?

With A levels over, and a place at Oxford to study English Literature, I went to Paris for the summer with my best friend. It was the end of school and the beginning of the rest of our lives: we criss-crossed the bridges of Paris, read Camus, stayed up all night, drank a lot of wine.

In September I came back to London and worked full-time in Woolworth's until Christmas. I was by this time “Head of Entertainment,” which meant I had to rearrange all the cassettes and CDs of the Top 40 Chart before the shop opened every Sunday morning—when I had a raging hangover.

With a bit of money in the bank, I could begin my year off before university. On New Year's Eve I boarded a flight for New York. It seems strange to me now, but I had never been on a plane before.

* * *

Age eighteen, I landed at JFK and that's where it all began. My big sister, Katie, five years older than I am, was living in New York and had invited me to come and stay for a few weeks. She met me at the airport and we took the subway home, got dressed up, and hit the first of the New Year parties. At ten minutes to ten (it was party number two or three, they were handing out sambuca shots at the door) I ran into Laurence.

This wasn't our first meeting. In fact, I'd known Laurence—we called him Laurie—since the age of thirteen when he used to visit London with his parents. He was a year older than I. His mother and my mother are close friends, both writers and academics, my mother at London University, his mother at New York University, and they often stay with each other during conferences or research trips.

With my newly rediscovered big sister and Laurie and a gaggle of friends, I reeled from party to party. Despite the alcohol and the
jet lag, I have quite clear memories of that first night in Manhattan. I remember a lively Chinese meal (how odd, that I could eat in public back then); I remember standing outside the restaurant on Broadway with Laurie, sharing a cigarette. I remember various cab rides, criss-crossing from the Upper West Side to the Upper East Side; I remember a rooftop party at midnight, the music and fireworks, looking out over the Hudson River, and our first kiss.

I don't know how to describe our relationship: inevitably the pain that followed has clouded much of the happiness we experienced at the time. But as for New York—it captured my heart. There is a line in
Heartburn
by Nora Ephron that reminds me of that time in my life and the excitement of discovering the city, about how New Yorkers are always rushing around “looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie.” I had planned to stay a fortnight, and ended up staying for nearly a year. I got a job (in advertising), a shoebox apartment (on the Upper East Side), and fell in love (for the first time). I ate plenty of chocolate chip cookies.

* * *

Why did I fall for Laurie so badly? It wasn't my first serious relationship. I had lost my virginity at the age of seventeen to a very nice chap called Jamie who went to St. Paul's. We met at the joint Poetry Discussion Group—which is where the girls went to meet boys and vice versa. He declared his intentions at the Christmas party at Twickenham Rugby Club; I remember it still, liking someone so much, praying he liked me back.

We were both virgins, and after dating for months we decided the time was right. Virginity was threatening to become a burden—sixteen was the age to lose it, seventeen was considered the cut-off point in those days. I was seventeen and a half and
Jamie was nearly eighteen. We borrowed his aunt's cottage in Devon for the weekend and did the deed. To be honest, it was more fumbling than passionate, but it was a relief to have gotten it over with. Afterward we went outside and sat on the sea wall; I remember Jamie was crying and I was thinking about how much it had hurt.

So, Laurie wasn't the first in that sense. But it was my first proper adult relationship: we were practically living together, and I was 3,500 miles from home. According to Laurie “it had been on the cards for years” (to me, his arrogance was part of his charm), and neither of us felt the need to pretend. That was new, the emotional openness and physical intimacy. At school our relationships had been immature; being cool was more important than being honest. If someone fancied you, or was about to dump you, you adjusted your feelings accordingly. Laurie and I never hid our feelings from each other: we were in love and heading in the same direction.

Our relationship was inevitable: the shared family history, and the tension that had been building in those too-brief meetings as teenagers; we got on pretty well as adults too. There was a genuine intellectual connection and shared interests: literature, languages, travel. We were competitive as hell—I would study at Oxford and he at Cornell. Unlike most Americans, Laurie had traveled widely in Europe; he spoke fluent French, Italian, and German. And, unlike my disappointment on that sea wall in Devon, sex with Laurie was irresistible. He wasn't conventionally gorgeous—very tall, lanky, floppy brown hair—but urbane, handsome. He dressed like the privileged Jewish New Yorker he was, with an academic antistyle thing going on (picked up in Europe, I think), all crumpled shirts and corduroys. He was the first vegan I'd ever met, and we spent hours discussing the rights of animals. I'd always been uncomfortable with the idea
of eating dead animals—my mother recalls me as a child sitting for hours over a plate of whitebait: I couldn't bring myself to put those tiny silvery fish in my mouth. Now, independent and free to make my own food choices, it all made sense. I never went as far as Laurie's strict veganism—I wear leather shoes, for example, and drink milk—but I have not eaten meat or fish to this day.

Nothing lasts forever. I had to leave New York and come back to start my degree. I remember saying goodbye to Laurie at the departures gate at JFK: I remember my anxiety for him; it seemed unthinkable that we could survive apart. There was no doubt in either of our minds that we were going to stay together across the Atlantic. We wrote constantly, long letters and postcards, and sent each other faxes daily. We signed up for long distance telephone deals—only 20 cents a minute to the U.S.—and we got email accounts back when they were quite the newest technology.

Ten weeks later, as we were planning our reunion—I was going to fly out to New York for Christmas, then Laurie would fly back with me for New Year's in Oxford—I received an airmail letter out of the blue. He said this long-distance thing “wasn't working,” that he needed a girlfriend who was around, that it was better for both of us to make a fresh start, alone.

The hurt was indescribable. I stayed in my college room for five days straight. I remember I drank water straight from the tap and sat on the floor by the window smoking duty-free U.S. cigarettes. I didn't go out to lectures or to the shops (it was the first time in my life I'd gone without food). I don't remember crying, just feeling completely blank—I couldn't get my mind around living without him. Then I took a shower, unlocked the door, and set about destroying myself.

Chapter 6

Things Fall Apart

H
ow can I describe those years in Oxford? I won't begin with the beauty of the “dreaming spires” or gambling trips down the River Cherwell (I'm no poet, and anyway it's been done much better in
Brideshead Revisited
). Nor will I go on about the books I read and essays I wrote, the inspiring lectures and the libraries, the University Parks, the lanes and colleges and pealing bells . . . They are all locked up inside, woven into my memories of Oxford, but they are not part of this story.

Those three years, from the ages of nineteen to twenty-one, should have been a time of growth; instead they were a time of shrinking, of near collapse. And yet I remember them as happy. It strikes me now as strange, that I was colder and hungrier than I'd ever been in my life, but I remember being happy.

The spark that had been ignited by the end of my relationship with Laurie caught fire. With my fundamental lack of self-belief, I blamed myself. I turned the pain inward; I despised myself for getting rejected, so punishment was the next logical step. I believe this is what self-harmers do: cut themselves on the outside in order to relieve the pain inside. I understand the impulse very well, although I have never deliberately injured myself. (I write this, and then a few days later I receive an email from a psychiatrist
who reminds me that “anorexia is also a form of self-harm.” God, that makes me feel uneasy.)

Starving myself was a way of coping with the pain I felt, and a way of controlling myself. Clearly I was too much for Laurie. Too talkative, too emotional, too fleshy. In short, too fat. I believed this, despite the fact that I was average height and weight, slap bang in the “normal” section of the BMI charts. Photographs of me aged nineteen show I had a nice figure.

I had no way of dealing with my emotional chaos, so I found a physical solution. Of course none of this was clear to me then, but I wasn't thinking straight. I was thinking about Laurie all the time. The overwhelming feeling was one of abandonment and humiliation. I hated myself, not him. (I've never been able to hate him.)

Self-starvation does a good job of muting everything. When you're eating so little, you don't have any reserves left over to get emotional or dramatic about life; mine became a pretty low-level existence. And yet it's also hard work: being constantly hungry requires focus; you mustn't slip up and eat something, you mustn't give in and show that you need food or a hug; you mustn't allow your appetite to get the better of you. You don't deserve to eat.

When anorexia starts, it's like any normal diet. You lose weight gradually, steadily, a pound or two a week. It's satisfying to see your efforts pay off: a simple game of cost and reward. You resist the croissant or the brownie you used to have with a friend in a café, you drag yourself to the gym every morning, and it starts working. Fewer calories in, more calories out: the numbers on the scale go down. It really is that simple.

* * *

It may be simple in theory, but in practice it's not easy to stop eating. Human beings—even superhuman anorexics—are programmed
to hunt, gather, and consume; calories are life and survival. It takes a lot of energy to overcome the natural impulse to eat, to deny yourself food every hour, every day, when you're constantly hungry. And this is one of the greatest misunderstandings about this disease—that anorexics don't like food. One of the questions I'm continually asked is: “So why don't you like food?” Really, truthfully, I don't hate food. (Fear, yes; hate, no.) I spend most of my life worrying about it; perhaps that's why I avoid it so assiduously.