And yet, here I was. Finally unable to eat anything. From head to toe, I was flooded with a sickly yellow feeling and my appetite – my most resplendent asset – had vanished. My intestines felt kinetic. There was a constant lump in my throat. Mum would give me bowls of soup in the evening, telling me it was easy to swallow, but I’d only manage a few spoonfuls and put the rest down the sink when she wasn’t there.
After a fortnight, I got on the scales. I had lost a stone. I stood in front of the mirror naked and saw, for the first time in my life, the very beginnings of what I had been led to believe were the true qualifications of femininity. A smaller waist, hip bones, collarbones and shoulder blades. In this new landscape that I didn’t understand – where the boy I’d shared a home and life with for over a year was suddenly repulsed by me – I felt a flicker of something finally making sense. I had stopped eating, therefore my body was changing. It worked. Here, in the mess, I found a simple formula of which I was the master. Here was something I could control that would lead me somewhere new, somewhere I could be someone different. The answer was in my reflection: don’t eat any more.
I made a project of my new mission; I weighed myself every day, I counted my steps, I counted my calories, I did sit-ups in my bedroom every morning and night, I wrote down my measurements every week. I lived off Diet Coke and carrot sticks. If I wanted to eat something, I’d go to bed or have a hot bath. More weight dropped away. I shed it day by day, pound by pound; it never seemed to plateau. This filled me with an energy that initially acted as a substitute for food; I felt like a high-speed train that was magically running on empty. Another month passed, another stone dropped. My period didn’t arrive, which simultaneously frightened and encouraged me. At least it meant something was changing inside and outside too; at least I was closer to being someone new.
During this time, when I wasn’t at lectures, I was hunkered down at home. I still felt fragile from the break-up and I didn’t want to socialize. The first person who noticed something was wrong was Alex, Harry’s sister, who I had become very close to during our relationship and who, thankfully, stuck by me through our break-up. She had just moved to New York and we were skyping every day. One day, in the middle of one of our chats, I stood up while we were speaking and she saw my body in full length for the first time in months.
‘Where are your tits?’ she asked me, her eyes widening as she scanned me up and down, leaning into her camera.
‘They’re there.’
‘No they’re not. And your stomach is like an ironing board. Dolls, what’s happened?’
‘Nothing, I’ve just lost some weight.’
‘Oh my darling,’ she said, frowning. ‘You’re not eating, are you?’
Others were less perceptive. I started going out more and seeing friends from university. People told me they’d heard about Harry and how sorry they were. People told me he had a new girlfriend. People told me how great I looked, over and over and over again. Every compliment fed me like lunch.
I went out and drank constantly to try and distract from the pain of hunger. My mum, progressively more concerned, would leave plates of food out for me on the kitchen table for when I’d get home from a night out. She thought that, rightly, I’d be more likely to eat then. I learnt to go straight up to bed when I got home.
By December, I’d lost three stone. Three stone in three months. I found it harder to summon the thoughts and strict rituals that had kept me away from food until that point. I was exhausted, my hair was thin and I was constantly, bone-searingly freezing. I sat in the shower to try and warm myself up with the water turned on so hot it burnt my back and left marks. I lied constantly to my worried parents about how much I’d eaten that day or when I was going to eat next. I would dream that I had consumed mountains and mountains of food and would wake up in tears of frustration that I had stupidly broken the spell I had cast.
Hicks was at Exeter for an extra year after the rest of us graduated. One weekend, Sophie, Farly and I decided to drive down to spend the weekend with her and go to all our old haunts. It also meant I could see Harry, who was in his final year there, which I thought might feel like something had come full-circle and bring me a semblance of closure. I told him we needed to give each other our stuff back; he agreed to see me.
The girls drove me to his house early on the Saturday evening and parked outside.
‘WE’LL WAIT RIGHT HERE, MATE,’ Hicks bellowed out of the car window, her feet and a fag dangling out of it. I went to Harry’s front door and rang the bell.
‘Oh my God,’ he said when he opened the door. ‘You look –’
‘Hi, Harry,’ I said and walked past him and went upstairs. He followed after me. We stood at opposite ends of his bedroom, staring at each other.
‘You look amazing.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Can I have my stuff?’
‘Yeah, yeah, sure,’ he said in a daze. He handed me a plastic bag of my clothes and books. I took his rolled-up jumpers out of my handbag and threw them on his bed.
‘That’s all your stuff I found at my house.’
‘OK, thanks,’ he said. ‘How long are you here for?’
‘The weekend. Me and Farly and Soph are staying with Hicks.’
‘Oh, great,’ he said. He was speaking uncharacteristically diminutively. ‘Well, do send them my love. Although, they probably don’t want to hear from me.’ There was a brief silence as we continued to stare at each other. ‘I’m sorry for –’
‘Don’t be,’ I snapped.
‘I am,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for how I handled it.’
‘Honestly, don’t be, you did me the biggest favour,’ I babbled. ‘Look, I’ve even grown my nails, I don’t bite them any more, I’ve had my first ever manicure, would you believe it, and it only cost five quid,’ I said, aggressively sticking my hands out towards him. I heard the car honking outside. Sophie and Hicks were drinking tinnies and both beeping the horn, while Farly flapped about trying to stop them.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he replied. We walked in silence down the stairs and he opened his front door.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked. ‘You look really –’
‘Thin?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m fine, Harry,’ I said, before giving him a cursory hug. ‘Goodbye.’
The girls took me out for a curry to celebrate what they saw as the big finale of the whole sorry mess; I picked at rice and drank pint after pint of beer. I felt more agitated, more humiliated, more angry and more out of control than ever. Whatever it was I wanted to achieve by seeing him hadn’t worked. I hadn’t got it.
I threw myself into weight loss harder and faster. My anger fuelled me. The weight began to plateau – a sign that the cogs of my metabolism were confused and slowing down – so I ate even less. Friends started confronting me about it – Farly told me she thought I was gripped by an obsession. She tried to help me open up, but I brushed off her questions with humour. Generally, I realized a good tactic to get people off my back was to constantly make jokes about how little I was eating. I would bring it up before anyone else did, so they knew it wasn’t a problem, just a diet. And besides, as I kept pointing out, I was still only a size 10. I wasn’t underweight, I just started out big.
I carried on because it was the only thing I could control. I carried on because I just wanted to be happy and everyone knows when you’re thinner, you’re happier. I carried on because, at every turn, society was rewarding me for my self-inflicted torture. I received compliments, I received propositions, I felt more accepted by people I didn’t know, nearly all clothes looked great on me. I felt like I had finally earnt the right to be taken seriously as a woman; that everything before that had been redundant. That I had been foolish to think I had ever been worthy of affection. I had equated love with thinness and, to my horror, reinforcement of this belief was everywhere. My health was plummeting, my stocks were up.
And a wom
an can never really be thin enough, that’s the problem. It is not seen as too high a price to pay to be hungry all the time or to restrict an entire food group or to spend four nights a week in a Fitness First gym. To be an empirically attractive young man, you just have to have a nice smile, an average body type (give or take a stone) a bit of hair and be wearing an all-right jumper. To be a desirable woman – the sky’s the limit. Have every surface of your body waxed. Have manicures every week. Wear heels every day. Look like a Victoria’s Secret Angel even though you work in an office. It’s not enough to be an average-sized woman with a bit of hair and an all-right jumper. That doesn’t cut it. We’re told we have to look like the women who are paid to look like that as their profession.
And the more perfect I strived to be, the more imperfections I noticed. I had been more body confident as a size 14 than I was over three stone lighter. When I got naked with a new partner, I wanted to apologize for what I had to offer and list a series of things I’d change, like a middle-class hostess who says, ‘Oh, don’t look at the carpet, the carpet’s just dreadful, I promise it’s all going to change,’ when she has guests round.
Some of my friends’ concerns began to merge with irritation. I arrived at parties basically half dressed, having not eaten anything for days, and would wander around in a trance, barely able to say anything. Sabrina and AJ went travelling together and I turned up to their leaving party late, felt too faint to talk to anyone, made an excuse and left after half an hour. I could feel myself pushing my life away and became more and more absorbed in a completely false sense of control.
And then I fell in love for the first time.
I was wandering around a grimy house party in Elephant and Castle when I first met Leo. I had never seen a man more perfect. Tall and lean with dark floppy hair, a strong jaw, sparkling eyes, a retroussé nose, a seventies tache; a face that was half Josh Brolin and half James Taylor with – and here’s the best part – absolutely no idea of his own beauty. He was a hippie PhD student; a monomaniac with a monobrow.
We started seeing each other soon after that night. I knew it was serious because I didn’t go to bed with him for two whole months, wanting desperately to get it right, to savour every moment of time with him – not to speed through anything. He lived in Camden and at the end of one of our nights together, normally around four a.m., he’d walk me to the bus stop outside Chalk Farm station and I’d wait for the N5 to take me ten miles north to Edgware. From there, I’d do the forty-five-minute westerly walk to Stanmore, winding through the deserted streets lined with Volkswagens, watching the sun rise over the semi-detached red-brick houses, and I was happier than I’d ever imagined I could be.
One night, as we did this familiar walk through Camden, he stopped to kiss me and ran his hands through my hair, feeling the bumps of my clip-in hair extensions. He picked the heavy hair off my face and held it back behind my head.
‘You’d look really good with short hair,’ he said.
‘No way,’ I replied. ‘I had a bob when I was a teenager and I looked like a friar.’
‘No, I’m talking really short. You should do it.’
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘I don’t have the face for it.’
‘You do!’ he said. ‘Don’t be a scaredy cat. It’s just hair.’
Little did he know that ‘just hair’ was all I thought I was good for. Just hair, just collarbones, just sit-ups. ‘Just’ was all I had expended my energy on for the best part of a year and it’s all I thought I was worth.
A month later I took a photo of Twiggy to the hairdresser, did a shot of vodka and cut fifteen inches off my hair. With it went some of my obsession with how I looked. It snipped off and fell to the floor.
Leo hadn’t realized my secret, because I didn’t want him to think I was a nutcase, but after a few months of dating, he added a few things up. I managed to avoid any situation where there would be food; I always told him I would eat breakfast later when we left each other in the morning. Finally, a friend had told him she thought that I was ill.
‘Is this a problem?’ he asked me.
‘It’s fine,’ I said, feeling both mortified and frightened that I was about to lose the best person I had ever met.
‘Because I can do this with you. I can help you. But I can’t fall in love with you if you can’t talk to me.’
‘OK, it’s been a problem,’ I told him. ‘But it will change. I promise.’
I would have done anything to keep this man in my life. The love I felt was aggressive and fraught – I loved him with panic and passion. I didn’t fall in love; love fell on me. Like a ton of bricks from a great height. I didn’t have a choice but to let go of an obsession that was on its way to destroying everything.
So I did. I read all the right books; I went to the doctor. Slowly a stone crept back on me. Slowly I got used to eating normally. My health returned. I even tried group support meetings in community centres where, would you believe, the first thing they do is put a plate of biscuits in the middle of the room and fuss over whose turn it is on the rota to bring the snacks the following week, which seemed to me to be as useful as putting a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the middle of an AA meeting.
I fell back in love with cooking. I fell back in love with eating. I spent every weekend doing both with Leo. My mum and I watched old Fanny Cradock and Nigella episodes together. Everyone kept telling me I looked ‘healthy’ every time they saw me and I tried to ignore the thought that this meant I was fat again. The war was over; the recovery began. I got my life back.
My hippie liberated me from my enslavement to perfection. We’d get drunk and cut my hair even shorter. He’d snip huge chunks out with kitchen scissors while I sat at the table squeezing limes into beers. I eventually shaved both sides, leaving me with a tufty Mohawk. I lived in plimsolls and his jumpers and I’d spend days with him without touching a make-up bag or a razor – a total first. We’d go for weekends on the coast and wash our faces and bodies and dishes in the sea. We set up a tent in his bedroom on Sunday nights when we were bored. It was pure and free and perfect.
But I knew deep down that I was still morphing myself at the behest of a man’s gaze; I had just gone to the opposite end of the spectrum. Leo hated me wearing too much make-up, so I’d wipe it off on the bus on the way home to him after a party. I’d change out of my heels into high-tops.
The weight I put back on was not anything I wanted to do for myself. Had I not met Leo, I think I would have carried on getting thinner, but with a stroke of luck, he helped lead me to total recovery. As I got older and mercifully more aware of what a precious gift a healthy working body is, I felt ashamed and bewildered that I could have treated mine so badly. But it would be a lie to say I think I will ever be entirely free of what happened in that time, which is something no one ever tells you. You can restore your physical being to health; you can develop a rational, balanced, caring attitude to weight as well as good daily habits. But you can’t forget how many calories are in a boiled egg or how many steps burn how many calories. You can’t forget what exact weight you were every week of every month that made up that time. You can try as hard as you can to block it out, but sometimes, on very difficult days, it feels like you’ll never be as euphoric as that ten-year-old licking lurid jam off her fingertips, not ever again.
Everything I Knew About Love at Twenty-one
Men love a wild, filthy woman. Have sex on the first date, keep them up all night, smoke hash in their bed in the morning, never call them back, tell them you hate them, turn up on their doorstep in an Ann Summers nurse’s outfit, be anything but conventional. That’s how you keep them interested.
If you ignore the boyfriends of your best friends for long enough, they’ll eventually go away. Treat them a bit like how you would the common cold or a mild case of thrush.
A break-up will never be as hard as the first one. You’ll float around aimlessly in the months afterwards, feeling as lost and confused as a child, questioning all the thing
s you knew to be true and contemplating all the things you have to relearn.
Always stay at a man’s house, then you can leave whenever you want in the morning.
The perfect man is olive-skinned with brown or green eyes, a big, strong nose, a thick beard and curly dark hair. He has tattoos that aren’t embarrassing and five pairs of vintage Levis.
When you’re not having sex, have a bush like a wild, climbing shrub. There’s no point wasting all that time, money and fumes on hair-removal cream unless someone’s going to see the results.
When you are thin enough, you’ll be happy with who you are and then you’ll be worthy of love.
Don’t go out with someone who won’t let you get drunk and flirt with other people. If that’s part of your identity, they should take you for who you are.
Orgasms are easy to fake and make both parties feel better. Do a good deed today.
You’ll feel settled, centred and calm when you fall in love with the right man.
The worst feeling in the world is being dumped.
Men, on the whole, are not to be trusted.
The best bit of a relationship is the first three months.
A good friend will always put you before a man.
When you can’t fall asleep, dream of all the love affairs with olive-skinned, curly-haired men that lie ahead of you.
Gooseberry Fool: My Life as a Third Wheel
It began with a train journey. I always thought something brilliant might happen to me on a train. The transitional state of a long journey has always seemed to me the most romantic and magical of places to find yourself in; marooned in a cosy pod of your own thoughts, suspended in mid-air, travelling through a wodge of silent, blank pages between two chapters. A place where phones dip in and out of consciousness and you’re forced to spend time with your thoughts, working out what needs to be reshaped and reordered. I have done big dreaming while sitting on trains. The clearest moments of epiphany or gratitude have hit me when zooming through unidentifiable English countryside, staring out at a golden rapeseed field, considering what I am leaving behind or about to approach.
Everything I Know About Love Page 6