Description

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With warmth, wit, and not a trace of self-pity" (Entertainment Weekly), Betsy Lerner details her twenty-year struggle with depression and compulsive eating in Food and Loathing, a book that dares to expose the insidious nature of women's secret life with food.
"Alternating between hilarious and heartbreaking" (People), Food and Loathing gives voice to one of the last taboo subjects and greatest stigmas of our time: being overweight. Lerner's revelations on the cult of thinness -- from the dreaded weigh-in at junior high gym class to the effects of inhaling Pepperidge Farm Goldfish at Olympic speeds -- are universally resonant, as is her belief that this is one battle no one should fight alone.
Essential reading for anyone who has ever wielded a fork in despair or calculated her self-worth on the morning scale, "Lerner's lament is a triumph" (Publishers Weekly).

About the Author

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Betsy Lerner holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize, and was selected as one of PEN's Emerging Writers in 1987. She is the author of The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Praise For…

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USA Today An object lesson in how women can lose themselves in the quest to lose weight....Lerner's bravery and generosity illuminate every page of this masterful story of a worthwhile life.

Newsday Food and Loathing is destined to take its place alongside the classics of adolescent angst, Girl, Interrupted and The Bell Jar.

The Seattle Times Lerner's writing has the ring of truth, and for many readers who live with eating disorders, this book will be a life raft.