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Repost: Cherry Boone O’Neill’s book, Starving for Attention…

One last repost, since I posted reviews of her sisters’ books. This is the first book about the Boone family I ever read. I originally read Cherry’s book in 1989 or so, but I reviewed it for Epinions in 2003 and updated the review in 2011. It appears here as/is.

For some reason, I recently decided to re-read Cherry Boone O’Neill’s 1983 memoir Starving For Attention after reading it for a high school paper I wrote when I was seventeen. It was interesting to revisit this book again after all these years, mainly because I have a totally different perspective now. Right now, I’m an adult and, in a manner of speaking, I’m a mental health professional. Back then, I was a high school student who was interested in eating disorders and had to write a book report.

Cherry Boone O’Neill is Pat and Shirley Boone’s oldest daughter. She has three younger sisters– her mom had four daughters in three and a half years! When Cherry was born in Denton, Texas in 1954, Pat Boone was just beginning his meteoric rise into teen idol status and attending college. Fourteen months after Cherry’s birth, her sister Lindy arrived, born in New York City. In 1956, Debby Boone was born in Hackensack, New Jersey. Then in 1958, youngest sister Laury was born. In the midst of his burgeoning career and the quick expansion of his family, Pat Boone managed to graduate from Columbia University, earning a degree in English. It wasn’t long before Hollywood beckoned and the young family moved to California.

Cherry writes that she was always eager to please, and having grown up with very strict parents who were strong Christians, she was especially motivated to toe the line. She also felt very responsible for watching her sisters. Debby was the most rebellious of the four sisters, while Laury was a mischief maker. Cherry tried hard to bring home straight A’s. The girls were also incorporated into Pat Boone’s act, especially since he had a TV series, the “Chevy Showroom”. The girls made their television debut on the last episode of that program. As they grew up, they made albums, went on tours, and appeared as guests on other television shows like the “Flip Wilson Show”, “Merv Griffin”, and “Glen Campbell’s Goodtime Hour”.

When she was a teenager, Cherry began to have emotional problems brought on by school pressures. Rather than face classes that gave her trouble, she would fake illnesses and stay home. While she was at home, she would eat high calorie foods and watch TV. Before too long, she realized she was gaining weight– so much that her school uniforms no longer fit her. Horrified, she made the decision to control her body. She put herself on a sensible diet and ordered a couple of gadgets that were advertised in the back of teen magazines. One gadget was a pair of “Bermuda shorts” that hooked up to the vacuum cleaner– it was supposed to suck the fat off of her body. Another was a pair of stretchy leg wraps that made her legs look thinner. She started exercising more. Gradually, the diet turned into anorexia.

At first, Cherry’s family was proud of her. Then they became concerned. Cherry writes about an incident that occurred one Christmas after Cherry skipped dinner and then binged and purged when she thought everyone was asleep.

My distended stomach ached– I must have looked six months pregnant. My food frenzy began to slow down when I could no longer walk without bending over. Did I get everything I wanted? I guess so– besides I can’t eat any more.

But wait! Some chocolates! I’ll chew on those on the way upstairs with a glass of punch.

Once in my bathroom, I completed the now familiar ritual I’d begun this time with that first bite of turkey. I forced my finger down my throat. After several gut-wrenching heaves I regurgitated as much as I could until nothing but small amounts of bile tinged pink with blood, emerged. I wiped off the toilet and began rinsing my beet-red face when I was startled by a hard knock on the door.

“Cherry, what’s going on?” My father’s voice was stern.

My heart pounded. I’m just going to the bathroom. Why?” I quickly straightened my hair, straightened air freshener, turned off the water.

“Open the door, Cherry. You know the rules about no locked doors in this house.”

“You and Mommy lock your door sometimes,” I answered back.

“Open this door, Cherry! Right now!”

“All right! All right! Just let me get my robe on,” I stalled, trying to open the window for fresh air. Then I calmly unlocked and opened the door.

“It doesn’t take you fifteen minutes to go to the bathroom, Cherry.”

“I haven’t been in here fifteen minutes,” I lied.

“I was outside after taking a sauna and I looked up and saw your bathroom light on. I waited, listened, and I know I heard you vomiting.” His eyes glistened with anger.

“I did not! I swear! I was just going to the bathroom and washing my face!”

“Look here, Cherry,” he said, gripping my arm and pulling me back into the bathroom. “Look at yourself! Your face is red, your eyes are bloodshot, the room stinks and you’re telling me you didn’t throw up?”

“I didn’t, Daddy! I promise I didn’t! I was going to the bathroom. I’ve been constipated so my face gets red. Honest!” My voice quavered with fear. Tears welled up in my eyes.

“Cherry, I don’t understand this. I know you’re lying, but it’s late and I have to get up early. We should both be in bed– it’s been a busy day. But don’t think we aren’t going to discuss this when I get back from Chicago! Now go to bed, and don’t you get up again– for any reason!”

Suddenly he was gone and I stood alone in front of the mirror. I stared at my gaunt face, then burst into tears. 
Stories of family squabbles like this one pepper the book, first with Cherry’s parents and next with her husband, Dan O’Neill. Cherry’s family was very close and loving, but some might say they were overly strict– to the point of being smothering. Corporal punishment was employed on the girls into their late teens.

Cherry did do some shocking things while she was ill. One night, after enjoying a nice dinner with her fiance, she promised him she would go straight to bed. But as she walked through the kitchen, she noticed that there were a couple of lamb chops in the dog’s dish. Cherry loved lamb chops, so without thinking, she got down on her hands and knees and started eating them, not realizing that her fiance was at the window, watching her… until he started rapping on the window!

I enjoyed reading this book because it has the elements of a story that I enjoy– biography (or autobiography as the case may be), a fair amount of drama, some trivia and anecdotal information, and a touch of comedy. However, there isn’t a whole lot of medical information in this book and the little bit you do find is quite dated. After all, Cherry suffered from anorexia back in the 70s, when many doctors had never even heard of the disorder. If you want to read an autobiographical story about anorexia with more up-to-date information, you would do better to read Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted. Even that book is a little dated– the author was treated in the late 80s and early 90s and treatments have changed drastically since then.

This book led me to believe that Cherry was never hospitalized for long for her anorexia (there is some brief detail provided about one hospital stay she completed as an adult). There are pictures included of her, however, when she was ill. One disturbing photo shows her at 82 pounds, right before her first appointment with Dr. Raymond Vath, a psychiatrist in Seattle who is credited with helping her get past anorexia. She looks positively skeletal in that picture, as well as in a couple of others that show her at 88 pounds, eating at a picnic. There are a couple of other pictures that show her performing with her family– the illness is not as easy to discern in those.

Starving for Attention has been out of print for some time and may be hard to find. You may be able to locate it at a public library or on http://www.half.com. I think it’s a worthwhile read, although I don’t believe it’s the only book you should read if you want to learn about eating disorders. By the way, Cherry and her husband had given birth to their first child, Brittany, at the end of this book. As of now, Cherry has had five children, proving that those with eating disorders can eventually go on to have children.

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book reviews

A review of How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, by Kelsey Osgood

I just finished Kelsey Osgood’s book, How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia. I don’t remember what prompted me to read this book, which is Osgood’s first and was published in 2014. I seem to remember seeing it referenced somewhere and described as a “good” read. Having just finished it, I will agree that this book is pretty good. Osgood’s descriptive writing reminds me of that of a novelist. She uses a lot of excellent vocabulary, some of which I had to learn while reading. Kindles are great for that.

I learned some new lingo, too– like “wannarexia”. Osgood’s take on anorexia nervosa is that it’s “contagious” and transmitted by the dramatic triggers of popular books, movies of the week, and pro-ana Web sites. Along with her thesis, then, are jargon words like “wannarexia”, which she describes as a person who wants to be anorexic, but isn’t actually really anorexic. Interesting indeed… and not something I had read before in the vast number of books I have read about eating disorders over the years.

How to Disappear Completely is supposed to be a chronicle of Kelsey Osgood’s experiences with anorexia. She spent a lot of time in several eating disorder units in New York, particularly at Cornell University, where she runs into all kinds of characters who suffer from eating disorders of different kinds and severities. Her commentary about the people she meets in treatment is very compelling. Interspersed within those stories are her own comments about the dangers of documentaries like Lauren Greenfeld’s Thin, and books like Steven Levenkron’s The Best Little Girl in The World, which many people find “triggering”. She also discusses people like Mary Kate Olsen, who at 17 years old in 2004, was deposited into rehab in Utah. Officially, the reason she went to rehab is because she had anorexia, but there were also rumors swirling that she actually had an addiction to cocaine and her parents thought people would be more sympathetic to a diagnosis of anorexia.

As I finished Osgood’s book today, it occurred to me that I really didn’t feel like I had read her story, per se. Instead, How to Disappear Completely comes off more as just commentary. I was certainly impressed by the many, many books Osgood had read on the subject of anorexia. Some of the books she mentioned were published decades ago, like, for instance, Fasting Girls: the History of Anorexia Nervosa, which was originally published in 1988. She also mentions Steven Levenkron, of course, who wrote The Best Little Girl in the World in 1978, back when very few people had ever heard of eating disorders. And she also mentions Hilde Bruch, author of The Golden Cage, which I remember reading when I was in high school. Marya Hornbacher’s famed memoir, Wasted, is liberally referenced, as is Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, and Susana Kaysen’s Girl Interrupted. Like Osgood, I’ve read almost all of them. Unlike Osgood, I’m not sure I can conclude that reading those books necessarily leads to the development of a mental illness.

I think a lot of young women do kind of admire people with anorexia nervosa. Let’s face it. Our society values thin, beautiful women. Being thin means being in control of one’s appetites and being able to wear anything. I remember being very young and compulsively reading dramatic accounts of anorexic heroines, like Levenkron’s “Kessa Dietrich”, an aspiring dancer who dieted herself down to 73 pounds and almost died until Levenkron’s male therapist character, Sandy Sherman, saves her from her obsessions. In that sense, maybe some of Kelsey Osgood’s comments are somewhat truthful. There probably are young girls out there who get exposed to a novel about anorexia, decide to try the behaviors themselves, and then fall into a terrifying downward spiral. However, I doubt that’s the main reason why people become ill with eating disorders or any other mental illness.

I did find Osgood’s comments about how “real” anorexics viewed “wannarexics” they’d run into on eating disorder units interesting, and also a bit disturbing. She wrote, implying some disdain from other patients, about how some patients weren’t actually truly “sick”, and were really just seeking attention by mimicking the “real” anorexics and bulimics. It seems to me that if someone needs attention that badly, they probably should be in treatment. Whether or not a so-called “real” anorexic thinks they merit the attention is kind of irrelevant, isn’t it? By feeling the need to mimic destructive behaviors and actually succeeding, aren’t the “wannarexics” also doing harm to themselves? Doesn’t that harm also need to be addressed? And shouldn’t we be concerned when a person feels the need to engage in eating disordered behaviors, regardless of why they do it? That obsession to try to be like an anorexic is, in and of itself, kind of sick, isn’t it?

Osgood also discusses how in the warped world of anorexia, the best anorexic is a dead anorexic. Because somehow, the obsession is so twisted that one can never be thin enough… or sick enough. There’s constant competition among people with anorexia nervosa, and it seems there’s always some drive to be the most dramatic. Osgood’s premise is that this dramatization, particularly in books and movies about anorexia, is part of the problem and a major reason why eating disorders have become so common. I think there could be something to Osgood’s hypothesis, but her conclusions are a little bit half-baked. And again… I don’t think she really told her story. This book is more an observation on anorexia nervosa as it manifests today.

I do think Kelsey Osgood is a talented writer. She uses a lot of engaging language that I found a pleasure to read. I can see that she earned a M.F.A. at Goucher College, which no doubt helped hone her writing chops. However, this book is poorly focused and doesn’t quite meet the mark of what I was expecting it to be. It was a lot of writing about other people and other books, and not so much about Osgood’s own story or creating her own book. Aside from new vocabulary words and eating disorder lingo, I’m not sure I learned a whole lot of new things by reading this. Still… some readers might enjoy Osgood’s way with a setting up a vivid scene, as she does when she describes some of the characters she met when she was in treatment.

I would recommend this book to those interested in reading it, but I can think of other books about eating disorders that I think are better. The aforementioned Wasted, by Marya Hornbacher, is in my opinion, a better book. However, Wasted is also very triggering for some people because it’s very detailed… and that is the kind of book that Osgood criticizes the most. On a scale of 1 to 5 stars, I think I’d give this book almost four stars. The colorful writing nudges the score closer to four, but the lack of a focused thesis and the author’s own story brings the score under that mark.

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book reviews

Reposted: An updated review of Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted…

I read Marya Hornbacher’s landmark memoir about her experience with anorexia nervosa many years ago. In 2015, I re-read it and wrote an updated review, which I am reposting here as/is.

Back in 2003, when I had just started writing product reviews on Epinions.com, I posted a review of Marya Hornbacher’s groundbreaking book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia.  This book was originally published in 1998.  I remember that very clearly, because at the time, I was working at a restaurant and didn’t have a lot of money to blow on books and music.  I really wanted to read it.  So did everyone else that used the local library.  I finally checked it out months after it was first published, then bought my own copy.  Marya Hornbacher’s storytelling blew me away.  She’s close to my age, too, so I could relate to some of the cultural references she made during her coming of age years, even though she’s from Minnesota and I’m from Virginia.

I recently decided to re-read Marya’s book, even though I read it a few times years ago.  It’s been a long time since I was last diet obsessed.  Though no one would believe it to see me now… and they probably wouldn’t have believed it then, either… when I was a teenager, I used to diet obsessively.  I never made myself throw up or binged, but I did used to restrict food and would, on occasion, go without eating for days.  It’s been many years since I last did that.  I find that now, if I try to starve myself, I can’t really function very well.  I get pale, shaky, confused, and extremely short tempered.  Though it’s been awhile since I last fainted, I imagine if I went too long without food, I probably would.  I used to faint all the time when I was younger. 

As a teen and college student, I would starve myself all the time.  I did it, in part, to lose weight.  I probably also did it for attention, and because I had very low self-esteem and hated myself.  Some of my friends knew, but my family never did.  If they had known, I doubt they would have cared that much, since I have never been thin.  Either that, or they wouldn’t have believed me, unless they had seen it for themselves.  I do remember my mom yelling at me once when she hadn’t seen me eat in awhile, but it seemed to be more out of annoyance than alarm.  I have since come to realize that a lot of times, my mom is annoyed about being concerned.  The two conditions go hand in hand for her.  If I’m honest, I’m kind of the same way.  I get worried, but it annoys me when I feel worried.

So anyway, I just finished Wasted yesterday.  I can’t say I’m as blown away by it as I was in the late 1990s, though I still think it’s a damn good book.  She starts at the beginning, explaining that her parents, though still married at the time the book was published, were a very dysfunctional couple.  They had weird food habits.  Marya would have friends over and there would be “nothing to eat”… or, at least nothing that kids would like.  Her mother didn’t keep sugar in the house, so there was no chocolate, no sugary cereals, no Cheetos or potato chips… 

By the time she was in fourth grade, Marya was a full blown bulimic.  She later progressed into anorexia nervosa and was deeply entrenched in it by age 15.  As a teen, she was hospitalized three times.  The first time, it was for bulimia, so she had fewer restrictions than some of her fellow patients, who were there due to anorexia nervosa.  She gained and lost weight repeatedly, eventually reaching a low of 52 pounds in 1993, while a college student.  She very nearly died.  In fact, doctors once gave her a week to live.  She managed to rebound and recover, though she was eventually diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder with atypical features.  I read about her experiences being bipolar when I picked up her book, Madness: A Bipolar Life, published in 2008.

Marya Hornbacher definitely knows what she’s writing about, though her experiences were very extreme.  She’s also a very vivid writer who has a relatable voice.  Her eating disorders, while bad enough on their own, were mixed with alcoholism and drug abuse.  She got involved with males… guys she didn’t know well and didn’t care too much about.  At the same time, she was extraordinarily talented.  She spent a year at Interlochen, a Michigan private high school for artistic teenagers and, according to Hornbacher, a hotbed of eating disorders.  Her health suffered so much there that she had to leave after a year, yet she still managed to achieve a lot.  She won a scholarship to American University in Washington, DC, Bill’s alma mater as well as my older sister’s.  She did not graduate from American, though, because once again, her eating disorders got in the way. 

Throughout the book, Marya offers “interludes”, passages written after she had supposedly recovered.  She explains what it’s like to read her files, written by medical and psychological professionals who took care of her.  She also writes about physical damage she did to herself and how it affected her circa 1996.  I have no idea if she still has physical issues nearly twenty years later.   I would guess she does. 

I suppose if I had to offer a criticism of Wasted, I’d say that it may be dangerous reading for some people.  Those who have struggled with eating disorders may find it triggering or “too informational” on how to maintain the disease.  For example, Marya writes that many bulimics eat certain brightly colored foods so they have a marker when they vomit to see what’s come up.  That’s a trick that may not have occurred to those reading her book for “thinspiration”.  Some people recovering from an eating disorder may feel compelled to try some of Marya’s methods themselves. 

On the other hand, I don’t know how in the world Marya could have written her story without describing the disease and what she did to maintain it.  While being more vague about the extremes of her illness– for example, not telling readers that she got down to 52 pounds– might have made this “safer” for people who have anorexia nervosa, it also would have made for much less compelling reading.  People who don’t understand eating disorders and don’t know why they are so dangerous should know about the more dramatic aspects of the illness.  Aside from that, people with eating disorders are forever looking for “thinspiration” anyway and they’ll find it wherever they think it exists.  An Amazon.com underwear ad could be triggering to someone with an eating disordered mindset.  I don’t think it’s possible to completely protect people from themselves.

In any case, Marya Hornbacher’s first book, written when she was just twenty-three years old, is brilliantly composed, full of candor, and uses vivid language.  I do recommend it to those who wonder what would compel someone to starve themselves, binge, and purge.  Those who struggle with eating disorders may do well be be cautious.

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