OK, not a diary. … This book is a memoir, however it receives an honorary mention for being an eating disorder autobiography written by a lesbian. In this gripping bestseller, celebrity actress and now wife of Ellen Degeneres, Portia de Rossi, recounts how suppressing her sexuality for fear of ruining her acting career helped foster her startlingly negative self-image which, in turn, fuelled her eating disorder.
Written in diary entries, this book tells of how Chelsea’s parents’ divorce and sexual abuse by a neighbour result in the negative self-image that lead to her anorexia and bulimia. There are many Christian references in the text.
I love the angle of this book: a mother’s and daughter’s diary entries published side-by-side from a time when the daughter was suffering from eating disorders. Tara is angry with her mother for focusing on her career and turns the anger on herself by developing anorexia and bulimia. The book also includes retrospective comment from both mother and daughter.
A memoir interspersed with diary entries, this book spans twenty years. Martha M. is devastated by her parents’ divorce. She starts throwing up her food at age thirteen. When she reaches twenty-six she realises that, if she doesn’t stop now, the ‘well’ part of her life will become a fraction. She starts watching others’ eating patterns to work out a normal relationship to food.
Written in diary format, this book tells the story of Constance Barter’s anorexia from the age of thirteen. Constance eats half a yoghurt and a cherry tomato a day, and exercises until she collapses. At age fourteen she spends seven months in hospital, keeping a diary record of her journey to recovery.
Although it reads like diary entries, only parts of the book are dated, for example ‘Winter 1978.’ At the age of eleven Lori Gottlieb begins a diary. Her first entry proclaims that she wants to be the thinnest girl on the planet and that there is nothing else for a girl to wish for. This is a story of treatment for, and recovery from, anorexia.
This book contains one chapter of selected diary entries. This story, of treatment for EDNOS (Eating Disorder Otherwise Not Specified), is not told in linear time. It includes therapy notes, treatment exercises, and the centre’s rules and regulations. At the age of twenty-three, after nine years of illness, Nicole Johns checks herself into a treatment facility where she spends three months. The author happens to be bisexual, which she barely mentions in the text. She does not consider it an issue nor does she relate her sexuality to her eating disorder.