An Apple a Day (12 page)

As I became a more senior commissioning editor, I went out drinking less with my contemporaries anyway, so the food
avoidance got easier. Unfortunately I also had to do more entertaining—taking authors out to lunch and so on. If you've ever thought that having an eating disorder is just confined to mealtimes, think again. Food permeates every part of our lives—our friendships and relationships (cooking for each other, family meals, treats) and work. I can't explain how difficult anorexia has made my career; almost every week there is another fearful event involving eating, a meeting with catered sandwiches, an office party, a birthday, a going-away party, or drinks and nibbles. And food is always involved and must always be avoided.

One particular work lunch sticks in my mind. It's years ago now, and I'm not sure why I remember this one with such clarity when every one of those simple business engagements involving food was traumatic. I had recently decided to put on weight and “give up anorexia”—another half-hearted attempt doomed to failure. But at the time, anyway, it was the first day of my new regime, another fresh start I'd been postponing for weeks. I was the Psychology Publisher by this point, and was taking a new author out for lunch. Normally I would have arranged to meet for coffee in a smart patisserie—and then buy lavish pastries to make up for it—but two senior colleagues were coming along too and had suggested a “first-class lunch.” So I wasn't able to wriggle out of it.

We were booked into an Italian restaurant not far from the office. My anxiety had been building for weeks—the night before the lunch itself I didn't sleep at all. I must have checked the restaurant's website at least five times, scanning the menu to check for potential pitfalls and work out what might be safe. It was a beautiful winter's day, bright and crisp, the first sunshine London had seen in weeks. As we left the office, the editor who sat next to me, a lovely girl and a good friend, waved and said, “Hope the meeting goes well, Em—hey, at least it's a free lunch.” This is something I heard all the time at work, and I never understood it.
People would say, “Oh no, bloody office party—I'm only going for the free food.” It's a concept that has always amazed me—I'd do anything to avoid the free-food part of free work events: feign illness, climb out of a window, anything!

Every day at work I would see people going for lunch together, casually, happily. I would marvel at how uncomplicated it looked. Over the years I've done everything I could to avoid eating with others: I have smuggled bananas into stationery cupboards, eaten bread rolls in toilet stalls, eaten yogurts on park benches in the rain. If there are people around, if I can't find a place to be alone, I simply go without food.

And that's just the practical side—let alone the social side of things, the excuses, the evasions, and how bloody antisocial it seemed. I've made some really good friends over the years at work, but there's always been this barrier preventing me getting close to any of them. I know they find it strange. In offices, lunch is where friendships are formed and cemented, where casual workmates become allies: it's the only opportunity during the working day to escape and gossip about your evil boss or confide in each other. When I saw them all, congregating for lunch, I'd wonder why the hell I made it so difficult for myself. Wouldn't it be simpler and nicer to buy a real sandwich and eat it out in the open—on the grass in summer, or at my desk in the office, or in a sidewalk café? Or with friends? It's been years since I did that willingly.

Perhaps this explains my extreme foreboding of that lunch meeting. I remember how much I just wanted the meal to be over. We were seated at a round table in the window, all shining silverware and cream linen napkins. Then the author arrived: introductions were made, hands were shaken, and the waiter distributed menus. But I was ready, wasn't I? I knew what I was going to order—although there was always the risk that the menu had changed.

I recall the panic inside my head: it seemed insanely early to be sitting down to lunch; I was aghast at the thought of an entire meal. The anorexic voice seemed very loud in the hushed restaurant. Eating now—when you haven't even deserved it? Surely it's only the morning? It was 1:30
PM
. I would normally have allowed myself a banana or an apple around that time—but a full cooked meal in a restaurant? Hot food at that time? Anyway, I ordered a Diet Coke and the author ordered an orange juice (he was driving) and my two colleagues ordered a bottle of red wine.

The waiter brought our starters (plain green salad for me) and we discussed the new book, and then he brought our main courses: steaks for them and pasta with arrabbiata sauce for me. It was a huge portion of spaghetti, which made me irrationally angry. It seemed so unfair that even if I ate fully half of the massive plateful, it would still look as though I wasn't eating properly. This upset me, just when I'd made the effort to act normal, and, more than that, it upset me because it was so much goddamn food. It tasted so good (I'd forgotten) and I was so hungry (I was constantly hungry) and all my fears about gluttony were confirmed, because I knew I could probably have eaten the entire portion of spaghetti three times over. Because the truth is: I'm a glutton.

Anyway, I got through the lunch and it was OK because it was all men. As I mentioned before, most men aren't particularly attuned to “disordered” eating: they don't notice when you accept a bread roll from the basket, wave it around, break it in two, and then leave it on your side plate in a pile of crumbs. They don't see that you lift the olive oil but don't actually drizzle it over your salad at all. Hopefully they didn't find it strange that I asked the waiter three times not to add parmesan to my pasta.

When I eat in public how do I look? I feel like I'm hunched over, tense, the internal conflict in my head plain to see. Could they hear the anorexic voice in my head shouting with each forkful,
each fork loaded with fat and calories: greedy, greedy. I don't think they could.

That lunch, day one of my new start: green salad, no dressing, spaghetti with tomato sauce. It wasn't that sinful: quite healthy even. It's indescribable, the taste of real food, when you're used to only apples. Even as I was trying to steer them back to discussing the forthcoming book (they were talking football) my taste buds were being overwhelmed with all the different flavors: fresh egg pasta, drenched, glistening in oil, pesto, and pine nuts muddled with juicy cherry tomatoes, every coiled forkful of spaghetti shining with oil, slick, dripping, fat. My body was so starved of fat that it made me reel.

(I remember when I gave my little niece Isla her first taste of chocolate she looked almost drunk with the new flavor. It was just a nibble on the corner of a chocolate finger, but her eyes lit up and a blissful smile spread across her face. Our bodies are programmed to respond to fat: it's not just me with an insatiable greed, it's not a sin.)

Oh, the relief when that lunch was over. I didn't want to sit in front of the rest of my pasta, because what if I carried on eating? Of course I wouldn't—I had eaten precisely half the plate and laid down my cutlery, but what if I just launched myself into it and finished off every last delicious strand? I always feel like this in restaurants until they collect the plates. As long as the pasta remained there in front of me, I couldn't stop fretting about whether I'd eaten more than half or less than half, and how oily that arrabbiata sauce was. (My lips felt greasy for days from all the oil.)

The ordeal of a simple working lunch: those sleepless nights in advance and ordering unknown food and eating in front of others—do people really enjoy it? It's moments like this that bring me face-to-face with the very real differences in an anorexic brain: I cannot get my head around this concept of enjoying feeding
oneself openly, in public. Even now, when Tom glances at his planner, say at breakfast, and realizes he's meeting some PRs for lunch, I marvel at how unplanned he is about going out to eat with strangers. “Saves me a fiver in Pret a Manger” he'll say, and I wonder if I will ever be that relaxed.

When the main course was cleared away I felt a weight lifted from my shoulders. It was perfectly reasonable not to order dessert—I declared myself nicely full and asked for a black filter coffee, decaffeinated. With the horrors of the meal behind me, I felt elated. I sat up straighter, more in control, more professional. I turned to my author and we began to discuss the terms of the contract.

I don't like admitting this stuff, how horribly anorexia got in the way, how it made everything so damn stressful. But I am proud that, despite it all, I did well in my publishing career for more than ten years. You can laugh at my oily-spaghetti horrors (even I am smiling now), but imagine how complicated it made work events, parties, conferences. You're not just having a bite to eat with a colleague or client; you're facing your greatest phobia in public. You're trying to talk business and play the part, and inside there's this shrieking-mad anorexic goading you with every mouthful.

So, was that lovely lunch really a fresh start—my pasta-fueled kick-start to recovery? Not quite. It was a kick-start to nothing, except years more of the same fears. Back at the office, for the rest of the afternoon, my body was silent. It was satiated—a feeling I'm really not accustomed to. I remember there was nothing: no hunger pangs, no cravings. My stomach was peacefully doing its work, I suppose, digesting the nutrients (or whatever full stomachs do with all that fat). The silence unsettled me; there was a dimension missing. There was no edge to anything.

Even cycling home that day was different: I wasn't strung out, so I wasn't flinging myself around corners or weaving through
the London traffic. In fact I felt quite patient, and I waited at red lights like I was supposed to. I pedaled along, looking at houses and trees and people walking by. The sun was setting and the evening was mild. I stopped on the bridge in Hyde Park and looked across the Serpentine. There were still a few blue boats out on the water and I almost considered getting off my bike and flopping on the grass with a notebook. There was no reckless rush to get home, I realized—I could just enjoy the evening sunshine. I could stop at a café; I could have a cold beer or a glass of wine al fresco. I could do something spontaneous, unscheduled. But I didn't. It wasn't like me and it felt wrong. When my hunger is stilled there's nothing left to rely on, nothing left inside, and the whole world comes rushing at me. Too many possibilities I can't control. I wanted the hunger back. It focuses me, keeps me on the edge, clean and empty. Fullness, on the other hand, is lazy and contented and complacent. I felt fat and vague and drifting. My body was so quiet.

But this is what I have to accept if I'm going to beat this disease. When I start eating (properly, regularly), yes, I will feel this way. I have to trust that when the hunger goes it will be replaced by something else, something more meaningful than the pain of my stomach acid eating into its lining, the constant thoughts of food. The sensation of fullness, which throws everything off kilter, has to become OK for me somehow. I have to carry on eating, however hard it seems, because I'm running out of excuses and reasons and time.

My spaghetti fears continued way into the night. Twelve hours later I was lying in bed, wide awake, staring into the dark. Finally I turned on the light and sat on the edge of my bed, feeling anxious and defeated. When I got home I'd skipped dinner because of the lunch—that half-plate of pasta—and by midnight of course I was so hungry I couldn't sleep. It was so familiar, the gnawing pain in
my gut, the repetitive thoughts. I had to face the fact that I'd failed even before I had made a proper start. And a large part of me was relieved to be sinking back into the welcoming arms of my worst, best friend: hunger.

The reality of getting better is these repeated failures—that's why recovery rates for anorexia are so low. Of course I see it's a pointless waste of time, all these hours spent thinking about what I will and will not eat, what I have and have not eaten. It's cheating and skipping meals and knowing you're only cheating yourself. I find it impossible to silence this internal noise, the commentary on how greedy it is to feed myself. I've always been the energetic one, full-on, slightly manic. Hunger shouldn't give you energy, but paradoxically it does: you're always empty, restless, searching for something to fill you up, always on edge.

So that was another false start. But the point is that I have been here before, many times over the years. According to addiction experts, the more attempts you make to give something up (alcohol, drugs, smoking) the more likely you are to succeed in the end. I have launched myself on this journey of recovery before: I know what it's like to start eating and then lose my nerve and stop. From New York to Oxford to London, in those years from nineteen to twenty-nine, it's no exaggeration to say it's been like that almost every day. I came close to destroying myself and then I began to turn things around; slowly, slowly I began to eat more. And as I began to eat more—falteringly, with plenty of failures along the way—I found that the rest of me came back to life too.

* * *

Back at the start of the millennium, around the time of that lunch, I had begun a relationship with Greg, a man who unfortunately happened to be married with children. He was a Scorpio like I
am—completely unstable, but one of the kindest, most intelligent men I'd ever met. We would stay up all night talking over red wine and cigarettes, we argued a lot, shared poetry and music; one evening we just took off and drove for miles, out of London, into the mountains of Snowdonia, and then had to drive all the way back for work. It was like that with Greg: exciting but never relaxing. He was forty-four and I was twenty-four; we were born on the same day exactly twenty years apart. I don't know what I thought was going to happen, if I ever thought about it, though Greg talked of being together forever. By then, I had coaxed myself up to 105 pounds, although it was a constant battle. Anorexia remained my shameful secret, but I was learning to live with it, to work around it. I still wasn't cooking normal meals—or cooking at all—but I was eating: fruit, salad, bread.