Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/197979
Books_FNL with art 8/20/10 6:02 PM Page 17 Onward and Upward finicky son and then their culinarily adventurous daughter, Lisa. And then it gets into the confusing world of food addiction: the love of food that turns into binging that turns into restricting and finally to purging, hospitals, and suicide attempts. Along the way, the story is marked for its candor. In alternating points of view, simply marked "Sheila" or "Lisa," we learn of Sheila's body insecurities, Ned's sister's food obsession, Lisa's teenage sex life, and her growing isolation from everyone in her family as her eating disorder takes over. We learn about the doctors and treatments and maddening tenacity of a disease that is all about a person's mind but starves the body. Sheila Himmel writes in the introduction that she hopes the book will be a special kind of resource for other families, "a sympathetic, articulate expert or parent who not only had been through this hell but also was insightful about food in our culture." She does an excellent job of this. Like a good reporter, she peppers the reader with statistics that remind us that eating disorders are not isolated events. Ten million women and 1 million men have eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, yes. But also: 89 percent of women want to lose weight and 24 percent women would cut their lives short by three years to lose weight. She leaves no doubt that food and weight obsession is a national pastime. She explains the cultural basis of food refusal, from kosher and halal designations to food allergies to foodie refusal of anything that isn't organic or local. It's not just anorexics who refuse food, she insists. We all do. We're all obsessed to one degree or another. But here is where I quibble with the book. In Sheila Himmel's need to couch her daughter Lisa's anorexia in our "food negative" culture, she downplays that anorexia is a serious mental illness. It may be part of our culture but it's not the same feeling as the low self-esteem that many women experience because they can't lose those last 15 pounds. It's crushing, not just physically but psychologically, and keeps the sufferer obsessed with food even as she doesn't eat it. Full disclosure: I have an eating disorder. It's the opposite of Lisa's primary problem. Instead of undereating, I've overeaten past the point of being able to taste food, past the point of even wanting to eat. I relate to Lisa's description of herself in her binge-eating phase: "I had no idea what hunger felt like, nor could I really recognize being full." That was me. Yet I still ate. It's a compulsion, and it winnows your life down to a jagged point. It's not the same as someone who eats chocolate to medicate every emotion. Yes, I did that too. But eating disorders are so much more complex. So I was uncomfortable with the inevitable side effect of the book's candor: Like it or not, we join Sheila as she asks herself in J U LY | A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 not so many words if she could have prevented Lisa's eating disorder. There's an absurd moment when Sheila struggles with having reading her daughter the Yummers! children's books, about Emily the pig and her out-of-control appetite. "Emily is certainly a binge eater," Sheila writes. "We didn't see it that way at the time, but reading Yummers! and Yummers Too: The Second Course got me worried." Lisa's simple answering entry is, "Emily is a pig! Is she binge eating or just a pig? I think it would be different if the Emily character was a person, but she's just being a hungry pig. A child wouldn't read that much into it. I loved this book as a kid." But that's what eating disorders do to the family member of the sick person. Like the families of alcoholics and drug addicts, the disease compels family members to second-guess everything. It becomes its own maddening obsession. Though I read it identifying with Lisa, most readers will identify with Sheila. Either way, the book offers a look into a disease that's often misunderstood. It's the most honest and engaging book I've seen on the topic and it is bound to help parents like Sheila, either by alleviating isolation or by giving readers hints for how to help their own children. It leaves the reader rooting for mother and daughter, praying that both get some peace. —Heather Boerner I am a Teamster: A Short, Fiery Story of Regina V. Polk, Her Hats, Her Pets, Sweet Love, and the Modern-Day Labor Movement By Terry Spencer Hess; Lake Claremont Press A labor history book dressed up as a chick-lit novel, I Am a Teamster tells the life story of Regina Polk, the feisty, flamboyant organizer who brought union representation to thousands of white-collar women workers before she died at age 33. Born in rural 1950s Arizona to a nurse mother and a farmer father, Polk grew up defying society's expectations of a woman's proper role: playing sports, flaunting her sexuality, and generally showing a determination not to let her gender get in the way of what she wanted. What she wanted, it turned out, was to fight the boss. While working as a hostess at the Red Star Inn in Chicago shortly after college, Polk noticed the mistreatment and low wages that her coworkers endured. She called several unions asking for help to organize the place and finally got a response from Teamsters Local 743, at the time the largest Teamsters local in the country. W W W. N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N AT I O N A L N U R S E 17