February is Eating Disorder Awareness Month

At the age of fifteen, Amanda Rogers was asked her name. She had illegally snuck into a nightclub downtown, and the club owner was offering her a VIP pass and a potential hostess job.  All he needed was her name. Anxious that he’d discover her real age and worried that her real name didn’t sound special enough, Rogers invented a name on the spot: Portia de Rossi. Portia, from The Merchant of Venice, and de Rossi from watching the credits of a movie.

The name stuck, and with it, an identity that Rogers would nearly kill herself to embody.

The identity was that of a celebrity, something de Rossi could never fathom that she was. In her eyes, models and actresses were beautiful, waif-thin and charming, and definitely not gay, which seemed to her the opposite of what she was: “a fat dyke” in her own words.

Portia de Rossi’s Unbearable Lightness tells “a story of loss and gain,” a story of one model and actress’ life-long battle with food, weight, and bodily occupation. de Rossi tells of her binge-purge dieting habits to her near-death experiences with anorexia and bulimia.

From a young age, de Rossi’s mother encouraged her to closet her love for women and suppress her appetites in order to succeed as a model and actress. De Rossi complied, never fathoming that her friends, family, and the public could accept her just as she was.

Mind you, de Rossi grew up in the 90s, that decade just freshly inspired by Madonna’s sexual revolution. Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O'Donnell hadn’t yet publicly come out, and the term “gay” wasn’t a palatable topic of conversation amongst social circles, let alone in the media.

De Rossi recounts her story over 307-page memoir, which is narrated in the first person across a series of vignettes that illustrate poignant landmarks along the path towards sickness, including a trying first season as a sex symbol on the hit TV series Ally McBeal.

The memoir is divided into two parts organized around de Rossi’s sickness followed by an epilogue which hints at recovery. In part one, de Rossi recounts her early years as an aspiring model, laying out the groundwork on which an eating disorder breeds: She tells how she was always rewarded with food, and her whole life, she was either bingeing or purging, never able to comfortably occupy her body or normally incorporate food into her daily life.

As a young model, de Rossi learned to measure her self-worth in inches and pounds. When her fame accelerated, de Rossi’s concern for her public image intensified, as she became paranoid at the surveillance of the paparazzi.

Part Two captures the worst of the worst, a less-than-ninety pound de Rossi going through all the stages of mental illness from denial to acceptance, to the first stages of recovery. At her worst stages, de Rossi tells of refusing food on fourteen-hour long flights, her compulsive exercise routines, and her obsession over calories and fat.

Amongst her heartbreakingly honest testament, de Rossi also includes four photographs in her memoir that capture her at her worst stages of the disease. These photos are strategically placed toward the end of the memoir, juxtaposed with de Rossi’s medical prognosis that she received after collapsing on set. Alongside images of a barely-there actress, the text reads “Your liver enzymes are extremely elevated which are at the level of cirrhosis,” and “You have an autoimmune disease called lupus.” The photos and the text evidence for the reader the disparity between the imagery and the reality of “beauty,” rhetorically summarizing the aim of the memoir.

What the memoir lacks in color and setting it makes up for in story, as de Rossi’s story alone is enough to sustain interest. The text shows evidence of a concern for form and metaphor, though it’s not a ground-breaking expose in the genre of anorexia memoirs. What is new about this text, however, is the way de Rossi demonstrates how issues of beauty and the body intersect with issues surrounding sexuality; the text highlights the extent to which an eating disorder masks much deeper, much suppressed sexual desire to love and live openly.

De Rossi’s memoir successfully narrates the story her body struggled to tell in it’s metamorphosis from Amanda Rogers to Portia de Rossi; it’s a story of survival, of deep-seated shame and of frustrated appetites.

A great read for all who seek to understand the relationship between food, eating, and power.

Amanda Cosco
		About the author:
		Amanda Cosco is a freelance writer. The city is her muse.  After completing a master’s degree in English Literature at Ryerson University in Toronto, Amanda packed up her life and moved to the city in pursuit of jazz, sex, and soup. Amanda completed her bachelor of arts at York University, where she had one foot in literary studies and one foot in journalism, earning her a double-major in English and professional writing. Amanda has presented her scholarly work at academic at conferences across Toronto, and her research on the metaphor of hunger in women’s fiction has received over $30,000 in grants and prizes. With her pen name, Lady Medusa, Amanda has left her digital footprints all over the internet. Currently, she’s blogging for several social media websites, and composing her first book of poetry, entitled "Autobiography of Skin. Follow her on Twitter @ladymspeaks
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