Finding Strength in Vulnerability: Inspiring Eating Disorder Memoirs (Demi Moore, Jeanette McCurdy, and Marya Hornbacher)

What do a former Nickelodeon star, an A-list actress, and a renowned author have in common? They've each fought their personal battles with eating disorders and bravely shared their stories in their memoirs. Join me as I delve into the lives of Jeanette McCurdy, Demi Moore, and Marya Hornbacher in their respective books: I'm Glad My Mom Died, Inside Out, and Wasted. As a former fashion model, I can relate to their struggles and will share my insights on the need for control and the desire to fix what we can.

Through the emotional journeys of these three remarkable women, we explore the common threads in their eating disorder struggles, from the pressures of their careers to their complicated relationships with their mothers. I discuss McCurdy's cathartic process of finding peace after her mother's passing, Moore's battle with addiction and identity, and Hornbacher's harrowing experience with anorexia and bulimia. These inspiring memoirs shed light on the complexities of eating disorders and stress the importance of seeking support and understanding. Don't miss out on this thought-provoking and heartfelt episode.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Three different women with three completely different stories and one theme Eating Disorders. This is the Lucy Beatrix podcast. Today I'm talking about three books that I read that all talk about their struggles with eating disorders. They're all memoirs And I just want to talk about what I noticed different themes and things that I both related to, didn't relate to and just found overall pretty interesting. So, yeah, that's today's show.

Speaker 1: 0:33

The books that I'm going to be talking about are I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy, inside Out by Demi Moore and then Wasted by Maria Hornbacher, and these three individuals don't have that much to do with each other. They have nothing to do with each other other than the fact that both Jeanette McCurdy and Demi Moore were actresses. But I found it so interesting that within these three memoirs talking about eating disorders, there were such common denominators in the ways of control and thinking about your body as a reflection of yourself, and that's something that I relate to a lot because, if you don't know a little bit about my story, i was a fashion model for over a decade. I was on the covers of magazines, i was in that world or this idea of being in the media, and the struggles are real. There's definitely a lot of that external pressure that I faced. So it was really fascinating for me to listen to the words of people who went through the same types of pressure but on a very much bigger scale, because obviously I was nowhere near that kind of like visibility that they faced. But those two actresses, demi Moore and Jeanette McCurdy, they also seem to have a lot of common themes with the other memoir wasted by Maria Hornbacher, who had nothing to do with acting. She was not an actress, she was a journalist, and I just found it really interesting to think that eating disorders don't really discriminate against what your career is. You don't have to be in the public eye to have that kind of pressure, and so, yeah, i thought that was kind of fascinating. So, right off the bat, i think the craziest thing.

Speaker 1: 2:27

To me this was like the first book that I read in this little trio that I went on started with a book that my therapist recommended and that was I'm glad my mom died. And Jeanette McCurdy was this child actress and she was kind of thrust into the spotlight at a very young age. Her mom was putting so much pressure on her And much of the book has to do with that relationship with her mother and how her mom was just kind of like this really aggressive force in her life and less nurturing, and said more just like forceful, and that kind of pressure, starting at such a young age. That's what I think was like the breeding grounds for what then descended her, what led to her descent into a disordered eating. So when I was listening to her story there was a lot that I didn't relate to, because my mom never put me in the spotlight like that, like I kind of went into the modeling industry on my own and just like went off and did my own thing very independently from my parents. But what I did relate to was this obsessive need to control and fix what I could. And so, with my own story of food struggles, i think that that really is a lot of the crux of how we like take the things that we can control and we're like, okay, well, i can control diet, exercise and you know, like maybe a couple other things, but that those things are things that I can fix and make sure that I'm doing right. And so that was something that I picked up on her book, that kind of shed light on my own experience where I was like. That is something that I definitely relate to.

Speaker 1: 4:09

Oddly, this was so crazy. In that story she references a magazine that her mother was obsessed with, this diet magazine called Woman's World. It's a weekly magazine and her mom has it dog-eared and her mom is constantly referencing it and there's, like always, a Woman's World magazine. And the crazy thing is is that I was actually on the cover of this magazine multiple times. So, and during the years that this was all going down, i very well could have been the girl on the cover of these exact magazines. So it was kind of a crazy thing to think that there I was, standing on a scale with a smile, or have a tape measure around my waist with the headline with the magazine cover saying how to lose weight watching TV. That girl was me, so it's weird to like read a book about this struggle that she had and then also seeing that like I was, like I was on the other side of it in a very weird, surreal way.

Speaker 1: 5:11

But, that said, i think the takeaway that I got from Jeanette's story was that she had to get over this relationship with her career and her mother in order to be free, and that was the thing that I was like okay, this really helps me understand my own relationship with my career, where I had to kind of cut ties with modeling in a very similar way, where, even though I'm still a model and I'm still signed, i put a distance between that life and then my life now And that was what afforded me this like relaxing feeling to just be able to eat freely. So, other than that, the other idea that I took away was this idea of her distancing herself from her mother when her mom passed away And that kind of enabling her mother kind of instilled in her the little voice that was telling her to do the behaviors. But then when her mom passed away, that kept going. She still had struggles with food And it's almost like she had to come to terms with like letting go of that voice. But, all in all, the thing I thought that was the most was so great about her book was that it still had a very good sense of humor And she can talk about these topics like her mother dying and eating disorder and the struggles of her career, but make it funny And I really appreciated that, because sometimes I think things get so serious and it is serious stuff. It's life or death for sure, but I liked the sense of humor with it And obviously cause she's an actress the way she's telling her story in the audio book you hear her, so it makes it that much more enjoyable to listen to. So the next book that is not the actress but Maria Hornbacher, who wrote Wasted.

Speaker 1: 7:06

That was the next audio book that I listened to And that was just because it was a recommended book. After I listened to, i'm Glad My Mom Died. And the funny thing was is I've read this book. I read this book over a decade ago. I have it on my bookshelf right here And I know this book pretty well. But I had never listened to it as an audio book. And the reason I know this book so well is because back when I first started to struggle with an eating disorder, i read it when I probably 15 years ago, and this book came out I think in the late 90s and anybody who's had any kind of food struggles knows this book. It's kind of like a textbook of eating disorder stuff, both anorexia and bulimia, and this book was written by a prolific writer.

Speaker 1: 7:59

This, maria Hornbacher, is a writer. She is so good. She is a journalist. She went on to like. She talks about the beginning of her career in journalism at the end of the book. But her story is you're hanging on every word And I found it really awesome to listen to it because I had only ever read it And I had remembered bits and pieces, but hearing her tell it made it that much more powerful.

Speaker 1: 8:25

This book definitely shakes you to your core And it is graphic, it is ugly at times, but it's also not this. It's not what you would expect, because the idea of the whole body image thing, with having having having to live up to certain standards, can be both external or internal, and you really see with Maria how this internal voice just gets louder and louder and louder and takes her over the edge Like she's. She doesn't hold back with talking about how she goes in and out of treatment and what kind of stuff is going on there and how she'll get a little bit better but then a whole lot worse and a little bit better and a whole lot worse. And that reflects my own experience perfectly. So I felt like wasted was a really cerebral look at what it's like to have an eating disorder and truly, if somebody didn't and they read this they could say, okay, now I kind of have an idea of what's going on. I actually told my therapist to read that one. So after he told me to read I'm glad my mom died I told him to read wasted And I was like read this one but buckle up because it's, it's rough.

Speaker 1: 9:41

And, yeah, what I love about her writing is that you, you understand how this becomes this major fixation to try to attain something that is so pure And that word I'm putting in air quotes because obviously being underweight is not pure, it's not like it means trying to be the aspirational goal. But there's something that's baked into a lot of women or people in society that struggle with food stuff, that the lighter you are are the more pure, or or I don't even say perfect, but like the way you're closer to the ideal. And that, to me, really strikes a chord, because I think about how, when I was modeling and they were telling me to lose weight, but that it was like they were trying to disguise it as like you'll just be like better if you're just a little bit lighter, if you cut some inches off of your hips, and that got stuck in me of like you'll be better, like some things will just be better if you're lighter. And I specifically remember being told to like if I had lost just a little bit of weight, that my face would read better in the pictures and stuff, even if you didn't see. Because I remember I was like, well, why can't I just be a beauty model, why can't I just do that kind of stuff where it's just my face and not my body And my body can be just completely out of the equation? And I was told that like I'll just look better if I'm lighter And yeah, that sticks. So I think about like that idea of how it coincided with this feeling of purity and being perfect, so yeah.

Speaker 1: 11:26

And then she talks a lot about the adrenaline of running on empty. That to me, so I completely get that, because I remember thinking when I was the lightest that I ever was and people would say things they'd be shocked I'd be on set working and stuff that almost gave me more energy. And she was talking about being very busy working in DC, writing, covering stories and just running like on fumes. And I was like, yeah, that I was in that same kind of manic state in the height of my modeling career. So Mariah Hornbacher nailed it with that book man, it's just like. That is the book that I think people should read when they want to understand. She also talks about the dichotomy of between being a bulimic and an anorectic and like how you're, she was kind of always aspiring to be an anorectic, of not needing food, but she would succumb to these binges and purges and ultimately be bulimic.

Speaker 1: 12:24

So the next book was Inside Out by Demi Moore, and that was another one that just kind of popped up on my feet of something to listen to And I never really, i mean, i knew who Demi Moore was. She's a famous actress and she's been in all these big movies, and this book really spoke to me because I didn't realize that a lot of her upbringing was kind of messed up and that she almost was thrusted into the industry in a way that she didn't have a chance to become herself first And I didn't have like a fucked up upbringing like she did, but this idea of not having your sense of identity and then like being somehow having your identity put on you and then trying to figure out who you are. I feel like that has a lot to do with struggling to find yourself and then, like you can get lost that much quicker with both addiction and with eating disorders, and I mean those two go hand in hand. But when she specifically talks about how she fell into alcoholism and then went through the 12 steps, i've had the same kind of relationship with alcohol. So that was a really cool part of her story to listen to, as well as while she was.

Speaker 1: 13:43

I mean I didn't know that this book had so much to do with her pregnancies and how she was pregnant four different times And she talks about having a miscarriage but that with her three daughters she was in and out of roles, kind of sandwiching, as she was pregnant She would be putting on weight to have a baby, have a baby and then after a month later turn around and fit into some outfit for a movie, a major movie with like a huge budget. So then that relationship with food just got very obsessive and like out of control. And she also talks about her relationships with men with like Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher, and how that coincided with that other like escapism, almost like where she got lost inside of her relationship with Ashton Kutcher And when she came out of it it was just like crippling. So that's something that I relate to too. So I definitely I appreciated these women coming forth with their stories so much and being so honest.

Speaker 1: 14:47

Like I was actually quite surprised that some with both to me more and Jeanette McCarty cause they are public figures talking so openly about people that they had been with and like things that were going on in the industry, and it's just like they were so honest And they didn't hold back and try to make themselves look better or like above these issues, and so I got a lot out of it. But I would say that the three of them together actually kind of worked perfectly because they all had different things to offer between talking about addiction and the struggles of eating disorders, and relationships and maternal relationships, and so, yeah, i found all three of them very compelling, especially as someone who has struggled with both addiction and eating problems. So, yeah, i hope that you guys got something out of this little review of the three books and how they go together, and I hope that you are able. You can find me out if you ever wanna like. Chat with me if you wanna find me on Instagram. I'm at LucyBietrix L-U-C-I-E-B-E-A-T-R-I-X. And until next time, just be fast, just win.