One of the things that is lost with electronic books and
readers is the physical page, and all that it can provide. It’s not just that
writing is printed on the page; it’s that the page has margins, gutters,
corners and numbers. You can interact with a page, decorating its borders with
marginalia, turning down its dog-ears, and staining it with your life. Even a
very roughed-up book is still a book that can be read. The page can become a
palimpsest of layers forming a more complex narrative for having been read.
Sometimes, a found book can carry with it the detritus of
someone else’s life — a forgotten bookmark or recipe hiding within the pages waiting to be released.
Tucked into the page of Dr. Stillman’s disastrous diet book
that offers his response to common excuses for those falling off the diet wagon
is a slip of paper bearing dense, penciled notes on Latin vocabulary acting as
a bookmark. The page it marks bears this confession:
“I’ve been a bad
girl, I ate like mad.”
Was the girl bad because she ate like mad, or did she eat
like mad because she had been a bad girl? The possibilities are intriguing.
It’s an intimate confession that ties behavior — possibly sinful behavior —
with consumption, loaded with guilt. This is a very old chain of events: the
Eucharist acts as a form of redemption through the consumption of bread, the
transubstantiated body of Christ. At the alter rail, you are only allowed one
meltingly thin host, which must suffice for all the bad behavior you can think
of.
This confession also reeks of the idea that the eating
itself was bad. The girl didn’t simply overeat or fall off her diet; she “ate
like mad,” implying a loss of control with which her rational mind could not
compete. Eating like mad is akin to bingeing, which only serves to stuff the
eater with anything to push the guilt out.
Perhaps the girl was simply ravenous, having only consumed
600 calories all day on her liquid diet, and was playing catch-up to survive.
Perhaps she bristles when she reads Dr. Stillman call her kind “heavies,” and
“overweights.”
comedamus et bibamus cras enim moriemur
The Doctor’s Weight
Loss Diet, Irwin Maxwell Stillman, MD, and Samm Sinclair Baker, 1969
Also from this book: Little Drummer Girl
