In his new memoir Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater, former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni is very brave indeed, not only admitting that he suffered from bulimia as a youth, but explicitly describing the rituals that the disorder prompted in his college years.
After guilt-ridden fried-chicken meals in the University of North Carolina dining hall, "off to the second-floor bathroom in the back corner of the student union I'd go. I'd walk in, listen for the sounds of anyone else, bend down and glance under the stalls to check for feet, making sure the coast was clear. I'd stop briefly at the sink, turn on the water and moisten the index and middle fingers on my right hand, so that they'd slide more easily down my throat."
On evenings out at nearby restaurants with his two best friends, Bruni would dash to the restroom and make himself vomit immediately after eating. Although he spent a lot of time splashing cold water into his eyes to make them look less bloodshot -- always a dead giveaway -- his pals finally confronted him with the truth they'd known all along.
As described with stunning candor in the book, Bruni had struggled with his weight since infancy. Voraciously hungry for as long as he can remember, Bruni calls his childhood self a "baby bulimic" because of a tendency as a toddler to devour huge second helpings, then throw up.
As a hefty adolescent whose classmates jeered that his initials stood for "Fat Boy," Frank Bruni went on the Atkins Diet. "People who became wise to it only in the 1990s tend to forget that it made its initial splash back in the early 1970s," Bruni writes. His mother had eagerly bought Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution in hardcover, confident in its powers as the "holy grail of weight loss" she'd always sought.
"The Atkins diet prohibited certain things I loved, like pretzels and ice cream," said Bruni, "but it let me have as much as I wanted of other things I also loved, like cheddar-cheese omelets with pork sausage at breakfast or hamburger patties - three of them if that was my desire, so long as I dispensed with the bun. ... It allowed snacks like hunks of cheddar and roll-ups of turkey breast and Swiss cheese. I could even dip the roll-ups in mayonnaise and not be undermining the Atkins formula. According to Atkins, it was important to stay sated, because any empty crevasse of stomach was nothing but a welcome mat for a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup."
Sometimes talking or writing about what we've done at our sickest and most haunted moments can free us from them. Hopefully, Bruni's honesty will also free others as well.
