The death of French model Isabelle Caro knocks the wind out of you. Whatever the causes of her becoming anorexic at age 13, whatever the inner, familial or societal torments that took hold and wouldn't let her go, Caro's death is a violation of the natural order. People die at 82, not 28.
Once again we are reminded that anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder.
Caro died on Nov. 17, but at her family's request the news was not made public until Dec. 29.
Caro gained worldwide fame as an anorexic poster child. For or against, is the question.
A 2007 billboard campaign for the Italian fashion house Nolita featured the ghostly thin model posing naked, the words "No ANOREXIA" behind her head, "Nolita" at her side. It was supposed to be shocking and repulsive. Some said the shock value made her all the more attractive. Images of Caro, weighing about 59 pounds, appeared on pro-anorexia websites.
"My anorexia causes death," Caro said at the time. "It is everything but beauty, the complete opposite. It is an unvarnished photo, without make-up. The message is clear - I have psoriasis, a pigeon chest, the body of an elderly person."
Whether the ads helped or hurt anorexics, they made Caro and the photographer, Oliviero Toscani, famous. "Looking at my ad, girls with anorexia would say to themselves that they have to stop dieting," Toscani argued then.
Caro wrote a book, The Little Girl Who Didn't Want to Get Fat, published in France in 2008.
Early this year, Caro was interviewed for Jessica Simpson's VH1 show, The Price of Beauty, in a segment on fashion models. Upon meeting Caro and her translator at Restaurant la belle ferronniere in Paris, Simpson said, "We were all shocked. We didn't expect her to be so skinny. You could see her bones."
Caro reported that at the very start of her career, just out of high school, a fashion designer told her she had to lose weight, and that she had never been told by a modeling agency that she needed to put on weight.
Simpson and Caro both expressed hope that the segment would help others avoid anorexia. The interview took place in a restaurant. Simpson and her assistants had dark-colored drinks with straws (Diet Coke, perhaps?). Caro and her translator had glasses of water.
The question of images arose in the publicity campaign for Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia. Most media outlets used the family photos we sent of Lisa, smiling with a soccer ball at 6, a stick figure at 16.
Then Lisa and I were approached by two very well respected magazines in the U.K., one based in London and one in Australia. We did extensive interviews and sent photos.
Both wanted more graphic pictures. Jutting collarbone wasn't enough. One editor asked if we didn't have photographs from when Lisa was in the hospital, at her lowest weight.
Right. Maybe the hospital had intake photos. Did we want to ask for them?
Nope.
Did we take pictures of Lisa in the hospital, in a wheelchair with an I.V. in her arm?
Be serious.
The editors' ghoulish interests were a gut check, reminding me of the first time I visited a hospital wing for adolescents with eating disorders. It was for research, not personal. I was taken through locked doors and briefed in a cheerful common room, with a refrigerator stocked with cans of Ensure high-calorie nutritional shakes. Then we rounded the corner into the main corridor, where an elderly woman, I thought, was hunched over in a wheelchair. She was a young teenage patient.
"It's real suffering and it goes deep," Isabelle Caro told CBS News. "I've suffered enormously from seeing how people look at me and judge me."
Pro-ana, "thinspiration" forums have been full of tributes to Caro. One reportedly read: "Die young, stay pretty."
