Archive | Essays

Skinny and Number-Sixed: 2019 Orthorexia

Recently I was in a room of women who did not eat carbohydrates.

I am exaggerating, of course. I am sure they occasionally ate things like sprouted quinoa in bowls filled with other expensive elements meant to extend their lives by weeks or even months.

That is, if they didn’t choke on their own bile first.

Because these women were unhappy. They were rich women and they were white women and they were women my age. I kept having to remind myself they were my age, because they looked both older and younger than me. Their skin radiated a glow that mine only achieves about an hour after I work out–but really it was a sort of florescent, dangerous glow that spoke of misplaced determination. Their hair also spoke of that determination. It was very actively Not Grey, but not with the generic beige which less clever or moneyed women slap on grey hair. No, their hair was like a trip to the Grand Canyon or South Dakota’s Badlands–compelling flowing layers ranging from gold to burnt sienna–waves of sediment, not sea. Continue Reading →

A View from the Bridge (Sorry, Mr. Miller)

I keep having a dream that I’m crossing the Massachusetts Avenue bridge connecting Boston to Cambridge. I suppose I could look up the name–doubtless one or two of you know the answer–but what really lingers when I wake is a dreamy possibility. Some part of me doesn’t want any concrete facts to disrupt that feeling.

Growing up I always loved the view from that bridge–an updated Monet painting, with the Charles River a big, dipping blue, sailboats and tiny motorboats bobbing, young and old people clutching hats and drinks. Flanking both sides were rising trees and sleek roadways–toy-cars in the grand scale afforded by that bridge. To the Northeast I could see the Museum of Science, where my father took me on Saturday mornings to study chemistry and cubs. To the Southwest were the parks, fields, all the homes I knew best.

Continue Reading →

Edie Sedgwick, Signs and Sirens Superstar

A beautiful birdie reminded me today is the birthday of Edie Sedgwick, she of the ermine hair, silvery limbs, eyes like a Day of the Dead painting. Edie’s glamour was rooted in the visibility of her exoskeleton, and the most iconic photographs taken of her caress those cheekbones, clavicle, hipbones, the tiny exposed infrastructure of her wrists and upper arms. I still admire the effect though her eating disorder helped launch my own. I even had a name for it: Glamourosa nervosa.

Dying the year I was born, she would have been 76 today, but Edie never was going to live that long. Hers was the last-hurrah glow of a star shooting into oblivion, her no-holds-barred radiance the original heroin chic. Yet even at her most junked-up, goth was as far from her aesthetic as from a Swedish nun. Now that I’m twenty years older than she ever became, I grok her poor-little-rich-girl limitations—namely, being the art rather than making the art. Not even today can you live into your 30s without learning to live without an audience. Still, I’m so grateful for how she lit our path with striped shirts and chandelier earrings. To those of us bridging the mid-20th century and the new millennium (aka we Gen Xers looking backward to find our future), Edie was all the 1960s at once and we loved her for it.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy