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A THIN LINE BETWEEN MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

by Jennifer Egan

My stepsister Marcia and I share an occasional lust for high grease breakfast foods, and over
pancakes and eggs recently, she told me something interesting. Marcia's daughter, Drennan, was
with us -- a wily, emphatic little girl who, at 4 years old, is young enough that one can still spell
words in her presence and elude -- just -- the clamp of her curiosity. S-E-X is a big one, of course.
Marcia is careful to spell out the name of her ex-husband, Drennan's father, when speaking of
him with anything but the warmest affection. I was surprised, though, when Marcia mentioned
that she'd been on a D-I-E-T.
"Why did you spell it?" I asked.
"Oh, I don't even want her thinking about all that," Marcia said.
We both looked at Drennan, who was smacking her lips over fried eggs and hash browns. I didn't
have to ask what Marcia meant by "all that." We are both 35, members of the vanguard
generation of disordered eaters. When Marcia and I were children, no one had heard of anorexia;
I first encountered the term at 13, in 1975, in a magazine article about a girl who had emaciated
herself for reasons no one understood. I remember her picture: somber, willowy, standing on a
bathroom scale, her shoulder blades jutting out like wings. I looked at her and felt my whole
being compress into a single strand of longing. I wanted that. Anorexia. And I got it, not in so dire
a way that I was hospitalized with feeding tubes -- or even close. But at 14, when I began losing
weight precipitously, I inculcated myself into the cult of food consciousness and its attendant
elations and despairs. I joined the ranks of girls and women whose notebook margins are dappled
with obscure sums -- apple, 100; bagel, 200; frozen yogurt, 150 -- women for whom countless
meals are fraught with the tension of trying to eat less than anyone else, who keep a section of
their closets full of "skinny" clothes that radiate desire and reproach, who cancel doctor
appointments because they're afraid of being weighed that day, for whom "You look too thin" is
perceived as a radiant compliment and a growling stomach and a light head inspire feelings of
triumph. These rituals, and many others, were to circumscribe my thoughts and behavior for the
next 15 years.

It can be eerie, in light of our presumed uniqueness, to discover how closely the experiences of
one's contemporaries parallel one's own. I've heard many women my age say, "I wanted to get
anorexia," or even, "I learned how to make myself throw up," as a prelude to prolonged and
desperate struggles with bulimia. Many of my friends at the University of Pennsylvania were
grappling with full-blown eating disorders; the rest were wary and self-conscious about food.
How could they not be? In the women's restrooms at the Wharton Business School, where I
sometimes studied at night, food containers often lay right next to toilets. Donut boxes, Twinkie
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wrappers, ice cream containers -- these remnants of desperation frightened me the way
nightmares do, grotesque distortions of things that are, at bottom, deeply familiar. Here, eating
no longer bore any relation to nourishment or even to pleasure: It had been reduced to a brief
complication in the process of purgation, of emptying oneself.
My mother, who graduated from Vassar in 1959, finds these stories incomprehensible. "We'd
order in plates of French fries and hamburgers, and we'd just eat it all and go to bed," she says.
"We were all a little overweight by today's standards, but I don't remember that troubling me in
the least." Marilyn Monroe was the beauty who floated in the minds of my mother and her
friends, voluptuous, pillowy. "The models in the fashion magazines were skinny, but no one cared
about them," my mother says. "They were anonymous."

But attitudes toward food were the least of the differences between my mother's college years
and my own. "There were certain people who planned to have careers," she says, "but the rest
of us majored in English or something, and the idea was that you would get married. I thought
I'd never have to earn a living. I'd be an even more ornamental accessory." This promise -- that
in exchange for being lovely and well educated, my mother would be taken care of for life -- was
one of many the world failed to keep. By 26, she found herself divorced with a 2-year-old
daughter. It was 1965. Women only five or six years younger than she were studying at
universities awash in demands from all quarters – for equality, for opportunities -- demands my
mother had never thought to make. The world that she and her Vassar friends had been groomed
to inhabit had vanished from under their feet.

My fears of being overweight, which commenced when I was 9 or 10, have always been linked,
in my mind, to my mother. She is a glamorous woman with exquisite taste and a sumptuous
wardrobe. Physically, I resemble her to an almost uncanny degree; people have been doing
double takes at the sight of us for as long as I can remember. Perhaps because she and my father
were divorced before I was 3, my sense of my mother and myself as a unit, a pair, an inseparable
duo, feels ancient and inviolable. When I was 5, we wore matching two-piece bathing suits.

I regarded my future stepfather as an unwelcome interloper in our small, simple world. "He's just
coming over for a bite to eat," my mother would assure me, to which I would reply, "OK , one
bite. And then make him leave." But they married when I was 4 and moved to San Francisco,
taking me far from my father, who was still in Chicago. He, too, remarried, and as both families
began having more children, I struggled, alongside much of my generation, in the role of
stepchild, so perilous in fairy tales and in life. My unease made me cleave all the more to my
mother -- the unit of us two was the only one in my life that still felt intact.
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I was an average little girl, not skinny, not fat, with white blond hair, an enormous grin and an
unrelenting sweet tooth. I remember my mother suggesting at some point that I hold in my
stomach when I stood; not only would this look better, she said, but it would strengthen my
stomach muscles so that pretty soon, my stomach would stay tucked in of its own accord (I'm
still waiting for that part). This missive from the world of adults was something I took quite
seriously: I was careful to hold in my stomach.
"Something odd happened in the '60s," my mother recalls. "Fashions became very childlike. The
models all had these knobby legs and patent leather shoes ... women suddenly wanted to look
like prepubescent girls." Considering that many consumers of fashion in the 1960's were women
like my mother, bred to inhabit a world that was now in staggering transformation, this yearning
to return to puberty -- to start over – seems deeply reasonable. My mother was fashionable; she
subscribed to Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and she followed their leads -- followed, too, the
ascension of those skinny, anonymous models from the status of clothes hangers to that of stars.
If feminine power in the '50s was measured in overt sexuality, the ability to attract a man (a man
who would take care of you for life), in the '60s, a woman's power became vested in her ability
to regulate her sexuality -- most obviously with birth control, but also by curbing the womanliness
that would land her in the kitchen slinging pork chops, as my mother's had.

In the selfishness of childhood, I could not imagine my mother doing anything but serving us, and
she never implied that she would have preferred to do otherwise. But I think I sensed her
frustration. By the time I was 12, her marriage to my stepfather was stretched tight over fissures
that would ultimately bring its collapse. He was gone a lot on business; she cooked dinner for my
brother and me every night ("Chicken again?" we were forever whining) and did enough laundry
to fill an airplane hangar. Recently I asked my mother what she might have done if she hadn't
married so young (she returned to the workplace in her early 40s, and is now a successful art
dealer) and she mentioned languages, diplomacy, Europe. I can't blame her. As a child, I felt a
deep aversion for my mother's life, and that aversion filled me with guilt -- and fear. I adored my
mother. She was all I had.

A heightened consciousness of food first seized our household in the early '70s, when my mother
read Adele Davis and banished Quisp and Lucky Charms forever from our shelves. Hostess Ho
Hos and Ding Dongs yielded to Fruit Rolls and Tiger's Milk Bars. My brother and I were fed
spoonfuls of cod liver oil each morning before we left for school; I spit mine onto the garage floor,
where it mingled nicely with the oil stains ("It smells like fish in here," my stepfather would muse,
bewildered). And this health consciousness was duly followed by a growing awareness of weight.
The flat green scale in my parents' bedroom acquired Delphic powers; it revealed whether you
had been Good or Bad. My stepfather transformed into a fanatical runner, and when the early
antecedents of aerobics came along (before Jane Fonda, who, incidentally, was a college
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classmate of my mother's), my mother embraced them with a fervor. My parents would marvel
at snapshots of themselves from the 60's -- look at that double chin, that flabby stomach -- as if
some prior blindness, some naive vulnerability in themselves had now been cast off.
I took my Fruit Rolls and Tiger's Milk Bars to school and traded them for Ho Hos and Twinkies,
which I wolfed down like a refugee receiving succor during wartime. And then I worried. My love
of food, and of sweets in particular, had begun to feel dangerous. I had absorbed the notion of
Good and Bad with regard to eating, and knew that I was Bad. And perversely, the more
entangled food became with virtue, or my lack thereof, the more tenuous its connection to
satisfying hunger, so that rather than quelling my desire to eat, these ruminations made me crave
food always, whether I was hungry or not. By 13, I was eating a lot and it was starting to show.
Now, mingled with the general wretchedness of adolescence was the specter of fatness, which
loomed before me terrifyingly, compounding my sense of powerlessness and unease in the
world.

I began to soothe myself with fantasies, visions in which I became popular, irresistible, strong,
like the models in my mother's fashion magazines (which I devoured), visions in which, above all,
I was searingly, mightily, unstoppably thin. The article on anorexia, intended as a warning,
functioned for me as a how-to manual. I remember the euphoria of finding myself lighter on the
bathroom scale, my sense of joyous and secret achievement when the waistbands of my pants
hung loose and my ribs became distinct as fingers and people asked my favorite of all questions,
"Have you lost weight?" I felt as if I were finally coming into focus, hard and sharp and light,
released from the muffled padding of my sadness.
My sudden 14-year-old weight loss made my stepfather apoplectic, but my mother wasn't nearly
as troubled by it -- not as troubled as she would have been, say, had I gained weight. Fat meant
sloppy, out of control, but thin meant sleek and powerful. She joined my stepfather's bullying
efforts to make me eat, but on a tacit, subterranean level, I believed that I sensed her approval,
and luxuriated in it. Because my mother herself was thin, and dieted, I felt a kinship with her, as
if losing weight were an organic feature of the adult world she inhabited. At the same time, in
craving strength and power, I sought to leave behind the life my mother stood for -- to enter the
arena of the worldly, rather than the chicken basting and laundry folding. And I felt, in some
buried way, that my mother wanted that for me, too.
It is in the body of a true anorexic that the irony of equating thinness with power becomes
grotesquely obvious: shriveled, weak, married to a project of self-erasure that often ends in
death. But for those of us who struggled with an undue consciousness of food and weight without
destroying ourselves, those of us for whom time and experience and whole sections of our lives
were measured in fatness and thinness, in Good and Bad, for us, too, there are ironies. And the
main one is this: Our route to worldly power involved shrinking the world to match the
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dimensions of our own small (but never small enough) bodies, and then dominating those. A
conspirator against us could not have planned it better.

How did it happen? For myself, I have an idea: As much as I longed to triumph, to have
adventures, to succeed in ways my mother had not, a separate part of me was terrified to betray
her. Without my mother, whom did I have? What would I be? By mistaking my physical self for
the world and exerting my power over that, I could experience the sensations of triumph while
remaining essentially harmless: preoccupied, physically weak, inhabiting a world more narrowly
circumscribed, in these ways, than my mother's had been. When I think on those years, the waste
of time is what I most regret; all that thought and worry, those physical trials. I could have learned
Greek or Latin with that time. I could have built a boat and sailed around the world. But these
regrets are subsumed, finally, by sheer relief at having been released from that tiny box of
thought, subtly, almost without my noticing, somewhere around the time I published a novel.
That was my first, tentative brush with the world beyond myself, and it led me to imagine what
real power might feel like.

An eating disorder is partly a disease of consciousness, of perspective -- hence its insidiousness,

and also its contagion. Attitudes toward food are taught and learned, but once food becomes
entangled with notions of good and evil, it can be nearly impossible to extricate. Nor can one give
it up altogether. Eating disorders have become part of our culture, and they'll multiply and
reproduce with lives of their own. We can't take them back. But unlike our mothers, who were
as blindsided by their arrival as we, I and my generation know exactly what they are. I don't have
children yet, but when Marcia spelled out D-I-E-T, I made myself a promise: If I ever have a
daughter, I'll keep the cult of food consciousness outside her range of vision for as long as I can,
so that when it finds her some other way, as it surely will, she won't see me as its silent advocate.
And then I can help her fight it. I made that promise as I watched Marcia's little girl finish eating
in peace.