One Woman’s Diet for Salvation

There was a time when the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas was so obsessed with food that a hard-core gorge caused her to gain 11 pounds in four days. She’d cram whole banana cream pies into her gullet and follow that with lemon crullers, loaves of bread and trays of cookies.

Now 17 years into recovery from an eating disorder, Bullitt-Jonas lays out her gastrointestinal highs and lows and her search for spiritual sustenance in her first book.

“When, by the grace of God, you’ve managed to save your life, you want to pass on what you’ve learned,” she writes.

Flashing back to when the kitchen counter was her altar, Bullitt-Jonas, associate rector of All Saints Church in Brookline, Mass., explores how her obsessive hunger for food masked a deeper desire: for intimacy with God and with others.

“I was used to my weight going up and down by 15, 20, 30 pounds, while I alternated periods of bingeing with dieting and fasts, exercising ferociously all the while,” she writes.

The book is sometimes meandering and, overall, not nearly as well-written as “Wasted,” last year’s breakthrough memoir of an eating disorder by Marya Hornbacher. But Bullitt-Jonas’ book has generated considerable discussion, perhaps because of its linking of two topics that get wide attention--spirituality and eating disorders.

“Holy Hunger” explores Bullitt-Jonas’ obsessive eating against the backdrop of her privileged childhood in Cambridge, Mass., where her father was a Harvard scholar and her mother was a Radcliffe College trustee.

The honesty of Bullitt-Jonas’ book is its success. Written chronologically, it explores the trickle-down effect of her parents’ pathologies--the rampant alcoholism of her father and her mother’s distant demeanor and struggle with depression.

“I numbed myself, stifling and choking off all my longings, all my feelings, with food,” she writes.

Growing up, she was shuttled between boarding schools in Switzerland and Baltimore. After going to college at Harvard, she spent a year in the VISTA program volunteering at a public interest law office in Philadelphia.

Her problems began to coalesce after her parents divorced and she returned to Cambridge to earn her doctorate at Harvard. As she holed up in her apartment studying and isolated from her fractured family, her bingeing spiraled out of control.

To compensate, she would work out. She ran the Boston Marathon, then the New York Marathon. Even when she tried to diet, it was too extreme: on one weight loss program that allowed vegetables, she ate so many carrots that her skin turned orange.

She hit bottom after the suicide of a co-worker and participation in a family intervention of her father’s drinking: “I wanted out. I wanted help. I wanted God.”

That evening after listening to Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms,” she visited the monastery of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, which was near her apartment in Harvard Square, along the Charles River.

On a velvet kneeler in the cavernous, drafty building, she prayed. Her epiphany came while she was receiving Holy Communion:

“You literally taste, you swallow, you take in God. I was amazed and moved to tears. It was as if Christ was willing to address me in the only language that I could presently understand, the language of food. . . . Here was the bread that might lead me home.”

Realizing that her insatiable appetite was actually a misdirected desire for spirituality, she steeled herself for a long journey back to health and back to God.

Parts of the book are riddled with tiresome metaphors, and the generalities about her recovery are also vague. More specific incidents from Bullitt-Jonas’ history would have been more compelling than a thicket of eating metaphors.

She does write poignantly about the value of Overeaters Anonymous, a program that emphasizes a surrender to a “higher power.” And, in some of the best parts of the book, she describes in searing detail the vigils at her father’s deathbed.

“By the time my father died, I knew I was on my way. I had set my course. I knew that whatever my life was about, it was about desire, the desire beyond all desire, the desire for God.”

In the end, Bullitt-Jonas tells a worthwhile tale about true nourishment that comes not from consuming custards and pies, but from engaging on a spiritual path with the Lord.