The Year of Living Dangerously With Anorexia

Eleven years old, thin and popular, Lori Gottlieb sits at her Beverly Hills elementary school lunch table in 1978 and reveals to eager friends the secrets of her weight loss. For breakfast? “Exactly 19 flakes of Product 19 cereal and 2 ounces of nonfat milk.”

Soon a flurry of little girls has gathered around, asking her to determine how many calories lurk in their lunches, which she does with the accuracy of a fat-seeking sharp-shooter. “Mayonnaise has 100 calories per tablespoon,” she says, shaking her head at the turkey on wheat sandwich of a friend. Soon it was a banana for lunch, lettuce for dinner and, ultimately, tricks to keep from even smelling food--lest the steam seep into her stomach, only to solidify as fat. Then the child began to starve.

Twenty-two years later, Gottlieb’s journals from the year she became anorexic were published as “Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self.” She edited her voluminous writing for clarity, she said, and polished the childhood language. The hardback was a bestseller; the paperback version was released last week. Martin Scorsese has optioned the movie rights.

Gottlieb discovered her old diary when, after deciding to apply to medical school, she went looking for old chemistry notes. What she found surprised even her: a detailed account of her family, school life and an almost day-by-day documentation of her near-starvation.

Lori, at 11, is brazen in her determination not to eat and so keen an observer that even the saddest parts have some humor. After a psychiatrist asks the family to communicate by expressing feelings instead of thoughts, her mother tries it out:

“ ‘You know, Lori, I’ve been meaning to tell you something for a long time. It’s about your hair. It really needs work. Your layers are all grown out. . . .’ Then she turned to Dad and said, ‘I love communicating!’ ”

Lori loves math and chess and softball. Her mother loves shopping and decorating; her stockbroker father is remote. Her mother, who never finishes a meal, eats one slice of toast for breakfast. When Lori stops eating, her mother tells her she can’t diet--until she’s a woman. She is, however, supposed to be “ladylike” and stop her annoying habit of speaking her mind at every turn.

Her mother, however, is not very different from the other women Lori observes. Lori notes how little they eat, and the games they play to stay thin: “They’re always eating lots of salads before weddings and fancy occasions so they can fit into sexy dresses. I’d just buy a bigger dress . . . .”

In the grip of anorexia, however, Lori far outdoes her mother, eating smaller and smaller portions until she lands in the hospital at 60 pounds and tries to cut the “fat” from her stomach with a knife.

But her eating disorder is symptomatic of her deeper unhappiness: “My dad is very smart, very tense, and likes to spend a lot of time alone in his study, especially when Mom is crying, screaming or meeting with the decorator. . . . Dad’s nicer than Mom . . . . Specifically, he never says anything when Mom’s telling me how abnormal I am for a girl or how I care too much about math or how much she wishes I wasn’t so unique.’ ”

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Last week, over a tall chocolate milkshake with whipped cream at a West Hollywood diner, Gottlieb says she first stopped eating during a family vacation in Washington, D.C. Rather than follow her father’s order to finish a milkshake during a White House tour, Gottlieb dumped it in a bookcase. “I do sort of wonder if anyone ever had to clean it up,” she says with a rueful smile.

It is difficult to imagine that Gottlieb, who is naturally petite, ever looked in a mirror and imagined an ounce of fat. But anorexia isn’t really about food, she says, so much as control.

Since her refusal to eat came and went in about a year, anorexia has not overshadowed her life, Gottlieb says. It was, however, a defining experience.

There is a seductive aspect to the first stages of anorexia, she says, and only later does it turn into torment. “It’s exhilarating at first. The willpower involved seems like an act of asceticism, you can feel proud of yourself for setting this very difficult goal and achieving it. You’re getting a lot of attention, and it’s as though you’re fighting biology; you feel very powerful.

“Then it becomes a terrible experience. I was like, ‘I’m starving, I can hardly walk and I’m growing hair all over my body.’ ” (As fat disappears and the body loses its ability to keep warm, soft baby hair, called lanugo, begins to grow.)

Gottlieb credits her recovery in part to a nurse she met at Cedars-Sinai, who stayed in touch with her. And she found friends who shared her interests. After graduating from Beverly Hills High School in 1985, Gottlieb attended Yale University. She worked as a prime-time series development executive at NBC in Burbank, where once again she was immersed in a weight-conscious culture. “I would go out to lunch with actresses, and they would order only a Diet Coke while I’d be chowing down. I don’t think the average person has any idea how much work it takes for them to look like that. That’s why they have to have body entourages--nutritionists, dietitians, personal trainers.”

Now a second-year medical student at Stanford University, and healthy, Gottlieb is “teeny,” as she puts it, and people still worry about her weight. At book signings, they ask what she had for dinner. Her relationship with her parents, particularly with her mother, has improved significantly over the years, Gottlieb says. “Now if she asks, ‘Are you a little thin?’ It comes less from a place of aesthetics than a place of concern for me.”

“Stick Figure” puts her parents, particularly her mother, under Klieg lights, illuminating every lump and bump in their relationship, at least from an adolescent’s point of view. They have a better understanding of why she was so unhappy but are intensely private and have not relished having their life on display. “I’m fortunate that they have been very supportive and that they understood why I felt I needed to do this book,” she says.

Although L.A. is still home, moving away has given her new perspective on the culture of thin. “It’s almost laughable to people outside of L.A. You’re embarrassed for people here a little bit. Yet at the same time, if you asked a woman somewhere else, ‘If you could snap your fingers and look like one of those L.A. women or look like you,’ I still think they’d pick the other woman.”

Gottlieb will appear tonight at 7 at Dutton’s, 11975 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood.