10/30/2022 0 Comments I write like by memoiresMost, like me, were perfectionists, introverted A students who’d gone on to substantial, if not stratospheric, careers and secure, if not dazzling, marriages. I was still in touch with several high school and college classmates who’d also had eating disorders back in the 1960s and 70s. This time, it wasn’t only my own story that interested me. What if your story isn’t the whole story? So, I decided to write a new book about it. Therapy concluded.īut my questions about this repeating pattern exposed by the divorce diet only multiplied. Therapy helped me confront and correct that idea, which in turn helped my husband and me build a new relationship to replace our busted one. I still thought there must be something about my upbringing that had trained me to think erasing myself would solve my problems. In fact, I was repeating a pattern whose roots stretched all the way down to my genes. It was his response, really, that arrested this so-called diet and alerted me to the fact that something much more interesting than weight loss was going on. Yet now, more than three decades later, I joked with our therapist that I was on the “divorce diet.” Fortunately, he was not amused. Back in 1979, Solitaire was America’s very first memoir about anorexia, and I thought, at the time, that writing it had liberated me from eating disorders forever. In fact, I’d written a book about the many ways it hadn’t worked. I’d clung to that same conviction for seven years while starving myself as a teenager. And I started obsessively weighing myself, taking comfort in the declining numbers on the scale, as if my life would somehow get better if there were less of me. More specifically, it was my response to that separation, which looked a whole lot like my response to adolescence at age 13. The event that triggered my memoir Gaining was my separation after 20 years of marriage. The memoir, then, becomes that investigation. This particular form of nonfiction is almost always written in response to a personal experience that burrows so deep, it won’t let go until its whole story is investigated. Orwell's influence on popular and political culture endures, and several of his neologisms, along with the term Orwellian - a byword for totalitarian or manipulative social practices - have entered the vernacular.No one sets out to write a memoir on a whim. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, language and culture. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), which together have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism.Ĭonsidered perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist.
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