Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders [BARGAIN PRICE] (Hardcover)

by Aimee Liu (Author)
Key Phrases: restricting anorexics, been anorexic, eating disorder patients, New York, Caroline Knapp, Los Angeles (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Thirty years after Liu penned Solitaire documenting her teenage experience with anorexia nervosa, she recounts her midlife relapse and recovery. Liu exposes many myths surrounding eating disorders, with a combination of research and in-depth interviews with other former anorexics and bulimics. She interviews men and women of various cultural and economic backgrounds to refute the notion that anorexia and bulimia affect only "modern rich white girls." Liu's interviewees range from Rob, a 50-year-old physician, to Jessica, an Australian 25-year-old aspiring actress. Liu devotes many chapters to the impact of family on the anorexic or bulimic, contradicting the accepted belief that the victim is "the sick one"; rather, she locates the starting point of the disease in genetics, family life, shame and personality. Like other victims, Liu finds a history of mental disorders in her family, ranging from alcoholism to obsessive-compulsive disorder. According to Liu, a manifestation of an eating disorder is a call for help and should be treated as early as possible, and she fleshes out facts and statistics with her personal interviews, making this book poignant even for those who have not suffered from an eating disorder. (Feb. 22)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Three decades after Solitaire (1979), her memoir of struggling to overcome anorexia nervosa, Liu might be expected to discuss how it feels to be cured. Time, however, has given her a valuable perspective shared here in a careful deconstruction of eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. From her own experience and interviews with many other women who have been diagnosed with an eating disorder, Liu now knows that anorexia and bulimia are lifelong companions. She and her informants have learned that, ebbing and flowing, sometimes moving to the fore but ever present in the background, an eating disorder responds to both good times and bad in a person's life. She quotes eating disorder experts (psychiatrists, physicians, research scientists, etc.) who explain how those who once succumbed to the urge to withhold or purge food are likely to be perched always atop a precipice, risking toppling into old habits when stress levels rise. Examining the disorder from the inside (the individual) out (to the family and society), Liu has created a solid resource. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; 1 edition (February 22, 2007)
• ISBN-10: 0446577669
• ASIN: B001JJBOFQ
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #765,906 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Changes the Dialog on Eating Disorders, April 22, 2007

By	Stacey M Jones (Conway, Ark.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders (Hardcover)

GAINING: THE TRUTH ABOUT LIFE AFTER EATING DISORDERS is a well-written interesting hybrid of a book that is part memoir, part individual interview/reportage, part summary of existing research, all about the experience of having recovered from an eating disorder. I found it interesting particularly in how it addressed personality and temperament, how they relate to genetics and environmental factors. Liu's book, because it is both personal and researched, paints a vivid and rich portrait of individuals who have suffered and recovered from this particular illness.

Liu's memoir of her own anorexia takes up the story of her life after her last memoir ends. Liu wrote Solitaire in her 20s after she recoverd from a serious period of restricting anorexia as a high school and college student. She writes of a moment when she decided she wanted a happier life and turned toward health. But GAINING isn't focused on her eating disorder, but on the life she lived afterwards that still bore features of someone with her particular former illness.

The individual interviews Liu conducts to enrich her investigation of what her own experience as a recovered anorexic might mean support her thesis that while the eating disorder might stop, many of the concerns and fears continue and are "treated" in other ways. Liu interviews women who became workaholics, engaged in punishing exercise, kept their lives emotionally "clean." Commonalities and connections are made among recovered anorexics and among recovered bulimics that illustrate with personal narratives the findings that Liu focuses on from current research.

Liu's treatment of the research on the topic is interesting and turns a corner in what I think of as the popular understanding of eating disorders (starlets who opine that they could use an eating disorder for a couple of days, etc.). Liu rejects a traditionally feminist position that environment and media messaging against women are primarily responsible for the disorders experienced by many women and men, though she treats these ideas respectfully and addresses how she does think they play a part in the experience. She expands on the thinking that "genetics loads the gun and enrivonment pulls the trigger" in terms of biological predisposition and experiential triggers for those who suffer from eating disorders by writing about the position that genetics creates the gun, environment loads it and extreme emotional experiences fire the ED bullet.

Research is also used to demonstrate the commonalities of those who suffer from such disorders in terms of brain functioning and temperament. Recovered anorexics, for example, often have temperaments that also lead them to choose not to have children. Liu examines brain functioning in terms of how women with a history of eating disorders respond to a photo of cake vs. the brain activity charted in someone who has never suffered from such an illness (the anorexics accessed the parts of their brains of judgment and anxiety, the control group went to the pleasure part of their brains) and also the differences in how anorexics differ from others in how their brains respond to dopamine, the key to pleasure in the human brain, to list just a few examples.

Liu doesn't focus on treatment styles or programs, but on the implications that having suffered from an eating disorder can have for an individual regarding his or her personality, life choices and future. Perhaps the best way to summarize the book is from this interview with Sheila Reindl, who wrote Sensing the Self and is a clinical psychologist and researcher at Harvard. Reindl tells Liu, "Recovery is like a big old house. ... The anorexic or bulimic is always going to live there. ... I prefer to think of it this way. She used to rule the house in a kind of tyranny. ... Now she still gets to live there and she may still have some of those old fears and vulnerabilities, but she's got only one room in the house and has to make way for more and more occupants as time passes" (p. 125).

This book was an artistic, thoughtful and respectful mix of personal investigation, interview and research summary cogent to the subject matter. I thought it was well written and compelling, illustrating some fascinating aspects of personality and temperament that inform decisionmaking and life choices. I found it a moving and informative read.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Very good, but don't compare and despair, March 16, 2008

By	Gina in Minnesota - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders (Hardcover)

When I started reading this book, just a quarter of the way into it, I was very excited and hopeful that this could be one of the best books out there on EDs because it focused a lot on recovery, and using real life examples. Reading about solutions instead of just epidemics and hopeless stats was refreshing.

The insight into people's personality traits was especially helpful. I bookmarked many passages with little post-it flags because so many things were right on.

I had to knock off two stars for one reason only--the height and weight stats of most the women she interviewed. At first I didn't notice but the more into the book I read, it became very distracting. First of all, height and weight does NOT paint an instant mental picture of what someone looks like to me, anyway. I am not one of those carnival game workers who is trained to know what that looks like. I didn't understand why she couldn't have just described them as "underweight" or used adjectives instead of stats, or whatever.

I couldn't believe it when she ACTUALLY listed the height and weight of the DAUGHTER of a woman with ED and inserted the following commentary--"far from excessive". You could almost hear the subtext after that, "but, could still stand to lose a few pounds." Instead, she lets the quote of the mother's opinion to speak what the author is thinking. And I'm thinking, how many girls who happen to weigh MORE than that and are SHORTER are going to feel when they read that? Never mind that she goes on to say how our bodies are functional and don't define who we are and how fathers can help daughters feel good about themselves--the seed of self-doubt could be planted somewhere.

I noticed she also talked a lot about her own weight numbers throughout her various life stories, as though this says something on its own. It obviously does to the author, since she had an eating disorder and weight represents what was going on in her life at that point, but it doesn't mean a whole lot to the general audience. If she said, I was at X weight at that point I would think, so? I'm sorry, I forgot to memorize your height and I don't know what that means and how that adds to the story. All I needed to know was how healthy she was, really. And it was triggering to start thinking about my own height and how it compared, and I had to consciously tell myself to stop doing that.

It was disappointing that for all the self-awareness and sensitivity the author brings to the subject, this detail escaped her attention. I don't think she meant anything malicious about it, of course, just a sad side effect of how an ED mind operates, unfortunately, even after the harmful behaviors have ceased.

(if the author had any input in the ironic cover art--a photo of a bone-thin model in a joyous leap in a sheer dress on the beach--this would get two stars, especially because there is a whole chapter devoted to how media images equate thin women to success, health, and happiness)

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book has been a revelation for me, February 27, 2007

By	Madeline Vincent (SC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders (Hardcover)

As someone who is currently recovering from my fourth round of anorexia (I am now mid-thirties), reading this book is the first time I have been able to "connect the dots" and really understand why I do this. I have had some of the pieces before, but this book has given me a depth of understanding of myself that I've never had, as well as the comfort of knowing I'm not alone. Thank you to Ms. Liu for writing it.