Portia de Rossi

“I’m just really worried about you. I just can’t believe how thin you are.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I knew I was thin but not nearly thin enough for this reaction. If I’d worked out in a sweater so he didn’t see my arms he wouldn’t be reacting like this, but I felt that now wasn’t the time to explain that to him. Besides, I’d never been so upset, seeing him cry. I’d never been so upset.

He got himself together a little, enough to look at my face. I was speechless, still, but I could see he wasn’t asking me to speak.

I watched as his face started breaking again. His face crumbled into creases. It went red. Tears were falling down his cheeks. He looked at me imploringly although he still wasn’t asking anything of me. It confused me.

“Porshe . . .” He cried harder. As he inhaled to say what he was leading up to say, his breath caught, making short staccato sounds. “You’re gonna die.”

My brother had left shortly after I’d pleaded my case. I told him that I knew what I was doing. When that didn’t work, I told him that I would eat, that I would gain weight and stop obsessively working out. He seemed pleased to hear all that so he left me to hang out with Sacha, who, after pointing out a very thin girl in the gym, dropped me home. She didn’t say anything about my weight, she just pointed to that girl on the treadmill, exclaiming that she was anorexic and how sad it was, and then she dropped me home.

I had cried a lot with my brother. The tears weren’t for me. They came because of him, because I hated seeing him cry like that. The only other time I’d seen him cry was when our dad died and to be honest, I didn’t know why my weight made him so sad. And I didn’t know why Sacha pointed out the so-called anorexic girl. I knew that I was thinner than usual. I knew that I was underweight, but anorexia was never something that I thought I could have. The girl at the gym didn’t have it. Not just anyone could have anorexia. It was a disorder of the highly accomplished, cultured, beautiful. It belonged to models, singers, and Princess Diana.

I had always been secretly in awe of anorexics with their superhuman self-restraint. There is a neatness to it, a perfection. Apart from the fact that I could never be thin enough to be anorexic, I didn’t want to be anorexic anyway. I just wanted to excel at dieting.

• • •

When I arrived home, my mother intercepted me on my way to take a shower and asked me to come to her room. At a glance it was clear to me that my brother had been talking to her about the episode at the gym and it was clear that her nonchalant attitude had been replaced by a very serious one.

“Come in here for a minute, okay? I would really like to talk to you.”

I followed her through the living room and into her bedroom. I passed by Gran, who for twenty years had sat in the chair in the corner of the living room, alternating her attention between the TV and her family’s lives, all played out in front of her as a source of entertainment. But my grandmother didn’t appear disconnected or uncaring, she just seemed like she already knew the end to all the stories. She’d seen all the reruns on TV and in life. She’d seen it all before. We were an episode of The Golden Girls in a rerun. Blanche, whose self-worth is based on her looks, has something on her mind but can’t communicate it in any way other than by acting out and has been called in to talk to problem-solving Dorothy, who had been given a tip by Rose as she stumbled across the truth, but it was something that Sophia had known all along. Gran gave me a look as I passed her that said, “Oh, yeah! I remember this one. This is the one where you confront your mother about her lack of acceptance of you for being gay and she finally accepts you for who you are. Oh yeah! This is a good one . . .” She couldn’t really have known that, of course. My mother and I had decided not to tell her about my sexuality. We had decided that she was too old and knowing that truth about me would be a terrible shock. Something like that could kill her. That the words “I’m gay” might just stop her heart, and she’d topple onto the floor, dead from shock.

My mother stood backlit against the window of her dark bedroom. I could just make out her pink scalp underneath her wisps of gray-blond hair and I wondered for how long gray hair could be dyed. Maybe it became so porous that color would just not take to it anymore. Maybe that’s why really old people have gray hair. Until this point I had thought it was because people in their eighties and nineties couldn’t be bothered because superficial things like looks didn’t matter anymore, but what if the desire to hold on to blond or brown hair was still there but the ability to do it was gone? I wondered if that’s what aging felt like. That desire and reality were dueling until the day you die, that nobody ever got to a place of peace. I had always wanted to get old so I didn’t have to care anymore, but I began to think that it would be best just to skip the getting older part and just die.

“You’re so thin, darling. It’s awful.”

Yes. I’m thin. I’m exactly what you wanted me to be.

“Well, I guess I can get my Swatch watch now.”

The Swatch watch was a carrot my mother used to dangle when I was a teenager if I reached 119 pounds, the magical eight and a half stone. As I had always fluctuated between nine and nine and a half, that number was always just a fantasy, a magical land where perfection lived and all the people who were special enough to get there were covered in Swatch watches. As I struggled to get to that number on the scale, the Swatch watches I wanted were going out of style one by one. First it was the clear one I wanted but was too fat to have, then a yellow one with blue hands, then the black one that passed me by without my earning the right to own it. I really did want my plastic Swatch watch. Even though they didn’t make them anymore.

“If you don’t eat something, you’re going to die!”

My mother squatted down with her hand on the corner of the bed. Her other hand was covering her face as she quietly sobbed. I stood over her, looking down. To my surprise I stood there waiting for something to happen. Where was the rush of emotion that had overtaken me when I saw my brother similarly bent over, sobbing and in pain? Where was that panic I felt that made me search for something soothing to say? Where was the deep regret for making my mother so upset? To my horror, a smirk involuntarily stretched over my face. My mother was crying and I was smiling. I loved my mother very much. Why was I being so cold?

The answer came to me with certainty and clarity.

I can be gay now. I can be who I am without pretending anymore. I’m forcing her to accept me just the way I am.

I bent down and picked my mother up off the floor. I put my arm around her shoulders and we sat like that on the edge of her bed until she stopped crying. I was waiting for her to stop so I could start in on her. As my mother quietly cried, I planned my attack. I would tell her that I was angry that she didn’t accept me for being gay, I was angry that she seemed to care more about how I looked than how I felt or who I was. I was going to tell her to change or she would risk losing me. My comments would hurt her, but it was better for her in the long run. I was going to show her the same tough love she’d shown me.

But I didn’t do that. Instead, I burst into tears.

“I’m so sorry that I’m gay, Mama. I’m sorry I’m not what you wanted.”

I cried for her disappointment, and for mine. I wasn’t the daughter she was proud of, I was the daughter that made her ashamed. And no amount of fame could take take shame away.

“Why are you sorry, darling? You are who you are.”

“I know! But you’re ashamed of me! You won’t even tell our family and they’re the people who love me!”

“I just thought that your being gay was nobody’s business. It was private.”

“Michael’s relationships weren’t private? You had no problem talking about those! You tell everyone the private things you’re proud of!”

My mother swiveled toward me, put her hands on my shoulders, and turned me to face her.

“Listen. I’m a stupid old fool. Alright?” She was looking directly at me. It was like she was seeing me for the first time. “I was scared, okay? I didn’t want you to lose everything you’d worked so hard for. But I was wrong. And I was stupid.” She folded me into her arms. “I love you so much.”

“I love you, too, Mama.”

I felt the weight fall away from me. I lost the weight that I’d been carrying around since I was a teenager. Shame weighs a lot more than flesh and bone.

Within moments we were laughing, talking about how crazy I was to take the weight loss too far. We were saying that all of it was really unnecessary, that I was great just the way I was. We decided that it was time to start dating and “to hell with it.” Happiness was everything. “And health,” she chimed in. “Without them, what’s the point?” We laughed and hugged and agreed that the most important things in life are health and happiness and that they were the only things I had to worry about now. That’s all she cared about.

My health and happiness were the only things my mom cared about.

We walked directly to the kitchen arm in arm and we made lunch together. We made fried rice with peas and a teaspoon of oil. We were laughing and talking, we ate it together, and my grandmother watched from the corner of the room in her chair, smiling as the credits rolled. The End.

26

I WAS STILL 89 pounds. I liked being 89 pounds. Although the image of my brother crying and my mother breaking down was burned into my memory and I had made promises to them that I would gain weight, January was not a good time to gain weight. I had agreed to shoot the cover of Angeleno magazine, a big, glossy fashion/lifestyle rag. I had committed to attending the Australia Day Ball, an annual event held in LA that honored Australians in the film and TV industry. I just couldn’t gain any weight until all that was done. What would be the point in sliding backward to the middle of the pack when it was just as easy to take the pictures of me at the finish line, alone in my triumph? My ego wouldn’t let me gain any weight. I didn’t see the point to it until after the cameras were no longer pointed at me.

As the maintenance took up a lot of time, I barely had time for anything else. Even with Carolyn doing the supermarket rounds to find the brands with the least amount of sodium or the lowest fat content, working out took up most of my day. I decided, however, that I needed a social outlet and I joined that ballet class with the yelling Russian and the fat women in makeup and tights. I figured at 89 pounds I was thin enough to wear a leotard and développé my leg into the air. Besides, ballet was a kind of workout, too, if you weren’t lazy about it. I met a girl there who liked to count calories and to work out. Melody was thinner than me with a better turnout and a higher extension. She was called on by the yelling Russian to demonstrate good développés. I tried to befriend her as we had a lot in common, but what we shared in common made it difficult to be friends. We were both recluses with rituals. Besides, being gay I didn’t feel comfortable making new friends. It didn’t seem fair after months of presenting myself as a relatable heterosexual to suddenly surprise them with the news that a lesbian had been lurking underneath the whole time, had been in their homes, talking about their sex lives, hugging them and telling them they had good leg extensions in ballet class. I stopped going to ballet class anyway. I didn’t have the thinnest thighs nor was I the best dancer in the class. It didn’t remind me of a time when I was good at something, it made me aware of the sad reality that if I was good as an eight-year-old, then I had gotten worse. I had peaked at age eight. What was the point in continuing? The old yelling Russian told me that I was too thin and that I needed to gain weight. What was the point?

The Angeleno cover shoot was a reward for my hard work. I had trained hard for the event and knowing that I had done the work, all I had to do was relax and enjoy the ride. The ride was a gentle downhill slope with smooth pavement beneath me. The ride was my feet off the pedals, feeling the wind through my hair, smelling the wildflowers as they rushed past me firmly rooted in place. No panic. No doubts. No disgrace. The interview was different. It took place at my favorite restaurant, The Ivy, which was my favorite because they blanched all their vegetables and never brushed them with oil. I ate my vegetables (with no lip gloss or lip balm—one can never be too careful) and attempted to maneuver gracefully around personal questions as fundamental and important to a person’s character as their desires to marry and have children. Being secretive was exhausting. But the interviewer had a secret, too. She secretly didn’t like me while pretending to find me delightful. She suckered me into being a little looser, a little more truthful. What added to my uncharacteristically easy mood was that the interview took place on my birthday, and when the manager at The Ivy presented me with a large slice of birthday cake, I looked at my new journalist friend and said with a wink in my voice, “Like I’m gonna eat that!”

An Australian tabloid picked up the story and on the cover it printed, “Out to Lunch with Portia.”

A cover is still a cover.

“Good news!” I stood in my kitchen looking out onto the Sahara desert that was the yellow wall of the Sunset 5 shopping mall and tried to rally excitement for my impending movie. My mother loved to hear of my accomplishments and because of the hell I had put her through over Christmas, I felt that the “good news” of an exciting role in a big studio movie was what she deserved to hear. As I began to describe the film, “It’s called Cletis Tout,” who was cast to star in it, “Richard Dreyfuss plays my father!” and where it would shoot, “In Toronto—you’ll have to come visit,” my excited, energetic voice was in stark contrast to the exhaustion I was feeling. Landing the role wasn’t exciting to me, it was merely the end of the long uphill climb of auditions, callbacks, and negotiations. Getting the role was a relief, like the moment of collapse at the top of a mountain before you begin worrying about how to get down. Like a tourist who travels not to experience foreign places but rather to tell people that she’s well traveled—this was how I viewed this excursion to Toronto with its film set and its respected actors. “I’m doing a movie this summer.” That was the reason I wanted the movie. As my Ally McBeal cast mates had seemingly all succeeded in landing movie roles, I too must do something extraordinary to fit in.

I hung up the phone and felt empty, vacant, directionless. I knew I should celebrate, but I didn’t know who to call. I didn’t know who would care. I couldn’t call my brother because he would want to take me out for Mexican food and margaritas and I couldn’t think of an excuse not to go. I couldn’t let him see me in person because I didn’t want to upset him again. He could think that I was eating more and loosening up on my strict diet from the picture on his TV screen, as everyone looks ten pounds fatter on TV. He could check in with me as Nelle Porter once a week and be pleased with my progress as the wardrobe department had cleverly quilted a disguise of flattering clothing to cover all my flaws: a patch to cover my thin arms, a patch to cover the gap between my thighs. I thought about a glass of wine—heck, champagne!—but knew I couldn’t enjoy it without feeling guilty. I was the leading lady in a movie, after all, and Christian Slater was my man. We had chemistry, apparently. A shape-shifting, sexless androgynous girl could have chemistry with anything. My life was just a fantasy with its fantasy lovers and its make-believe conversations with make-believe people in my head. So I was a perfect candidate to fall in love with a make-believe man and consummate our pretend love in a make-believe house. Reality was the difficult part. And the reality at that moment was that it was Friday at 5:00 and I didn’t know what to do. So I went to the Pilates studio.

Santa Monica Boulevard, the gay part of town, had an exciting energy. It was the beginning of the weekend, and the restaurant workers were placing candles on the outdoor tables, setting a welcoming scene for their patrons to drink, talk, and unwind from the week of work. As I drove down the boulevard, past the lesbian coffee shop I’d gone to the day I got Ally McBeal, hoping no one could see me through my tinted car window, I was once again aware of the emptiness. Losing weight was no longer exciting to me, and maintaining it was hard. I was exhausted most of the time and the ante on exercise seemed to keep going up. Unexpectedly, a voice would sound in my head at the point of my workout where I would usually have quit, telling me to march on, to keep going, that it wasn’t enough. It told me I wasn’t good enough, I didn’t do it long enough, that there was still a long way to go before I could rest.

The drill sergeant voice accompanied me everywhere, recorded all the missed moments when I was sitting but should’ve been standing, moving around, doing something. It was hard for me to drive anywhere, even to the Pilates studio. I had figured out several different blocks in LA where I could get out of my car and stretch my legs. I wouldn’t always run around the block, sometimes I would just walk with a deliberate stride. Sometimes I didn’t have the energy to run. I had the urge to get up from being immobile, but I didn’t have the energy to make it a useful excursion. The voice that made me get out of my car, that called me a lazy pig for walking instead of running around the block, would get back in the car with me and accompany me all the way to the studio, where it laughed at me for being late to work with no burned calories to show for it.

I pulled into the valet parking lot of the Pilates studio. The parking lot was shared with a restaurant and if you liked to work out when other people were going to dinner, then a valet would take your car. The voice told me to get out of the car as fast as I could and go burn calories. I got out of the car in a hurry and left my keys in the ignition for the valet.

How are you going to pull it off? How could you ever be pretty enough to be a leading lady? You’re not even thin. You don’t have long, lean limbs. You have ordinary looks and an ordinary body. You can’t play a leading lady in a movie. You’re gay. What a joke! What happens when people find out you’re gay and you’ve fooled them into thinking you were Christian Slater’s love interest? How is that going to work? Give it up, you stupid dyke. How long are you going to pretend you’re something you’re not? How long do you think people are going to fall for it?

As I reached the top stair and looked down at where I’d left my car, I saw it moving. My car was moving!

“Help!” I screamed. “Somebody’s stealing my car!”

I ran down the stairs, my heart beating in my throat. Jesus! Where’s my dog? Is she in the car?

“Help! Help me! Somebody’s stealing my car!” I got to the bottom step, flung my body around the railing, and ran to my car feeling like there were weights tied to my ankles, like I was running with someone holding me back. Evil was holding me back, allowing my car to be stolen in front of my eyes. And my dog! Oh my God! Bean! I screamed out her name, “BEAN!!!”

The car stopped and a man got out. He was wearing black pants and a blue vest. He held the keys up to me, silently. He looked frightened. We stood there, facing each other, him in his blue vest and me in my platform off-camera shoes and spandex shorts with the elastic waistband that was too loose for my hips. We stared at each other, and now it was my turn to be frightened. I gently took the keys from him and quietly sat down on the warm leather seat. I checked for Bean and she wasn’t there. I drove away in silence. No metronome. No marching orders. I drove back down Santa Monica Boulevard and past the lesbian café. Staring into the café, I drove through a red light. I knew that because a man crossing the street at the crosswalk slapped the hood of my car as he narrowly avoided getting hit and then by the time the noise registered, I saw that I was in the middle of an intersection, all alone except for a car rushing at my side. I drove home to my cold, empty apartment and vowed never to go out again.

The number 82 on the scale should’ve meant something other than what it did to me. All it meant to me was that I was seven pounds lighter than the last time I weighed myself. The number 82 was the reward for my hard work, a nod to my dedication, a flashing red digital recognition of my self-control. It was a way to silence the drill sergeant in my head, and in this subjective world full of conflicting opinions, it was a way to objectively measure my success. Another way to measure my success was to use a tape measure. I had begun measuring the objects and the space surrounding the objects. Like a study of semiotics, I measured the white and black surrounding the white, the vacuous space that held its object and gave it substance. I measured my big legs with their thighs and the space between my thighs. I measured my footballer’s calves and watched as the chunky fat withered away to become a dancer’s calves and then a little child’s calves, too new and underdeveloped to be labeled anything other than just legs. I measured myself daily after weighing for a more accurate understanding of my progress. Occasionally, I would measure myself visually. I would stand naked in front of a mirror and look at myself. Sometimes I even loved what I saw. Sometimes I saw a boy, maybe twelve years of age, with a straight skinny body and no ugly penis that he would forever be measuring, wondering if he measured up. I sometimes saw a teenage girl with no breasts and no curves that would turn her into a woman with desires and complicate her perfect, sterile life. Sometimes I didn’t see a person at all, I just saw the inch of fat on a stomach and thighs that encouraged me to continue to lose weight. I knew I wasn’t attractive, and I was very happy about that. I didn’t want to be attractive. I didn’t want to attract. As long as no one wanted to be let in, I didn’t have to shut anyone out. If I could keep people from being interested enough to ask me questions, I didn’t have to lie. As long as I could be alone with my secrets, I didn’t have to worry about being found out.

At 82 pounds, I wanted to photograph myself. I wanted to document my success. But first I had to silence the drill sergeant that reminded me of that extra inch of fat. First I had to get rid of that.

27

“CHECK THE gate.” There was a suspended moment as the cameraman shone a flashlight at the film in the camera.

“Good gate.”

“That’s lunch. One hour.” The scene of the crew and cast broke apart, first at its edges, with the actors strutting off the set and directly to their trailers, then the lights were shut down, the camera track taken apart, and finally the director on a chair on the far edge of the scene, with his script supervisor and ADs in tow, collected his notes and headed toward catering. It was my first day on the set of Cletis Tout. I hadn’t done any acting yet; my scene was coming up after lunch, but I had been at the set all morning. I had been asked to go to wardrobe for a final fitting and to work with the props guy as my character was a smart-ass, wisecracking potter who was tough on the outside, cold, hard, and glazed over yet fragile and needing to be handled delicately—like her pots.

I went to wardrobe feeling a little insecure, as I had gained weight since my first fitting. I wasn’t sure how much weight I’d gained because I’d stopped weighing myself after seeing the number 82 on the scale. I’d given up on the idea of losing that stubborn inch of fat because of what happened to the rest of my body. At 82 pounds, the veins on my arms looked like thick strands of rope attaching my hands to my forearms and my elbows. The unsightliness of it forced me to put ice on my wrists to try to make them disappear, as the hotter it was, the more they protruded. I knew I couldn’t show up to a big-budget movie set needing to ice-down my veins in between takes, so I decided to slowly gain some weight. Although I knew I had to look better at a heavier weight, seeing the number on the scale climb back up through the nineties and head toward a hundred pounds was something I couldn’t bear.

It was sheer agony, walking into a fitting, not knowing my weight. It was exactly this kind of anxiety—this fear of not knowing if I could fit into clothes—that I had tried to eradicate. I had told the costume designer that my measurements were thirty-four, twenty-four, thirty-five and, ironically, the ideal measurements as told to me by my modeling agency still didn’t apply to me. At the time the costumer asked for them, I was 29½, 22¾, 31⅜. And that was a lot more difficult to say over the phone. As I was playing a tough, bohemian artist, my wardrobe started out dark and layered, gradually shedding layers of clothes and softening the color palette as I gradually shed my tough exterior and dulled my witty barbs. It was a typical storyline for a “good” female leading lady character: she starts out hard and ends up soft and the metamorphosis from undesirable insect to awe-inspiring butterfly is reflected in the wardrobe.

My insecurity about my weight gain was unnecessary, as both the black studded leather and the cream silk organza fit me perfectly. I had gained weight before my first fitting, but thankfully, I had maintained since then. I felt enormous relief. I was still in control after all. Standing in front of the mirror, a leading lady in a movie, I made the decision that when I returned to Ally for the next season, instead of trying to fit into the off-the-rack sizes, Vera would have to make the wardrobe to fit me. After all, it was actresses taking over the models’ jobs of posing on magazine covers that required that actresses fit into the sample size that designers made for models. I wasn’t a nameless model expected to fit into any dress. I was an actress. And because I was a very skinny one, like a model, I just happened to be able to fit into any dress.

The hotel where I was staying during filming in Toronto, the Windsor Arms, was a chic boutique hotel with tasteful decor. It was home to all the transients, the U.S. actors who blow through Canada to work a job. The suite was a little dark because there was only one window and that was in the bedroom of the one-bedroom suite. A wall with a door separated the bedroom from the rest of the suite with its dark carpet and mahogany walls, and its black desk, gray sofa, and mahogany coffee table. The bedroom was all white and light because of the window. The light in there compelled me to spend all my time in the bedroom, which really just consisted of a bed, so I spent all my time in bed. I brought my life in two suitcases from Los Angeles to make my long stay comfortable during the five-week movie schedule. In one suitcase was my kitchen scale, ten I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter sprays, a large box of Splenda sachets, twenty cans of tuna, forty packets of oatmeal, Mrs. Dash, Extra chewing gum, a carton of Parliament Lights, and my digital bathroom scale. Although I hadn’t weighed myself recently and it was very heavy, I had to bring it because if I had the urge to check in with my weight, I couldn’t trust that the hotel would have an accurate scale. I also brought chopsticks, a can opener for the tuna, and my blue Chinese footed bowl with the fake pottery rings. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to make my frozen yogurt, so I brought my white and green bowl with the hairline crack in case I had access to a freezer and could find the sugar-free, low-calorie yogurt I ate back home. In the other suitcase were my workout clothes, jeans, and T-shirts and a dress for the mandatory “above the line” dinner. I’d always hated the mandatory dinner for a film production, whose guests ran from the top down to where the line was drawn (from the executive producers to the lowest-paid core cast) even when I wasn’t watching my weight. I hated having to talk to the producers because, as I was nearly always on the line, I felt like I could lose the job if I wasn’t as funny as the other cast members or if the light at the restaurant showed all my imperfections. I hated having to make the attempt to impress just to keep them from changing their minds and sending me home, replacing me with the prettier actress/girlfriend of the leading man, whose relaxed confidence was appealing and whose torso looked great from across the table. On location, I hated ever having to leave the hotel room. Alone in my hotel room was the only place I could relax. And I somehow always felt less lonely when I was completely alone.

I was scheduled to work only one day a week for five weeks, with the rest of my time for myself. So I decided to take up drinking. Apart from the glass of champagne on Christmas Day, I hadn’t drunk alcohol for a long time, and I missed it. Instead of eating dinner, I decided to use up my calories with a glass of wine. I felt like I deserved it. I earned it. I worked out hard and ate little, and so a glass of wine at night was a fitting reward. Apart from the wine, I really didn’t ingest calories. Because wine didn’t contain calorie information on the labels and not all wine had the same amount of calories, I limited myself to one glass a day. But because the calories were unquantifiable I didn’t really trust eating anything. Occasionally, if I were working that day, I would start my day with 30 calories of oatmeal with Splenda and butter spray, and maybe have a bite of tuna for lunch, but mostly, I would order pickles from the hotel kitchen and just have pickles and mustard for the day. It wasn’t terrific, but having wine was, so it was worth it just for the duration of filming.

“Cut. Back to one.” I stood on top of a rooftop building in downtown Toronto gasping for air. “One,” my starting position, was all the way down at the other end of the rooftop, and “action” was the cue to sprint from the other end to the front of the building, dive down on my knees, whip out a machine gun, and start shooting. As it was a comedy, the kickback from the machine gun knocked me over onto my back, where I had to wait a beat as the realization that I was in trouble set in, then in a panic hurl myself and my heavy machine gun off my back using my stomach muscles and struggle back onto my feet to make my escape. The rain made it harder. A fine and constant drizzle, not heavy enough to read through a camera lens, made the rooftop slick and dangerous and froze my fingers, destroyed my makeup and hair, and saturated my wardrobe.

Hour after hour of wide shots from the street, aerial shots from a crane, and coverage from the rooftop exhausted me, making it hard for me to keep running. But I had a bigger problem. My joints ached. My joints had occasionally hurt when I was back in LA, after exercise and at night when I lay in bed. But on that rooftop my wrists, knees, and elbows hurt so much it was hard to move them without feeling intense pain, and so I limited their movement to the action that took place within the space of time between “action” and “cut.” Any other time I would stand still, not even able to smoke because the motion of lifting the cigarette to my mouth was excruciating for my elbow. Even if I held the cigarette very close to my lips and turned my head to exhale the smoke, the pain in my elbow seemed to localize to the slightest movement. It seemed to scan my body anticipating where the next movement could be and settle there, ready and waiting to strike. The longer the wait between takes, the worse it got. As we started the action sequence in close-up coverage and gradually widened to include the whole building, making my body look like a black ant scurrying on a rooftop, my movements had to be bigger, more exaggerated. And as the camera was on a crane, by the end of the day, I was alone up there on the rooftop, wildly flailing about, without a PA or an umbrella, since there was nowhere for either assistant or umbrella to hide when the camera rolled. Every moment was agony.

I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t make it down a single step of the staircase after wrap had been called. My knees wouldn’t bend. They were stiff. The joke that I kept using to the concerned crew, who rushed onto the rooftop when it was clear for them to do so, was that it was so bloody cold I was frozen stiff. It wasn’t a funny joke, but I was in too much pain to care. I was taken to the elevator by two men who held me up, the weapons specialist on my left arm and the medic on my right, all the while I was telling them that their help wasn’t necessary, that I just needed to get into a warm bath. I don’t know why I refused to let the medic examine me. Maybe it was because his viselike grip on my elbow was more painful than walking on my own would’ve been. I just knew I didn’t want him to touch me, I didn’t want him to ask me questions, I just wanted to be alone. I knew that if I told him about my elbows and my wrists that he’d send me to a doctor, and I just wanted to finish the movie without any drama. I was already on the verge of making a scene and I didn’t want to do that, I just wanted to act out the scenes already scripted.

When I closed the door to my hotel room after the PA had walked me down the long corridor holding my arm (this time by the biceps), I cried. I cried out in pain and then I just quietly cried as a means to console myself. My gentle sobs seemed to say, “It hurts” and a silent tear falling replied, “I know, old thing. I know.” I turned the hot water faucet on to fill the tub and crawled into the bedroom to pour a glass of wine. Now that wine was my dinner, I bought my own bottles and hid them under the bed for fear that the mini-bar Nazis would take the corked bottle away even though I asked them to clear the mini-bar and didn’t allow them access to my room. I didn’t allow the housekeeping team into my room either. I was too afraid they would take away my chopsticks and my dishes by accident, or steal them. When I was on location shooting the movie Sirens, a toy mouse that I’d had since before my dad died was lost. I didn’t tell anyone that it was lost when the sheets were changed because I was too ashamed to admit to the concierge that I slept with stuffed toys. The housekeepers at this hotel weren’t allowed into my room unless I was there watching them. I couldn’t bear to lose my white and green dish with the flowers and the hairline crack. I’d already lost my mouse.

By the time I crawled back to the bathtub on three limbs, one hand holding the wineglass, the tub was full. I made another trip to get cigarettes and an ashtray and attempted to slowly remove my clothes. The joints in my fingers joined the cast of painful joints acting out in my body, needing attention and recognition for the important role they had thanklessly performed prior to this moment, and just unbuttoning my jeans was difficult. By the time I slid into the bathtub, the pain ravaged my body. It was like the hot water boiled the acidic fluid that lubricated my joints and the fluid seeped into my bloodstream, attacking the muscles and organs in its path. Everything hurt. I wept and wept. I was aware, however, that being in the bathtub in excruciating pain was the first time I hadn’t felt hungry all day. At least the whining, complaining pain in my gut that was like a five-year-old tugging at my shirtsleeve repeating, “I’m hungry,” had given over to the real pain in my body. At least I shut that little girl up.

I threw up the wine before I got into bed. I’d always been a bad bulimic but throwing up wine was the only thing that I found easy. Food was really difficult for me to throw up. I tended to give up after a certain point, never knowing if I got it all out. I felt bad about the whole process; the binge made me feel pathetic and out of control and the purging was the punishment. With every heave I hated myself more. I felt the blood vessels in my eyes burst and I knew that for days they would show everyone who cared to look at me that I was a pathetic loser, that I couldn’t control myself. But throwing up wine was different. For one, wine wasn’t a particularly nourishing thing to drink, and throwing it up is often better for your body than keeping it in. Also, throwing up alcohol is something that almost everyone has done at some point in their life; it wasn’t reserved for sick bulimic girls who didn’t have enough self-control over something as pathetic as food. Unlike food, at least alcohol is addictive. I threw up the wine because it was easy and because I was aware that asking my liver to break down alcohol when my body was obviously sick enough to cause me so much pain was destructive. I threw up the wine because I’d put my body through enough.

Throughout the night, as I lay in bed rereading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, I drank wine and threw it up. I worried that there would be traces of sugar from the wine that would cause me to ingest incidental, unaccounted-for calories, but I just said, “To hell with it!” I’d gotten so loose with the wine anyway. I felt completely out of control and crazy—but in a good way. My loosening up of calories was a healthy, good thing that would enable me to go out for a beer with the director, who I really liked. I could be social again. I just worked out a little harder in the hotel gym and stopped brushing my teeth with toothpaste. It wasn’t that I was crazy thinking that I could get fat from accidentally swallowing toothpaste; I was just ensuring that I cut out those incidental calories wherever I could. I ate less chewing gum and I didn’t use toothpaste. It was a compromise that worked for me. I really liked wine.

Five days later, we went on location overnight to an out-of-the-way part of town for the next day of filming. I felt a little better, was well rested, and even ate a little more as I realized food worked like Advil, and the more food I had, the less my joints ached. I went back up to 300 calories but kept my wine ritual. I had to finish eating food by 2:00 p.m. so I wouldn’t accidentally throw up tuna when I threw up my wine. The place where we went was so remote we had no choice but to stay at a spiritual retreat that didn’t serve wine or allow smoking. As I was given a tour of the log cabin they called a facility, I felt nervous and anxious like I was in rehab. I wondered briefly if the production company had sent me to rehab under the pretense of it being the only place close to the location. (Could they know about the wine?) The woman in a turban showed me the spa, which consisted of saunas and a coffin.

“Please let us know if you’d like to use the hyperthermic chamber.”

“It looks like a coffin. How does it work?”

“You lie down in the chamber for forty-five minutes and it removes the toxins in your body.”

The thought of being in a capsule for forty-five minutes was bad enough, but the fact that it removed all the toxins in your body gave me pause. My body was made up of toxins. I imagined the inside of my body covered in a spider web of toxins that held it all together. Toxins were the thread that bound my stomach to my intestines and the skin to the muscles. The webs in my body were the unabsorbable chemicals, the residue particles strung together from the artificial sweeteners, chemicals from the butter spray, and chemicals from the Jell-O, the alcohol, and the nicotine.

“If I removed all the toxins in my body, there’d be nothing left!” I knew the turban thought that was a joke, even though she didn’t think it funny enough to laugh.

I stared at the chamber that would in fact have become my coffin. I imagined a turbaned woman opening the lid and screaming as she looked at my remains. My body would be dehydrated and my blood extracted as the toxin-fighting machine, on a mission to remove every last toxin, couldn’t target the invasive toxins without removing all the fluid and the blood. My organs would be eaten up by the machine as it tore apart every last bit of tissue leaving behind a deflated sack of skin—and maybe my eyeballs.

28

I WOKE UP with my eyes closed as the dream I awoke from was so disturbing I tried to finish it for several minutes even after I was aware of being fully conscious. In the dream I had found myself standing naked in front of Tom Cruise, who was lying on a bed wearing a raincoat. I was naked and yet the reason for my being naked wasn’t completely obvious; the mood wasn’t sexual, it was friendly with nothing sinister implied. This bizarre scene took place in a big loft with concrete floors and a high ceiling, which I assumed to be one of his houses. It was the middle of the night, two or three o’clock maybe. The room was brightly lit like a department store or a supermarket, and the bed was in the middle of this enormous room. As I stood naked in front of him, I talked about being gay. I bared my soul in the same manner that I bared my body. I showed him all of me, inside and out. As I did so, instead of becoming lighter by unburdening myself from the secret that weighed me down, instead of losing weight, I became heavier. I felt burdened, heavy and dark, panicked that something dreadful was about to happen despite the kindness and acceptance he was showing me. After I talked for what seemed like hours, I began to make out shadowy figures in the walls that I thought were painted black. As the sun started to rise I could see that the walls behind his bed and to the side were not painted black. The “walls” were floor-to-ceiling windows. To my horror, I could see the silhouettes of what seemed like hundreds of people looking in, and I could see that I was in a street-level glass building in Times Square. I was on Good Morning America, and Tom Cruise was conducting an interview.

As I lay awake trying to trick my brain into thinking that I was asleep so I could make it end differently and take away the nervous, sick feeling that carried over from the dream into my reality, I realized that the sick feeling wasn’t only from dreaming about being tricked into exposing myself. The sick feeling was also from drinking and throwing up the bottle of wine I’d snuck into the no-alcohol retreat. (I’d stolen a corkscrew from the mini-bar in the hotel in Toronto and added it to my traveling case of tools and utensils.) I’d had a rough night. The pain in my joints increased to the point that I couldn’t find a position to sit or lie in to make myself comfortable, even briefly. I alternated between sitting, lying down, and walking in an attempt to relieve the pain, but the only thing that seemed to work at all was wine. So I kept drinking it. I had to keep drinking it, as its numbing effect seemed to wear off when I threw it up. But since forcing myself to throw it up gave me a splitting headache, I began to feel nauseous, and so the throwing-up part of the ritual became involuntary by the time I’d drunk my way down to the middle of the label. In between drinking and throwing up, I ran my wrists under the hot water in the bathroom sink, as the room didn’t have a bathtub and hot water seemed to help a little. I felt sorry for myself. I cried a lot. I thought about calling my mother, but I didn’t know what to say. I was in the middle of shooting my first big Hollywood movie. I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do. I knew that if I complained to her at all, she would respond in the same way she did when I cried to her about not being able to eat ordinary food with my family. If I were selfish enough to tell her how sad I was and how much pain I was in, I knew she would respond angrily because being angry was easier than being worried, and so she’d say, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. You wanted to be an actress.”

And I would say, “Yes, Mama. I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be a model, and I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be special, and I wanted people to think I was pretty. What I didn’t know was how hard it was going to be to be thin, to be considered pretty, and to be worthy of attention. I’ve had to work a little bit harder than I first thought, Mama. My journey was a little longer than most girls’. I was born with big legs and small eyes and a round face that’s only pretty from one angle.” Then I would tell her what I’ve always wanted to say to her but because we tend not to talk about heavy and emotional things, I’ve never been able to. “I don’t blame you, Mama. I blame Dad.”I blame you, Dad. I blame you for telling me that I was pretty. I blame you for dying before you had time to change your mind. Because of you I make up stories, have fantasy lives, fill in the missing words. You’re the blank. You’re the “Dear Mum and . . .” letter I had to make up because all the other children at camp had a dad and not a blank where a dad was missing. Being forced to write that letter was the first time I really knew you were missing. And it was a year after you died.April Fool’s Day is a bad day to die for a practical joker. I thought that because you winked only at me, I was the only one that got the joke. Remember when the Easter Bunny came and how you winked at me as you ate the carrot with his bunny teeth marks? We got the jokes, you and I. We were smart and we got the joke.

I didn’t sleep at all until morning. I’d seen the shadowy dawn become the light of day, which no doubt set the scene for my horrific dream that was hard to shake even after I opened my eyes.

As I carefully applied concealer to achieve the perfect no-makeup look before going to makeup, I thought about my subconscious and its lack of imagination. It seemed to me that as I became thinner, I became dumber, as even my subconscious failed to conjure up a decent metaphor. One part of the dream stuck with me, however, and that was my casting of Tom Cruise in the role of sneaky interrogator. My mother had always wanted me to marry Tom Cruise. Not just any famous actor, Tom Cruise in particular. He was the living image of the perfect movie star who seemed to separate his private life from his public life—a man of mystery, a private man. Choosing Tom Cruise as an example was perhaps another way of my mother reinforcing that there was a payoff to being private. “There’s a reason they call it a private life,” I’d often say to interviewers. But there’s a fine line between being private and being ashamed.

The day wasn’t just any day. It was DAY ELEVEN of filming. Day Eleven was a long bike ride to where the only known photograph of my character’s mother was buried in a box under a tree along with the money my character’s father had buried after he robbed the bank and before he was incarcerated. The bike ride began with a race for the treasure between a sweet, caring guy and an emotionally bankrupt girl, climaxed when she told him through her tears that she only wanted the picture of her mother, not the money, and ended with the two of them in love. It was a big day. And although I was prepared—I’d learned my lines and could comfortably fit into my wardrobe—I was not ready. I was in agony. And the day hadn’t even begun.

“Ride as fast as you can past camera. And go as close to camera as you can, too.” The director had to literally cut to the chase to make his day, a term used in movie making that meant that all the shots for all the scenes for that day had to be completed. Today he didn’t have a smile in his eyes; he wasn’t as full of jokes as usual. Directors can get very stressed about making their days.

“Yes, boss. No problem.”

I called the director “boss” because I liked Chris, but I also had no problem lying to him. Because riding the bike fast was a big problem. Nothing hurt my knees more than pushing down on the pedals, especially if I had to lift myself off the seat to get speed. After two takes of riding as fast as I could, I wondered whether or not I would make my day. My ankles, wrists, and elbows hurt almost as much as my knees. My lungs ached with every deep breath. I couldn’t believe how unfit I was considering how much I worked out. I’d continued my regular workout routine while in Toronto—an hour on the treadmill at 7.0, 105 sit-ups followed by 105 leg lifts—the only difference being that it wasn’t as fun. I no longer had to lose weight and so there was no motivation, no lower number on the scale to look forward to, only a higher number to dread. I had weighed myself that morning. I was 96 pounds and I was never going beneath it. I didn’t want to. But what scared me the most was how little I had to eat to avoid gaining the weight back. I ate 300 calories a day and I was just maintaining. I felt trapped, knowing that I would have to continue to be this extreme just to maintain the body I’d starved myself to achieve. It was a realization that was hard to digest.

The next scene was the crying scene. Ironically, I need to be in a happy mood in order to cry; I need to feel pretty self-confident and strong before I can pretend to be insecure and fragile. Usually, crying in a scene makes me feel good, as I get to show off my acting skills. But there was no joy in crying about the death of my father. It was too real, too close to me. I shut down with pain, both physical and emotional. Despite my condition, I managed to cry a little for the scene, but by the end of the day I was crying a lot. I didn’t even need to cry anymore, the scene was over; my character was completely over her father’s death and on to falling in love with Christian Slater. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t over my dad leaving me and I wasn’t falling in love with anyone. I couldn’t stop crying. It was like a flash flood. Its onset and its end were unpredictable and uncontrollable. It just happened, and like a flood, it was devastating.

I was in pain, so I cried. I couldn’t move my legs, my wrists, and my fingers, so I cried. I had to be carried into the makeup trailer, so I cried. I was embarrassed, so I cried. I had ruined my career, so I cried. I had ruined my enjoyment of life and wanted to die, so I cried.

I wanted to escape just like my dad had escaped, to fly away, to fade gently into black.

I sat stiffly in the makeup chair to have my makeup removed. It was the first time I’d ever allowed that to happen because I didn’t like the makeup artist to see all the flaws I’d concealed before she began her work concealing my flaws—before she made my skin color more even, my eyes bigger, my lips fuller. It was ironic to me that I allowed this end-of-day pampering ritual for the first time on the last day of my career. It was over. I was over.

The lights around the mirror began to bleed into my face. I couldn’t quite see my face for the white light around it. I saw two ugly black dots that were my pupils until I couldn’t see them anymore either. I felt myself floating away, fading into black. I knew I was passing out, but I could no longer hold on. The last thing I remembered was a hot towel being pressed onto my face. Then I let go.

Out of the blackness came a vision of myself as a little girl spinning around in a tiara and a pinkish-red tutu with a rhinestone-sequined bodice. I’m spinning around and around, doing pirouettes in a church hall. My mother is in the center of the first row. I use her as a spot by focusing only on her, turning my body first before whipping my head around and back to the spot that is my mother’s smiling face. With each piroutte, however, instead of being more impressed, she is less impressed. With each spot she is smiling less. The smile turns into a frown and the little girl is no longer wearing a tiara and a tutu but jeans and a black tank top. The little girl has spun into an adult and my mother is no longer there. I search for her in the front row, but she isn’t there. Instead I see myself. I realize that the person in the front row, disapproving of me, unhappy with me is not my mother. It’s me. I look disgusted by the image of myself. It is clear by the way my head is partially turned away, my face contorted in a grimace, that I hate myself. I pirouette again fast, to spin away from the image, too disturbing to look at any longer. But I keep spinning and gathering momentum, the centrifugal force won’t allow me to stop. I can’t stop. Now I can’t see anything. I am tumbling now. I have fallen off my axis. I’m spinning into the blackness. The spinning suddenly stops.

I have escaped.

29

“MISS DE Rossi? I have Dr. Andrews on the line.”

I sat in my dressing room on the set of Ally McBeal, lit a cigarette, and breathlessly awaited my test results. I had to get off the treadmill to answer the phone and both the treadmill and the fan I’d rigged to blow air onto my face were straining and noisily whirring. It was quite an effort to get to the phone quickly because sharp movements caused me to feel a lot of pain, sometimes to the point of almost blacking out. I could barely work out anymore, not only because of the pain but because I was too tired. I was tired because I was often too hungry to sleep. When I did sleep I dreamt about food. Last night I had a dream that I took a sip of regular Coke thinking it was diet and the shock of accidentally ingesting real sugar catapulted me back into consciousness. Most times, though, I dreamt about willingly stuffing my face. I dreamt about eating a whole pizza or plate full of French fries. I tended to feel so bad about it when I woke up, I cried. I sobbed as if I’d really done it—it just felt so jarring, so frightening. I thought that I had a problem because I was scared to eat. I was actually scared of food. I no longer trusted myself. I figured I’d lost my willpower.

I felt nervous. Not that I didn’t feel anxious all the time, but I felt even worse knowing that what came next was going to change everything.

I can’t stay thin. I just wasn’t built for it. I wasn’t born with thin legs and I can’t keep them. For over a year I’ve managed to maintain my weight, but if I keep up that maintenance to the exclusion of everything else, then I’ll have anorexia.

As I sat at the desk and held for the doctor (didn’t he call me?), I felt a roll of fat on my stomach. I pinched it with my thumb and forefinger. There was about an inch of fat that went right around to the sides, and yet at 98 pounds, I knew I was grossly underweight. I almost laughed out loud at the irony of it. My rib cage and my hip bones were jutting out, yet there was a roll of fat on my stomach taunting me, letting me know that it had outsmarted me, that it had won. It was ironic also that in order to get rid of that fat, I’d have to have had the energy to do crunches, but without putting caloric energy in my body I didn’t have the strength to do them, so now it would just stay there on my stomach in triumph, never to be challenged again. As I sat and waited to hear my results, I felt a little relief knowing that everything was about to change. I couldn’t imagine living year after year constantly battling in a fight you could never win. Anorexia is exhausting.

I will listen to what the doctor says and do what he tells me to do.

After collapsing in Toronto, I had no choice but to get help. I blacked out in the makeup chair and my private medical information seemed to be passed around and shared with anyone who cared to ask. My body was no longer under my control. I woke up to the medic taking my blood pressure and ordering blood tests. He called my physician, who called specialists and within days I had undergone a battery of tests. Blood tests, bone density tests; I had to show up with my body to whatever test it was he thought might contribute a puzzle piece to his diagnosis. I couldn’t argue. I was under contract and I could barely finish the movie.

But the movie ended two weeks ago and I was still being compliant with the doctors. One doctor turned into four, and so there always seemed to be someone to answer to. They had me cornered. I couldn’t escape them even if I wanted to.

But I don’t want to. I’m tired. I’m sad all the time, and I’m in pain. I want to give up.

“Hi, Portia?”

“Hi, Dr. Andrews.” I waited for some pleasantries to be exchanged but none were forthcoming.

“There are quite a few things I’m seeing from the test results.” He took a beat as if to ready himself before delivering a blow. It scared me. I knew there would be something wrong, but his hesitation sent a wave of fear through my body. The wave of adrenaline connected the pain from my ankles to my wrists, and my head began to spin. My head had been feeling like half of its regular weight even when it wasn’t spinning. Because of that, I often felt unbalanced. I took a drag of my cigarette. Maybe my head is spinning from the nicotine? I calmed myself.

There is no point in being nervous because I can’t affect the outcome. What’s done is done.

“Okay. Let’s start with your bone density. Uh . . . according to these results it shows that you have osteoporosis.”

“Ah . . . how long has it been since you’ve had your period?”

“A year or more.”

“Okay. Your liver enzymes were extremely elevated, which are actually at the levels of cirrhosis.”

“Okay. Your electrolyte and potassium levels are pretty dangerous. At this rate, they could effect how your organs are functioning.”

“Okay. I guess the most important thing that the tests showed is that you have an autoimmune disease called lupus.”

I exhaled the smoke in my lungs and extinguished my cigarette in one motion. I limply held the phone and sat staring into the full-length mirror opposite my desk. I saw a round face, thin arms, a bony rib cage, a thick waist, and big, thick legs. It was the same body I had always seen, only smaller. The proportions were the same. If y is exactly half of x, then 2:1 is the ratio of my body parts. My thighs would always be the same in relation to my waist and my arms—it was all the same, but in a smaller version.

Game over. I lose.

The whirring of the treadmill sounded like a vinyl record stuck on a track.

Get on the treadmill.

The bars either side of the belt looked like a cage.

Get on the treadmill.

I don’t know what to say to the voice that will shut it up. I’m dying and it still won’t be quiet.

“I have lupus! I’m sick!”

You’re fat.

“No I’m not!”

The voice was echoing, reverberating. The word fat was swirling through my head, sounding the alarms. But above the din of the drill sergeant and the alarms and the ticks of missed beats, a sense of peace overcome me.

I’m sick. I’ve successfully lowered the bar. I don’t have to be a straight-A student or be a movie star to be proud of myself. I just have to live.

I accept myself just as I am. I accept myself.

The voice stops. Apart from laughter coming from the hallway I can’t hear anything. It is deathly quiet in my head. And then I said something to the voice I have always wanted to say:

“Go to hell.”

EPILOGUE

I CAN’T EXPLAIN THE birds to you even if I tried. In the early morning, when the sun’s rays peek over the mountain and subtly light up the landscape in a glow that, if audible, would sound like a hum, the birds sing. They sing in a layered symphony, hundreds deep. You really can’t believe how beautiful it is. You hear bass notes from across the farm and soprano notes from the tree in front of you all at once, at varying volumes, like a massive choir that stretches across fifty acres of land. I love birds. But not as much as my wife loves them. My wife thinks about them whereas I only notice them once they call for attention. But she looks for them, builds fountains for them, and saves them after they crash into windows. I’ve seen her save many birds. She holds them gently in the palm of her hand, and she takes them to one of the fountains she’s built especially for them and holds their beaks up to the gentle trickle of water to let them drink, to wake them up from their dazed stupor. No matter how much time it takes, she doesn’t leave them until they recover. And they mostly always do.

The sound of the big barn doors opening prompts me to begin walking toward the stables. I clutch my coffee mug and walk in bare feet, wearing only my pajama pants and tank to say good morning to my horses.

As I arrive at the barn, Julio, who helps with the horses, is mucking out the stalls, an activity that I would help with were I wearing shoes. I love to muck out stalls.

“Hi, Julio.”

“Morning, Portia. Riding today?”

“Yep. A little later.”

I love riding horses. I love bathing them and grooming them. I love their strong, muscular bodies, their athleticism, and their kindness. I love the companionship and the trust a rider builds with her horse. I love everything about horses. Horses saved my life.

“Good morning, Mae.” The regal head of my big, beautiful Hanoverian horse pokes out from her stall. I wrap my arms around her neck and kiss her muzzle. I bought Mae in 2002 when I was recovering from my eating disorder. Learning how to ride her, learning her language, and being passionate about something other than my weight or looks shifted my focus away from my obsession with being thin long enough to let the doctors and the therapists do their work. I had found love in Mae. I had found a reason to get up in the morning.

“Ellen not up yet?” Ellen usually accompanies me in the mornings to the stables.

“Nah. I’m letting her sleep in.”

I crept out of the bedroom this morning and out of the cottage not even grabbing shoes or a sweatshirt as I was trying desperately not to wake her. Ellen works really hard and needs to rest when we’re at our farm on the weekends. She especially needed to sleep this morning as she was awake most of the night reading long after I fell asleep. She was awake most of the night reading this book.

After petting Mae, Archie, Femi, Monty, and Diego Garcia, I went back up to the cottage. As I opened the door to the porch I heard the voice that makes my heart the happiest to hear.

“Coff-ee!” Ellen calls out for coffee like a dying man calling out for water as he perishes in the desert. It always makes me laugh.

I walked into the bedroom, plop onto the bed, and wrap my arms around her.

“Baby,” she says sleepily, “you were crazy.”

“I know.”

“So sad. I feel like I was reading about a completely different person.”

“I feel like I was writing about a different person.”

“You were so sick. What happened to the lupus?”

“It was a misdiagnosis. I just needed to eat. And the cirrhosis and osteoporosis—all of it went away. I was lucky that I didn’t do serious damage.”

“You poor thing. I wish I could’ve been there to save you.”

“You did save me. You save me every single day.”

I kiss her and get up off the bed to make her coffee.

“I’m so proud of you, baby. It’ll help a lot of people.” As I pour the coffee, she suddenly appears at the doorway of the kitchen, her blond head poking around the door. “Just be sure and tell the people that you’re not crazy anymore.”

I didn’t decide to become anorexic. It snuck up on me disguised as a healthy diet, a professional attitude. Being as thin as possible was a way to make the job of being an actress easier by fitting into a sample size dress, by never worrying that I couldn’t zip up my wardrobe from episode to episode, day after day. Just as I didn’t decide to become anorexic, I didn’t decide to not be anorexic. I didn’t decide to become healthy. I decided not to die. I didn’t even care to live better than I’d been living, necessarily. I just knew at the moment of hearing my test results that I didn’t want to live as a sickly person who would slowly suffer and end up dead. The news that I had seemingly irreversible illnesses punctured my obsessive mind and rendered my weight-loss goals meaningless. I lost anorexia. It was too hard to hold on to. By the end I felt as though I was clinging on to anorexia in the same way you would cling to the rooftop of a building, your body dangling precariously over the other side, begging for release. Because it was more exhausting to hang on, and because I had a real reason for the first time in the form of lupus, I let go of dieting. I watched as my biggest accomplishment, my greatest source of self-worth, plummeted to the ground. I had climbed slowly, methodically, all the way to the top only to fall too fast to even see where I had been.

Anorexia was my first love. We met and were instantly attracted to each other. We spent every moment of the day together. Through its eyes, I saw the world differently. It taught me how to feel good about myself, how to improve myself, and how to think. Through it all, it never left my side. It was always there when everyone else had left, and as long as I didn’t ignore it, it never left me alone. Losing anorexia was painful—like losing your sense of purpose. I no longer knew what to do without it to consider. Whether the drill sergeant approved or disapproved was no longer a concern because he was no longer there. I let him go with the overwhelming feeling that continuing to fight for him was futile because he was too good for me; he was too perfect, too strict and demanding. Slowly, over several months, maybe even years, the feeling that I wasn’t good enough for him dissipated, and I gradually came to feel as though we were just a mismatch, he and I. We never should’ve been together in the first place. We were too different for each other, and we wanted different things from life. Knowing that, however, didn’t make it less painful. Without anorexia, I had nothing. Without it, I was nothing. I wasn’t even a failure; I simply felt like I didn’t exist.

I was diagnosed with lupus. I had osteoporosis and was showing signs of cirrhosis of the liver. My potassium and electrolyte balance were at critical levels, threatening the function of my organs. I no longer felt lazy, like I was giving up because it was too hard, I felt defeated. I felt as though I simply didn’t have a choice. I had to accept that the road I had chosen was the wrong road. It led to sickness and death. I had to allow the voices of the professionals into my closed mind. I had to try to take their road.

As I began the long journey on the road to recovery, there were a couple of detours that I wasn’t prepared for. Initially I had thought that once I began to gain back the weight, I would have the strong support base that I’d felt in Australia. I thought I would have loving, concerned people around me to ensure that I was getting healthy. But after I had gained an acceptable amount of weight and looked like a regular person, mostly everyone in my life assumed that the problem was solved. Almost instantly, I felt like no one was listening anymore, no one cared. It felt like caring was only necessary when my life was on the line. As I gained weight I was no longer something to worry about. I truly felt like a pubescent thirteen-year-old, ugly, voiceless; my cute days of being delightful were in the past, and my future accomplishments were too distant to elicit any kind of hope or joy. At that point, if I had still had the axe to grind, if I hadn’t got what I wanted from the disorder, some sense of acceptance of my sexuality, I would have relapsed. It would have been very easy for me to start losing weight again to get the attention and the concern that felt like love. It would have felt like a great accomplishment to not just do it once, but twice, proving to myself that I had the willpower I had always suspected was only fleeting.

Gaining weight is a critical time. The anorexic mind doesn’t just magically go away when weight is gained—it gets more active. Anorexia becomes bigger and stronger as it struggles to hold on, as it fights for its life. If I hadn’t seen my mother break down and accept me for being gay, I would’ve gotten right back on the path that made me rebel in the first place, because being anorexic did feel a little like rebellion. It felt like a passive-aggressive way of renouncing my mother’s control over me. It was definitely a statement that demanded “accept my sexuality or accept my death!” Being sick allows you to check out of life. Getting well again means you have to check back in. It is absolutely crucial that you are ready to check back into life because you feel as though something has changed from the time before you were sick. Whatever it was that made you feel insecure, less than, or pressured to live in a way that was uncomfortable to you has to change before you want to go back there and start life over. And with all the time it takes to have an eating disorder—literally the whole day is consumed by it, both mentally and physically—it’s important to find something other than your body image to be passionate about. You have to create a whole new life to check into, and the life I knew was waiting for me was a future relationship and the acceptance of it from my family. I had the key ingredient to want to check back in: I had hope.

For a straight-A student, a model, an actress on a hit TV show, the bar was set very high. I’m the one who set it. I thought that by accomplishing things that were exciting to people, I would receive their admiration and love. I thought that if I accomplished enough, that somehow I would be let off the hook in the future. Like I didn’t have to keep striving and achieving because I had done that already, and it would add up to being enough. Anorexia lowered the bar. Instead of having to be a high achiever to receive love, all I had to do was be alive. All I had to do for the caring, nurturing kind of love was lose another pound. All I had to do for acceptance of my sexuality was not eat. Of course, I didn’t think I was doing that at the time. I thought I was just trying to stay thin.

Recovery feels like shit. It didn’t feel like I was doing something good; it felt like I was giving up. It feels like having to learn how to walk all over again. I felt pathetic. I remember having so little self-esteem that I couldn’t talk loudly; I literally couldn’t make myself heard because I wanted to disappear. I didn’t want to be spoken to or looked at or acknowledged. When someone paid attention to me, I thought they were doing it out of sympathy, kindness, and so it felt condescending. All recovery meant to me was being fat. Unlike the case of an alcoholic or a drug addict, there are no immediate benefits to getting well. My joints might have stopped aching pretty quickly, but after that, I didn’t feel better, I felt worse. I experienced all kinds of physical changes that made me feel gross: my period returned, I had gas and was constipated. And then there was the fat that came back. It was truly awful for me. One week I felt lean and perfect, and the next week I was fat. Again. I felt like a failure. I hated every moment of it. I missed my bones so much. I cried at night because I couldn’t feel my hip bones and not having them to physically hold onto was like losing a dear friend.

Being anorexic was incredibly difficult. Eating, once I allowed myself to do it, was easy. Being diagnosed with lupus was like a pardon; it granted me the freedom to give up. It felt like an excuse to let go of starvation, and it allowed me to eat again. I could no longer starve or I’d die. Therefore, it was essential to eat. So I did. I ate everything in sight. I ate everything I had wanted to eat for a year but hadn’t allowed myself. I started by eating the healthy foods I’d missed: bran muffins, protein bars, granola, and smoothies. But very quickly the list began to include candy, cake, chocolate, and fried food. I felt that if I were going to give up, I might as well give up all the way. The floodgate had opened.

Just because I’d stopped starving didn’t mean I didn’t still have an eating disorder. My eating disorder felt the same to me. It took up the same space in my head, and driving around the city to find the perfect comfort foods took up as much time as driving around the city to find the tuna with the lowest sodium content. It was still there. It was the other side of the same coin. As it turned out, I wasn’t quite ready to rejoin life. I still wanted to disappear, and I chose to disappear behind layers of fat. I still felt unattractive to both sexes, still not really living, merely existing. I was still testing the theory of whether I would be loved and accepted for my mind, my kindness, for everything about me other than what I looked like. I went from one extreme to the other. I went from 82 pounds to 168 pounds in ten months.

At first, after starving for so long, it was difficult to begin eating again even though I knew I had to in order to regain my health. A component in breaking the cycle of starvation was medicine. When the bone-density results showed that I was osteoporotic, I was put on hormone replacement therapy in an attempt to strengthen my bones. I had also quit smoking after hearing the diagnosis and started on a psychotropic medication after having brain scans by a renowned neuropharmacologist, Dr. Hamlin Emory. The chemical changes in my body, and I think most importantly, the psychotropic drug quelling the obsessive behavior, helped me to eat again and gain weight.

At the time I walked through the doors of the Monte Nido Eating Disorder Treatment Center, I had gained 27 pounds. It was only four weeks after my diagnosis. I had gone from 98 pounds to 125 pounds in four weeks. Toward the end of my starving phase of my eating disorder, I knew that hovering under 100 pounds didn’t feel like my real weight. I was almost certain that the second I began to binge I would immediately catapult back to the weight I’d been before I started starving myself. I knew I would be 130 pounds within weeks. And I was.

I have never felt so ashamed as I did walking into an eating disorder clinic to be treated for anorexia at 125 pounds. I didn’t belong there. Even though my treatment was private due to the fact I was terrified that my shameful secret would become public, I was fearful that I might run into people who really had anorexia, who really deserved to be there. I struggled with the feeling of unworthiness throughout my entire treatment. Even though I was paying for it and driving almost daily to Malibu to seek treatment with Carolyn Costin, one of the most well respected and successful counselors in the country, I felt compelled to lie. Every single session I lied to her about my feelings, my eating habits, and my progress. I lied to her because I was embarrassed. I felt like I wasn’t worthy of her time when she had girls in her program who were fatally ill when I was so average in size.

I was being treated for anorexia, but due to the fact I was 125 pounds and at a healthy weight for my height, I thought there was no reason for me to be there. I thought that the psychological healing and my relationship to food were not worth talking about. Bulimia and overeating, abuse of laxatives and excessive exercising were not life-or-death illnesses in my mind, and I really didn’t share with Carolyn as much as I should have about my dalliances in all of those practices. Despite the fact I thought anything other than anorexia was a second-class eating disorder not worthy of attention, when I was being treated by Carolyn I was severely bulimic. I was grossly overeating. The pendulum had swung the other way, and I was sicker than I had ever been in my life.

Since ending my bout with starvation, I had become addicted to low-calorie, low-carb, weight-loss food. I especially liked low-calorie frozen yogurt and would drive around town all day to different yogurt stores in search of peanut butter—flavored yogurt as all the stores rotated their flavors almost daily. I would drive from east Hollywood to Santa Monica in a day on the search for peanut butter, eating the less tasty flavors along the way. I figured that if I drove all that way, I might as well sample the flavors they offered. I could’ve called ahead, but then that would leave me with unfilled hours in the day, and as my work on Ally McBeal only occupied two or three half days a week, I really didn’t know how to fill them.

There was a yogurt store at the Malibu mall and every day before my session with Carolyn, I would stop there. I would order the 12-ounce yogurt regardless of the flavor they were serving and eat it on the floor of the backseat of my car. I was terrified of being photographed eating in my car by paparazzi. Nothing seemed more piggish and gross to me than eating in your car, with the exception of being seen doing it. I had gained so much weight and was so worried that it was noticeable. I figured that all the press would need to do was to get a photograph of me eating to confirm that I had in fact gained a lot of weight. I couldn’t think of anything more shameful than my weight gain being obvious enough to talk about. And because the tabloids seemed very interested in my weight loss, I thought for sure they would be just as interested in my weight gain. In fact, during the months when I was at my highest weight, there was a lot of talk about my weight gain. A morning radio show, Kevin and Bean on KROQ, commented on the fact that I had “a face like a pie.” I distinctly remember this because I listened to them every morning. I remember this because it’s not something that you forget.

After eating the yogurt on the floor of the backseat of my car, I took the plastic bag I had asked for in order to carry the yogurt and I threw up into it. At 9 calories an ounce, it was 108 calories that could easily be eradicated. I would then throw the plastic bag into the trash can that I’d strategically parked very close to, and head to my session with Carolyn, feeling very worried that the whole scenario could have been captured on film as Malibu was a hot spot for paparazzi. Without hesitation, when Carolyn asked me if I had binged or purged since my last session, I would reply that no, I hadn’t. I hadn’t binged or purged or even thought about bingeing or purging. I would tell her how healthy I was and how great I was doing. I don’t know why, but it was very important to me to not appear sick to the only person that could help me get better. However, Carolyn had herself recovered from an eating disorder, and combined with her expertise and knowledge gained from treating hundreds of cases, she could see straight through the lies. There is a great deal of shame surrounding an eating disorder, with its abnormal practices and bizarre rituals, and so lying in treatment is common. My stories were only some of many she has had to decode.

My weight gain was horrific to me. I was bulimic again because I didn’t want to be fat. I didn’t want to be fat, but I couldn’t stop eating. I knew that I should work out again to combat the amount of food I put into my body, but because being fat caused me to be depressed, I didn’t have the energy. That’s the feeling of pulling away from anorexia. The anxiety of feeling fat turns into depression about being fat, and the lethargy and apathy that depression brings make it impossible to get off the sofa. I had found a passion in being thin. It nearly killed me. And while I hated being fat, my new passion was eating. Carolyn encouraged me to write down the amount of food I ate, and while I mostly lied to her, copying entries from the journals I used to keep for Suzanne, my nutritionist, I decided to send her this email. I had written this entry in November 2000 but only sent it to her in February 2001. It was one of the rare times I wrote down all that I ate in one day. It read:

Apple

Coffee x 2

Half wheat bagel

Whole sesame bagel

Banana

Bowl of pasta with sauce and cheese

Ritz crackers

4 mini-muffins

1 slice bread with tuna

Chocolate—4 mini

2 slices bread with peanut butter

2 cups dried fruit and nuts

bread—2 slices

bowl tortilla soup

half barbeque chicken sandwich

French fries

THREW UP

3 prunes (out of trash can)

mini-muffin

biscotti

coffee bean coffee (vanilla)

rice and beans

chicken taco

quesadilla

crepe and butter

large sugar cookie

ice-blended mocha

baby ruth

white choc crunch bar

pkt famous amos cookies

French vanilla coffee

THREW UP

4 boxes of (cal free) ricola

1 cup of tea with milk

YUP—THAT’LL ABOUT DO IT!!

Pxx (this was back in November)

Carolyn, knowing what I was doing to my body, went to work on my mind. Her therapy included not only discussions about my past, my sexuality, and the feelings I had surrounding food and weight, but we also talked about body image in the larger social sense. We talked about the image of the ideal woman in the form of models who were mostly unhealthy teenage girls. We talked about the idea that women in the postfeminist era, while supposedly strong and commanding and equal to men in every sense, looked weaker and smaller than ever before. We talked about how most women’s sense of self-esteem still largely rests on what they look like and how much they weigh despite their other accomplishments. Carolyn photocopied passages of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, and I read them. I remember lying on my bed, reading the badly photocopied text on the pages and saying out loud to no one but my dog, Bean, “Oh my God. I fell for it.” I remember feeling ashamed for calling myself a feminist when I had blatantly succumbed to the oppression of the mass media telling me what was beautiful, how to look, and what to weigh. It was a turning point. I had always prided myself on the fact that I was smart, analytical, and someone who didn’t “fall for it.” By starving myself into society’s beauty ideal, I had compromised my success, my independence, and my quality of life. Being overweight was really no different. It was just the “f— you” response to the same pressure. I was still responding to the pressure to comply to the fashion industry’s standards of beauty, just in the negative sense. I was still answering to their demands when really I shouldn’t have been listening to them at all. The images of stick-thin prepubescent girls never should have had power over me. I should’ve had my sights set on successful businesswomen and successful female artists, authors, and politicians to emulate. Instead I stupidly and pointlessly just wanted to be considered pretty. I squandered my brain and my talent to squeeze into a size 2 dress while my male counterparts went to work on making money, making policy, making a difference.

I was told that recovering from an eating disorder is hard and not very fun. But apart from honesty, the gift that Carolyn gave me was the knowledge that I would be recovered. Carolyn had herself recovered, and she told me that I wasn’t just going to have to learn to manage anorexia and bulimia like an alcoholic managing her drinking. Managing the disorder—thinking about food to any degree other than something nutritious and enjoyable—is, to me, the very definition of disordered eating. I didn’t just want to maintain my weight, suppress the urge to purge, and still have a list of foods that were “safe” to eat. I never wanted to think about food and weight ever again. For me, that’s the definition of recovered.

After only a few months, and despite Carolyn’s urging, I stopped treatment. I didn’t stop because I thought I no longer needed her counsel, but because I no longer wanted it. As I was learning that there were no “good” or “bad” foods, just bad eating practices, I listened not to Carolyn but to my eating disorder as it told me that it felt exposed and unsafe. If I stopped weighing my food and myself, like she suggested, its existence was threatened. My eating disorder and I had been together for my entire life, and at that moment, it was easier to continue down the unhealthy path than to pave a new one. In retrospect, had I continued my treatment at this critical point of recovery, I would’ve discovered that wellness and happiness were closer than I could’ve imagined. Instead, I resumed the cycle of starving, bingeing, purging, and grossly overeating. And I gained weight.

My weight, the thing that I was convinced was paramount to my success as an actress, wildly fluctuated as I played the character of Nelle Porter. I whittled down to a size 2 from a size 6 and then I became almost like a spectator, watching passively as my clothing size went back up from a 2 to a 4, a 4 to a 6. I watched as my biggest fear came to fruition. I was a size 8. I was the size the stylist for the L’Oréal TV commercial had announced to the executives; the size that told them they’d made a mistake in thinking that I was special enough to sell their hair products. I didn’t want to be a size 8. It was seeing that number sewn into the labels of my Theory skirts that made me resort to bulimia. But because I was afraid of lupus, mainly I just overate and cried. After reaching the dreaded size 8, I alternated between extreme anxiety about my weight and just giving up caring. Like a binge, I felt if I was going to do a bad thing, I might as well just keep doing it. Size 8 turned into size 10, then a size 12, and in one instance, a size 14. I was so upset and confused that I could ever be a size 14 that I unfairly accused my costume designer of buying a size 14 just to make me feel badly about myself. I lifted my jacket up to expose my bare midriff to a producer to make my case. I told the producer that I wasn’t as fat as my costume designer was making me out to be and it simply wasn’t fair that she was playing this psychological game with me. I will never forget the look on the producer’s face as I cornered her and showed her my stomach, passionately wailing about the size of my skirt and how the costume designer had brought it to me to make me feel insecure.

• • •

Within a very short time I weighed 168 pounds. More than hating myself, I simply had no sense of myself. It was like I was completely without ego for those months of being at my heaviest. I had reentered life, but it didn’t seem like my own life. It seemed like I was passively observing other people’s lives. I didn’t talk about myself. I was only interested in talking about other people. I had decided that I would very carefully make it known that I was gay to a few gay people around me. I figured that I had completely ruined my career by being fat, so I might as well be gay also. I figured that if I ever worked again, it would be as a “character” actress or playing the best friend to the lead female, so if my homosexuality was rumored around town, it wouldn’t really do any further damage to the image I’d already created for myself by being fat. On one very brave occasion I accompanied an acquaintance to a lesbian bar. I stood in the corner at a table facing away from the patrons. I was terrified of being recognized. With a push from my friend I went out onto the dance floor and asked an attractive girl for her phone number. She was attractive not only physically, but there was a sense of freedom about her. The complete opposite of me at the time, she appeared to be both carefree and grounded. We dated for about four months. While I was enjoying being in my first relationship with a woman, my bulimia intensified. I remember after a binge/purge session that lasted hours, she surprised me by dropping over. When she saw the red dots above my eyes and how ill I looked and sounded, she ran to the store to buy ingredients to make chicken soup. As I ate the soup she lovingly made, I felt ashamed. I hated that I had to lie and hide my secrets from my work and from my girlfriend. My paranoia and fear of being exposed—for having an eating disorder and for my sexuality—were excruciating.

There was good reason for my paranoia. A paparazzo had found out that I was gay and made it her mission to out me. She stalked me. She waited for me every day in front of my building and followed me everywhere, occasionally making eye contact with me and signing to me that she was watching me; that she knew who I was. I had been photographed by paparazzi before, even followed, but this felt like being a deer in a hunter’s scope. She and her driver were very aggressive and quite scary. The fear and paranoia led to my relationship’s demise as it was impossible for me to leave the house with my girlfriend without feeling intensely anxious and uncomfortable. Not only was I terrified of being exposed as gay, I was scared of being photographed because of what I looked like. I had gained 70 pounds since my last encounter with paparazzi when they were covering stories about anorexic actresses. I didn’t want to be in a magazine for being a fat actress.

I met Ellen in 2001 when I weighed 168 pounds. I don’t know if I was that weight exactly, but I was heavy enough that the thought that she might have found me attractive or that we could have been a couple never entered my mind. I remember being so excited and overjoyed to be around her that I can still recall the feeling of running after her backstage at a concert we were both attending for Rock the Vote. I caught up to her, sat next to her at a table, and bought her a drink. I remember what she wore: an orange knit sweater, white T-shirt, blue jeans, and white tennis shoes. I remember what we talked about and a joke she made as we were looking down at the mosh pit. I embarrassed myself by laughing too much and too loudly at that joke, but I simply couldn’t stop. I thought she was the most amazing person I’d ever met. She was highly intelligent, sharply observant, and funny. She was so beautiful it seemed that light emanated from her bright blue eyes. I had the best night of my life. I felt good about myself around her. I was excited and yet comfortable. At the end of the night, she invited me to come over to her house with the group of friends she’d met up with at the concert. I didn’t go. As we’d just met, I thought she was just inviting me to be polite, and I was too shy, too fat, and too insecure to go to her house with her friends. I felt that I had created the perfect memory of being around her that night and I didn’t want to ruin it. As it turns out, she had invited those people over only so she would have the excuse of a party to invite me to so she could get to know me better. She was attracted to me. She was attracted to me as a 168-pound woman with a face like a pie. The fact that she got stuck entertaining a whole bunch of people at her house that night because of me is still something we laugh about.

Despite the obvious chemistry at that show in March 2001, Ellen and I didn’t reconnect and become a couple until December 2004. Other than the fact that I was overweight, I was also closeted and private about my homosexuality, and so the thought of being with the most famous lesbian in the world didn’t cross my mind at that point. I continued working on Ally McBeal and taking small steps toward living my life as a gay woman. I had met some lesbians through the girl I’d briefly dated, and I spent time with them, observing them and trying to figure out what it meant to be gay. I soon discovered that I had to figure out what kind of lesbian I was going to be. It was obvious to me almost immediately that I was very different from most other girls. I didn’t really fit into either role of “butch” or “femme.” I liked wearing makeup and dresses and heels, but I also liked to wear engineer’s boots and black tank tops. In the first few months of my coming out to other lesbians, I realized that I was as much a misfit in the gay world as I was in society at large. I was half butch, half femme, neither here nor there. At that point in my life, I didn’t understand that playing roles in any relationship is false and will inevitably lead to the relationship’s collapse. No one can be any one thing all the time. There is a great deal of lying done while a role is being played in any relationship, homosexual or heterosexual. As I had tried to fit into the sample size clothing, I also tried to fit into a preconceived idea of what it meant to be gay. And any time I try to fit into a mold made by someone else, whether that means sample size clothing or a strict label of “butch” or “femme,” I lose myself.

I was a misfit in the lesbian world, I was closeted and scared that I would be outed in the media, so I reverted to being alone. I was still heavy, probably around 150, when 9/11 happened. 9/11 changed my life. I was so deeply disturbed by the realization that I could die without living my life openly and happily that I reached out to a friend who’d wanted me to meet a girl she knew and went on my first date with Francesca. We instantly began a serious and happy relationship that lasted three years. As 9/11 had jolted me into living my life more honestly and fully, my life improved greatly. Although I still struggled with self-acceptance, Francesca was loving and patient and taught me how to be in a relationship. I sold my apartment, and Francesca and I bought a beautiful house in Los Feliz.

When Ally McBeal ended, I landed a role in an innovative and exciting new show, Arrested Development. I decided to tell my producers and co-stars on Arrested Development that I was gay, as I felt that I couldn’t be in a serious relationship and hide it from the people I worked with. I felt that trying to do so was very disrespectful to Francesca, even though I was mostly terrified to introduce her as my girlfriend, especially to the show’s executive producers, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. I was truly afraid I could lose my job. But it suddenly seemed pointless to have a girlfriend if I was going to hide her from the rest of my life. Hiding her from the rest of the world was a different story, however.

The paparazzo who had begun stalking me around the time I was beginning to date accomplished her mission to out me when she got photographs of Francesca and me making up after an argument in an alley off Melrose. I had pulled Francesca into the alley after our conversation got a little heated because I didn’t want to make a scene and inadvertently out myself to the people walking by on the sidewalk who would surely recognize a couple having an argument. Instead, the photographs went around the world and outed me to everyone who stood in a supermarket checkout line. Because of these photos, I was forced to come out to my aunts and uncles and cousins in Australia before the tabloid hit the stands and hit them over the head with shock. The shock for me was the amount of love and acceptance I received from my extended family, especially my aunt Joan and uncle Stan.

I will be eternally grateful to that paparazzo who I had feared would ruin my life, since she forced me to be honest with my family about being gay. She freed me from a prison in which I had held myself captive my whole life. At my mother’s urging, however, I agreed to continue to keep the truth of my sexuality from my grandmother and so began a practice of removing all articles about me from my grandmother’s favorite tabloids, something that we continued doing for years. When I finally told my grandmother that I was gay, her reaction was truly amazing. I was back home in Australia to celebrate her hundredth birthday, about a year after Ellen and I had become a couple. My mother and I decided it would be my mother’s responsibility to tell Gran that I was gay, since she was going to have to deal with the aftermath if Gran was unhappy about it, which we were almost certain she would be. After Ellen came out on her television show in 1997, Gran stopped watching it, saying that Ellen was “disgusting.” My mother, having come to LA for a visit with Ellen and me, was supposed to show Gran pictures of the two of us together: our house and our animals—our life. My mother told me that Gran took the news calmly. But to everyone’s surprise, when I sat in front of Gran to yell my hello, she asked me in a yell if I was dating. I yelled at her, “Gran, I’m with Ellen.”

“Alan?”

“El-len.”

She looked horrified.

“Oh, Porshe. You’re not one of those!”

I turned to my mother, panicked. “I thought you showed her pictures and explained everything to her!” My mother swiveled on the sofa to face Gran and yelled, “Gran! I told you Portia was living with Ellen.”

“Yes,” she yelled back. “As roommates!” She looked perplexed and shook her head. “And all this time I was worried that that lesbian was hitting on my granddaughter!”

Gran closed her eyes for about twenty seconds. There was complete silence. I was holding my breath. It was the longest, quietest twenty seconds of my life.

“Well,” she said opening her eyes and holding her arms out for a hug, “I love you just the same.” We never talked about my sexuality again, only about how happy my life was with Ellen. From changing the channel in disgust to being Ellen’s biggest fan and watching her talk show every day, Gran showed me that people can change, including me, as I was certain that a woman born in 1907 in a small town in rural Australia would never be able to accept me. I had judged her and assumed that she would feel as though I had shamed the family. But I was wrong. In the nursing home where she spent her final few months before passing away at the age of 102, she kept a framed photo of our wedding for all the staff to see on the nightstand next to her bed. She was proud to call Ellen her granddaughter.

By the time I entered into my relationship with Ellen, I had recovered from my eating disorder. Living with Francesca forced me to deal with issues surrounding acceptance of my sexuality, and it also forced me to deal with my relationship to food. I shared a kitchen—and a bathroom. I couldn’t binge and purge without a lengthy and embarrassing discussion. I slowly stopped purging and just binged in my car or at work while she wasn’t there to see it. The rest of the time I would eat salads with no dressing. I was still fighting a heavier weight over the next two years, but what really became obvious to me was that I was doing something very wrong. I began to understand that every time I restricted my calorie intake, I would binge immediately after. Sometimes I could diet for a week or two without the bingeing and I would lose a few pounds, but then the binge would inevitably follow and I would gain all the weight back, and sometimes a couple of pounds more. I was always on a diet. I was either being “good” or being “bad,” but I was always on a diet—even when I was bingeing. I lived my life from day to day by weighing myself and measuring my success or failure solely on weight lost or gained—just as I had done from the time I was twelve. I’d measured my accomplishments and my self-worth on that scale for my entire life, with the same intensity and emotion, from 82 pounds all the way to 168. While I had begun to examine my behavior in treatment, I was forced to continue the self-examination when I was living with Francesca, because simply having to explain my actions to another person made me question them. I finally understood that by being on a perpetual diet, I had practiced a “disordered” form of eating my whole life. I restricted when I was hungry and in need of nutrition and binged when I was so grotesquely full I couldn’t be comfortable in any position but lying down. Diets that tell people what to eat or when to eat are the practices in between. And dieting, I discovered, was another form of disordered eating, just as anorexia and bulimia similarly disrupt the natural order of eating. “Ordered” eating is the practice of eating when you are hungry and ceasing to eat when your brain sends the signal that your stomach is full. “Ordered” eating is about eating for enjoyment, for health, and to sustain life. “Ordered” eating is not restricting certain kinds of foods because they are “bad.” Obsessing about what and when to eat is not normal, natural, and orderly. Thinking about food to the point of obsession and ignoring your body’s signals is a disorder.

Although I had learned about this from Carolyn, my understanding of how it worked was suspended due to my resistance to treatment. At the time of leaving Monte Nido, living without dieting sounded like a utopian philosophical ideal. That is, until I witnessed it at work with Francesca. A naturally thin woman who ate whatever she wanted and never gained or lost a pound was the most fascinating case study for this woman who had spent her life gaining and losing weight. I watched her eat pasta, candy, ice cream, and cheese. I watched her dip her bread in olive oil and wash it down with Coke—real Coke, not diet—while I ate dry salads with no dressing and sipped iced tea. I was dumbfounded that I was eating boring, dry, diet food and maintaining or gaining weight during the course of any given month when she never even thought about what she ate or how her body looked. I was equally amazed as I watched her order food at restaurants and only eat a small portion of her order because she was too full to finish it or skip breakfast or lunch because she got a little too busy and simply forgot to eat. After initially dismissing her eating habits as a result of her just being one of those lucky people who can eat whatever they want and stay thin, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe people who stay thin are the people who eat whatever they want.

I put this theory into practice after an incident between Francesca and me that was fraught with emotion and very revealing. I was sitting in the closet in our master suite crying because I couldn’t fit into a pair of pants that I had bought only a month before. They were size 6. I was in despair and when Francesca came to comfort me, I almost accused her of causing my weight gain, saying that she’d let me get fat again and that she didn’t care how I felt about myself or that my career depended on my ability to control my weight. After patiently hearing my wailing, she said something that I’ll never forget. She said:

“Fine. I’ll help you diet. But you’ll only gain it back.”

It was a simple statement, but the truth of it overwhelmed me. All I had done throughout my life was diet and gain the weight back. Therefore, the only conclusion I could make was that diets don’t work. Sitting on the floor of the closet with tears running down my face, I decided that my way wasn’t working, that it was time to try something else. From that day on, I decided that I would never diet again.

After that day, instead of watching her eat, I joined in. I ate whatever she ate. We cooked meals together and loaded pasta onto our plates. We ate ice cream. Because I knew I could eat pasta and ice cream again the very next day if I wanted to, I stopped wanting it in excess. If it were going to be available to me anytime, why eat like it was the last time I’d ever taste it? The fact that I stopped restricting food made it less appealing. The fact that I stopped labeling food as “good” and “bad” made me just see it all as food. Like Carolyn had told me, there was no bad food. There were just bad eating practices. I began eating every single thing I wanted when I wanted it, without guilt, without remorse, without feeling anything other than happy about the taste of the food I had chosen to eat. Initially, I gained a little weight. But over time, I found that I didn’t want to eat ice cream every day. Not because of fear of gaining weight, but because it was too cold, or too sweet for my taste buds after a salty pasta. I began tasting food and listening to my internal nutritionist as it told me that I truly wanted to eat a crispy, fresh salad rather than fries. When it told me that fries were what I was craving, it said, “Eat as many as you want knowing that you can always have them again tomorrow.” So I’d eat just a few until I was full, or I’d eat the whole damn serving until I couldn’t eat anything else on my plate. I stopped overeating. I stopped thinking about food. I ate exactly what I wanted, when I wanted it, without any feelings of guilt or being “good” or “bad.”

Within two months of that conversation in the closet, I was maintaining my weight easily at 130 pounds. I was one of those “lucky” people who could eat whatever they wanted and never gain weight. I stopped weighing myself. I simply didn’t care about weight anymore because it was always the same, always a comfortable, good weight for my body, and I stopped thinking about food because every single food item was available to me at any moment of the day. There was nothing left to think about.

As I listened to my internal nutritionist, I stopped wanting to eat meat, eggs, and dairy. This was something that carried over from childhood, as I never liked eating chicken breasts or steaks because I was worried about finding veins or fatty tissue. I also didn’t like eating processed meat, like chicken nuggets and ground beef, because I was worried that I’d get a mouthful of gristle. I definitely would never eat off a bone because the bones really reminded me of the fact that a living animal that had a heart and a mind and a family had been attached to those bones. I also hated the thought of ingesting the growth hormones that are given to so many animals in recent years to increase their weight and therefore their market value. And it disturbed me that I would drink a cow’s milk, which is designed to increase its calf’s weight to 400 pounds in as short a time as possible. I have always been a little squeamish at the thought of drinking another mammal’s milk. I find it odd that humans are the only species that not only drinks another species’s milk, but that we keep doing it as adults.

While I have never felt more healthy and energized, the most important thing that happened to me when I stopped eating animals was a sense of connectedness. When I was suffering with an eating disorder, my life was solely about me. I was living through my ego and didn’t care about life around me. I was selfish and angry, and because I didn’t care about myself, I also didn’t care about littering in the street or polluting the environment. My decision not to eat animals anymore was paramount to my growth as a spiritual person. It made me aware of greed and made me more sensitive to cruelty. It made me feel like I was contributing to making the world better and that I was connected to everything around me. I felt like I was part of the whole by respecting every living thing rather than using it and destroying it by living unconsciously. Healing comes from love. And loving every living thing in turn helps you love yourself.

While I was learning how to eat again (or perhaps for the first time), I cultivated new hobbies that had nothing to do with how I appeared to other people in terms of how I looked or professional accomplishment. My new hobbies required skill, focus, intelligence, and most important, honing and relying upon my own natural instincts. My brother owns a helicopter charter and training business called Los Angeles Helicopters, and I began taking flying lessons with his instructors. Although I didn’t get my private pilot’s license, I racked up forty hours of flying in a Robinson R22 and moved my focus from weight loss to learning this new and challenging skill. Driving to Long Beach, studying aeronautical physics and learning autorotations took up the time that driving around town to find yogurt had previously occupied.

My passion for riding horses was reignited after spending time with Francesca’s mother in England over the holidays. As a small child, I loved horses but after suffering a dislocated shoulder from slipping off a cantering horse, I stopped riding out of fear. Twenty years later, I found myself with the same enthusiasm and excitement for horses that I’d had when I was a child. Over that Christmas in England I would wake up at 6:00 a.m. and head down to the barn hoping to be able to watch Fran-cesca’s mother ride dressage and take a lesson on the Welsh cob she kept for interested visitors. When I returned to Los Angeles, I joined a hunter/jumper barn and within a few months bought a horse of my own.

To say that my first horse, Mae, saved my life isn’t an overstatement. Just being outdoors all day and breathing in fresh country air and noticing the beauty of the trees as I rode on meandering deer trails through the woods was enough to alter my consciousness, to respect nature and my place within it. The horse was like an extension of myself, a mirror showing me my underlying emotions that I’d become skilled at ignoring. When Mae was afraid, she was telling me that I was afraid. When she refused to jump a fence, she let me know that I was intimidated by the hurdles in my life. She’d speed up when I thought I was telling her to slow down, as she was responding to my internal anxiety not to my voice weakly saying “whoa.” Sometimes I couldn’t even get her to go. I’d squeeze her sides and she’d just know that I didn’t mean it. She’d know that I just wanted to stay still for a while.

• • •

Do I love myself just the way I am? Yes. (Well, I’m working on it!) But that doesn’t mean I love my body just the way it is. People who recover from eating disorders can’t be expected to have higher standards than the rest of society, most of whom would like to alter a body part or two. I’d still like thighs the size of my calves, but the difference is that I’m no longer willing to compromise my health to achieve that. I’m not even willing to compromise my happiness to achieve it, or for the thought of my thighs to take up valuable space in my mind. It’s just not that important. And while there are things I don’t like about the look of my body, I’m very grateful to it for what it does. I’m grateful that it doesn’t restrict me from doing my job the way I restricted it from doing its job. When I sit quietly and silently thank the universe for all the blessings in my life, I start with Ellen and end with my thighs. I thank my thighs for being strong and allowing me to walk my dogs around my neighborhood and ride my horses. I thank my body for not punishing me for what I put it through and for being a healthy vessel in which I get to experience this amazing world and the beautiful life I am living full of love.

I have recovered from anorexia and bulimia. I am immensely grateful that the disorders, although robbing me of living freely and happily for almost twenty years, aren’t continuing to rob me of health. Not everyone who has suffered from eating disorders has the same good fortune. The disorders have left me unscathed both physically and mentally. However, having anorexia has left me with an intense resistance to exercise. As well as being resistant to exercise, I have an intense resistance to counting calories. And reading labels on the backs of jars and cans. And weighing myself.

I hate the word exercise. I am allergic to gyms. But I don’t think that “formal” exercise in a gym is the only way to achieve a healthy, toned body. I have discovered that enjoyable daily activities that are easy, like walking, can be equally beneficial. I have noticed on my daily walk with my dogs that I rarely see an overweight person walking a dog, whereas I see many overweight people walking on treadmills in a gym. I attribute this not only to the frequency of having to walk your dog, but also the good feeling one has when doing something good for another being. Seeing my dogs’ excitement as I walk them around my neighborhood every day makes me happy, and when I’m happy I walk a little taller and a little more briskly. I can only imagine the enjoyment parents must experience when seeing the joy on their kids’ faces as they play tag football or shoot hoops with them. I also enjoy being outdoors. I like breathing the cold night air deeply into my lungs as I walk up the hills in my neighborhood and smelling the forest air as I walk on hiking trails after a morning rain. Another way for me to stay fit is to do activities where I can learn a skill, like horse riding or tennis or dancing. I find that if I can concentrate on getting better at something, rather than getting fitter or looking better, I accomplish all three things—the latter two being happy by-products of the original goal. Doing an activity to relax is also important for me. I swim to clear my head rather than count laps and burn calories. Swimming slowly is a form of meditation for me.

I have found ways to increase my heart rate, stretch my muscles, and breathe deeply every day in an enjoyable way that I would never label as exercise. I eat every kind of food that I like, moderating the portions using my appetite and not a calorie counter. I love fat and I love carbohydrates. Nothing fills you up and feels more satisfying than a mashed potato or pasta and olive oil. There are days when I eat a large bag of potato chips for lunch and I feel too full and greasy to eat anything else until dinner. It may not be the healthiest, most balanced day in a lifetime of days, but I more than likely won’t repeat it the following day.

To say that you can stay at your natural body weight and be healthy by eating what you want and not working out sounds extremely controversial, and yet people have lived this way for hundreds of years. It seems to me that it’s only since around 1970 that the concept of diet and exercise has existed in the way it does now, which is based on exertion and restriction being the key to weight loss, and yet since then, we have seen an increase in obesity in countries that have adopted it. (These are also the countries where the fast-food industry boomed during that time.) The diet industry is making a lot of money selling us fad diets, nonfat foods full of chemicals, gym memberships, and pills while we lose a little of our self-esteem every time we fail another diet or neglect to use the gym membership we could barely afford. Restriction generates yearning. You want what you can’t have. There are many ways to explain why the pendulum swing occurs and why restriction almost always leads to bingeing. I was forced to understand this in order to recover from a life-threatening disorder. And in a way, I wrote this memoir to help myself understand how I came to have an eating disorder and how I recovered from it. I really hope that my self-exploration can help not only people who are suffering from anorexia and bulimia, but also the perpetual dieters. You don’t have to be emaciated or vomiting to be suffering. All people who live their lives on a diet are suffering.

If you can accept your natural body weight—the weight that is easy for you to maintain, or your “set point”—and not force it to beneath your body’s natural, healthy weight, then you can live your life free of dieting, of restriction, of feeling guilty every time you eat a slice of your kid’s birthday cake. But the key is to accept your body just as it is. Just as I have had to learn to accept that I have thighs that are a little bigger than I’d like, you may have to accept that your arms are naturally a little thicker or your hips are a little wider. In other words, accept yourself. Love your body the way it is and feel grateful toward it. Most important, in order to find real happiness, you must learn to love yourself for the totality of who you are and not just what you look like.

I made the mistake of thinking that what I look like is more important than who I am—that what I weigh is more important than what I think or what I do. I was ashamed of being gay, and so I only heard the voices that said that being gay is shameful. As I changed, I no longer heard the condemning voices. When my relationship with Ellen became public, I was amazed by how well the news was received. I was still very scared, but I was also very much in love, and love outweighed the fear. I wanted to celebrate our love. I was so proud to call myself her girlfriend that whatever people might have thought about my sexuality wasn’t important anymore. I simply didn’t hear a single negative comment. I began to see myself as someone who can help others understand diversity rather than feeling like a social outcast. Ellen taught me to not care about other people’s opinions. She taught me to be truthful. She taught me to be free. I began to live my life in love and complete acceptance. For the first time I had truly accepted myself.

August 16, 2008

I walk out of the bedroom of the guest apartment where Kellen and Jen, Ellen’s and my stylists, have just finished tying the bows of my Lanvin pink ballet flats. The act of getting me into my wedding dress, a fairytale wedding dress designed for me by Zac Posen, is performed slowly and meticulously, with the gravity and respect all ancient rituals demand. My mother, dressed beautifully in a teal dress and jacket that we had bought together at Barneys just days before, is waiting excitedly to see her daughter in a wedding dress, a sight that she could have never imagined experiencing after learning that I was gay. When she sees me, she cries. She tells me that she is proud of me. She tells me that she loves me.

“I love you too, Mom. Now stop crying or you’ll start me crying. I can’t mess up my makeup.”

We never hold ourselves back now. We can get very emotional.

As Molly and Mark put their final touches on my makeup and hair, I recite my vows to my mother for a practice run. I can’t wait to tell Ellen how I feel about her in front of the people who are the closest to us and who support and love us, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, in fame or in obscurity. Among our assembled guests are Wayne Dyer, who is officiating the wedding, Sacha and her husband Matt, the partner she chose over me ten years prior in St. Barths, and my brother and his incredible second wife, Casey.

“This ring means that I choose to spend the rest of my life with you. I promise to love you in the nurturing and selfless way that you love me. I’ve changed so much since I’ve known you. Your love has given me the strength to be softer. You’ve taught me kindness and compassion. You make me better.”

I stop reciting and look at my mother. She is proud. She is calm. She is smiling at her healthy daughter who has found a deep profound love with another woman. And not just any woman, Ellen DeGeneres, the woman I used to use as an example of why my public outings with previous girlfriends were nothing to worry about. My mother would say to me, “Now you’re in a relationship people will find out that you’re gay!” And I would reply, “Relax, Ma. At least I’m not dating Ellen DeGeneres.” Ellen DeGeneres was the “worst-case scenario.” She would expose me as being gay. She would force me to live a truthful, honest life, to be exactly who I am with no pretense. I thank God for her every day.

I highly recommend inviting the worse-case scenario into your life. I met Ellen when I was 168 pounds and she loved me. She didn’t see that I was heavy; she only saw the person inside. My two greatest fears, being fat and being gay, when realized, led to my greatest joy. It’s ironic, really, when all I’ve ever wanted is to be loved for my true self, and yet I tried so hard to present myself as anything other than who I am. And I didn’t just one day wake up and be true to myself. Ellen saw a glimpse of my inner being from underneath the flesh and bone, reached in, and pulled me out. I continued reciting my vows to my mother although I was a little nervous about her reaction to what I was about to say. Although I was completely recovered before Ellen and I became a couple, I wanted to remind Ellen of my struggle for self-acceptance and to tell her that because she saw something in me that I hadn’t previously seen in myself, my perception of myself changed. She didn’t see an average girl, a mediocre girl from a middle-class family who had to win the race and change her name in order to be considered special. She saw a unique and special person. She saw a woman who was worthy of care.

“You treat me better than I’ve ever treated myself . . .”

As I had expected would happen, my mother interrupts. “But you’re all better now, aren’t you?” She is extremely concerned about the possibility of my relapsing into the dark and lonely world of an eating disorder.

I look at my reflection in the mirror and I like what I see. I’m not looking at a childhood fantasy of what I should look like on my wedding day or a bride in a wedding dress. I am looking at me. I contemplate the idea of being better and it brings to mind my favorite quote from Wayne Dyer, our friend and the man who is about to marry me to the woman of my dreams. “True nobility isn’t about being better than anyone else; it’s about being better than you used to be.”

“Yes, Ma. I am better.”

I am better than I used to be.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am so incredibly grateful to everyone who made Unbearable Lightness possible and who encouraged and supported me along the way.

Peter Borland

Alysha Bullock

Ann Catrina-Kligman

Carolyn Costin

Judith Curr

Ellen DeGeneres

Jonathan Safran Foer

Victor Fresco

Kathy Freston

Mike Hathaway

Judy Hoffland

Nancy Josephson

Alex Kohner

Jeanne Lee

Annick Muller

Harley Neuman

Paul Olsewski

Megan Pachon

Donna Pall

Craig Peralta

Gina Phillips

Sacha Plumbridge

Casey Rogers

Margaret Rogers

Michael Rogers

Patty Romanowski

Kali Sanders

Lisa Sciambra

Nick Simonds

Dana Sloan

Randee St. Nicholas

Megan Stone

Jennifer Rudolph Walsh

Oprah Winfrey

Kevin Yorn

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Prologue

Part One1234567891011121314

Part Two151617181920212223242526272829

Epilogue

Acknowledgments