Kasha

Outwardly, Susan Burton had it all—a degree from Yale, a thriving career, a loving husband and kids. Inside, Susan waged a war on herself, using food as a way to exert control over the discomfort she felt in her own skin.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. When
I returned to Boulder, my body was different. A summer
metamorphosis was a familiar plot line in the y A
novels I had once read. Often the teenage girl character

(00:22):
transformed by growing breasts or by getting her period, something
that advanced her maturity. I felt I'd been forward to
even though I turned back the clock, I was no
longer menstruating. But if you had glimpsed me on the street,
then you would not have been startled or necessarily thought
that girl needs to eat. You might have thought, as

(00:43):
I did, then, that girl looks pretty. In my bathroom,
I took off my pajamas and wrapped myself in the towel.
Through my mother's bedroom door, I heard the fuzz of
the shower. I waited a few minutes for her to
be done. When I went into the master sweet she
was in her closet choosing clothes. Morning Edition was playing

(01:04):
through a clock radio. I entered her bathroom, hung my
towel on the bar across the shower door, and stood
naked on the scale. This was the white scale from Target.
I could go through all the scales we'd ever had.
The one with the big round dial that my grandparents
had sent the first digital scale we owned, where the

(01:25):
led readout was raised on a stick. Now Here I
was on a pebbly white surface at the beginning of
a new year, lighter than I'd ever been. Lighter. Everything
in that word air and joy and wonder. That's Susan Burton,
reading from her recent memoir Empty. Susan's is the story

(01:47):
of an addiction invisible on the surface to a substance
that can't be quit. Food. We just can't quit food.
But what happened when eating becomes so disordered that everything
about it consuming? Purging, starving withholding binging is a dangerous

(02:09):
and consuming obsession that takes over a life. This is
a story of hidden shame, distorted body image, perfectionism gone haywire,
and ultimately what it takes to heal. I'm Danny Shapiro,

(02:34):
and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. So described for me the
landscape of your childhood. I was from two places, and
that feeling of being from two places really defined my childhood.

(03:00):
I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up
in a suburb of that city called Aida. It was
a landscape of kind of roller coaster hills and farmland
that was now suburbia. I grew up in a you know,
gray house with black shutters, kind of picture perfect. My

(03:24):
mother decorated it with Laura Ashley, so there were you know,
Laura Ashley floral pleated lamp shades and balloon blinds. And
I moved when I was thirteen to Boulder, Colorado. My
parents got divorced, and my mother and sister and I
went west. My mother had romantic notions about the frontier,

(03:48):
and I sort of internalized that I didn't have any
real understanding of the history of the American West. But
I had my own amantic notions about the frontier too,
because I wanted to reinvent myself in this new place.
I've been sort of a nerdy middle schooler, and I
wanted to be um a popular girl in this place

(04:12):
where nobody knew me. So Boulder, you know, it was
a very different landscape than West Michigan. Boulder is where
the Great Plains explode into the rocky mountains. Essential skyline
of the city is a dramatic rock backdrop called the
flat Irons, and the white peaks of the Rockies are behind.

(04:34):
And it took a while for that landscape to feel
like home for years. Not for years, but maybe for
the first year it felt to me sort of like
a Hollywood backdrop. But I don't live in the West anymore,
and it's now a landscape that I longed for, the
feeling of being in that dry air under you know,
those enormous skies and that hot sun and you know

(04:56):
sort of the daily thunderstorms in the sun er. There's
a lot about the openness of the West that I
miss in both landscape and spirit. It's interesting that you
use the phrase like a Hollywood backdrop, because then this
sense of reinvention, for you know, self invention at the

(05:17):
age of thirteen, starts to take root when you're a
new kid in a new school, um starting a new chapter.
Oh absolutely yeah. I'd been a very kind of studious
middle schooler, and once I knew that I was going
to be in a new place where nobody knew my history,
I had this fantasy that I could be a girl

(05:40):
like the one in the pages of seventeen Maxine, which
I loved. But when I say I wanted to be
like a girl in seventeen, I wasn't really thinking about body.
It was more a question of personality for me. I
wanted to be like a bubbly girl with like a
side pony hail and a boyfriend, and I wanted to

(06:03):
wear leg warmers and tam PACs like I It was.
It was more of kind of a vibe I was after.
But I think what's important is that I wasn't okay
with who I was. I wasn't okay with showing my
real self and that there's something I have to hide,

(06:25):
and that I need to pretend to be somebody else
in order to have friends in order to connect, in
order to be okay. Could you describe both of your
parents for me. Yeah. We lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
because my father was the news director of a local

(06:45):
radio station called Wood and some my earliest memories are
of sitting at the kitchen table eating an English muffin
very early in the morning and hearing my father's voice
come out of the radio behind me. He quit that
job when I was six years old to write a
novel and then did sort of various I guess now

(07:08):
we would call them passion projects at home in the study.
For most of my childhood, my father was a very
handsome and charismatic figure. He'd gone to and Over and Yale,
both my parents had grown up in the Northeast, and
he was very funny. But he had a temper, he

(07:29):
had a darker side, and he had a tendency to isolate.
You know. I think I bring up those passion projects
in the study because my memories of my father are
very tied to him sort of retreating, retreating into the study.
In the basement, he had a dark room where he
developed photographs, and he had a room he called his
ham shack where he kept his ham radio equipment, and

(07:50):
he would go down to those spaces. There was a
real need to be alone, you know. He was somebody
I wanted to do well for, I wanted to please.
I feel very connected him. We share the same middle name,
and we share similar looks. My mother and my sister
are both dark haired and dark eyed, and my father
and I are both fair and blue eyed. And it

(08:12):
was just, you know, one one way that I always
felt very connected to him as a kid. I'm just
I'm thinking about your mother too, and not looking like
your mother. It's funny, you know when I say it,
it sounds slight, but it's It was the kind of
thing like I remember being a kid and being in
the checkout line at the grocery store with my mother
and you know, and a grocery store cashier saying, she

(08:33):
doesn't look like your daughter, which is so strange to me. Now,
if you were to see my like if my mother
and I were walking down the sidewalk, it would be
so clear we were mother and daughter. We have very
similar features, but I think the dark hair and kind
of the you know, white blonde hair of of a
young child maybe was so striking. So where my father
was sort of charismatic and could command a room, it
was literally a broadcaster, you know, holding a mic and

(08:55):
asking questions. My mother was shyre. She always had lots
of friends, but wasn't you know, it wasn't like she
was like throwing dinner party. She had close friends. Both
my parents were readers. My mother, more than anyone else
in my life, is the person who made me a
reader and a writer. I wouldn't say she was the
She wasn't the kind of mother who would for example,

(09:17):
sit down on the floor with me and play with
my dollhouse. Which she was a mother who understood how
potent and how wonderful it was to be a little
girl playing with the dollhouse. So she she granted me
a lot of like imaginative freedom and space. But they had,
you know, they had a troubled marriage, and my mother's

(09:39):
sort of acquiescence and passivity in their marriage, she sort
of exploded that hall. She ended up leaving my father
um when I was thirteen, and that's when we went
to Boulder. So many stories of family secrets originate in shame.
It is so often a shame that causes the islands

(10:00):
in which secrets fester and grow, making it impossible or
at least terrifying, to speak the truth of our inner lives.
One particular evening, when Susan is thirteen, she hears her
parents fighting, and she hears her father say something truly
horrible to her mother. He calls her disgusting. Susan internalizes

(10:23):
this word. In time, it becomes a weapon she turns
on herself. I was thirteen, I was in eighth grade.
I had a friend sleeping over and I remember waking
early in the morning and I heard my parents. You know,
people talk about their parents fighting. I sort of don't
think of my parents as fighting, and this sounds cruel,

(10:46):
but but I think of my father be rating my mother.
And that was essentially what was happening in their room
across the landing. And at one point I heard my
father say, you disgusted me, You're disgusting, And then I
heard him leave the room and walked down the stairs,
opened the door and closed the door and go running.
It was a frightening moment. I was thirteen years old.

(11:10):
Part of me was wondering about my friend. Was she asleep,
had she heard? But I really wondered what my father
found disgusting about my mother. And the answer that seemed
the realist to me in that moment. The answer my
you know, my head sort of offered up was that
he was disgusted by her body, and not just her

(11:33):
body in general, but in my mind, it was a
specific part of her body. He was disgusted by her stomach.
She was often talking about how she had a little
pot belly. There was a lot of focus among the
women in my family on stomachs, and reflecting on that,
now you know the specificity of that with which that

(11:56):
rose up for me at thirteen. I mean, my god,
was I not going to, you know, spend decades having
a seating disorder where I was focused on my stomach
like it was just it was all, it was all
right there for me already I assumed that was the
site of his disgust. Yeah, that's that's so interesting because
throughout your book you write about hip bones and the

(12:18):
different variations of emptiness and fullness, and the ideal in
the midst of your eating disorders being that when you're
not just lying down but actually standing up, your hip
bones like a ruler could be put across them, that
there would be no stomach, you know, kind of in
the way, which is actually something that I feel so

(12:44):
many young women contend with in varying degrees. And you know,
I think of eating disorders as like sort of being
on a slide rule in some way, or there's problematic
eating or not eating, and then there's a place where
a switch gets flipped and it becomes dangerous and pernicious.

(13:08):
I mean, can you talk about the first time that
that switch that flipped for you? Yeah, I mean I
think that you're, uh, the analogy of a slide rule
I think is really smart because um so, I'll mention
a couple like markers on the slide rule before I
get to the switch flip. But I mean, I think
one thing that's important to know is that I was

(13:30):
always a really kind of restricted eater as a kid,
and not in a way of limiting calories, although that
was there too. I went on my first diet when
I was nine, but I was scared of a lot
of food. I was the kid who at the birthday
party wouldn't eat pizza. Um. I didn't like soda. I
didn't like potato chips. I had a lot of fears

(13:51):
about tastes. I had a lot of fears that food
would make me sick. So there was something kind of
fraud for me with food early on. Another import and
thing that happened is that I got my period when
I was ten. Um So, this is in n and
not a lot of other girls had their periods at ten.
And not only did I have my period, but I had,

(14:11):
you know, everything that went along with it. I had
hips and breasts and waste. And I was profoundly destabilized
by this. I didn't feel at home in this new body.
I wanted my old body. And that feeling of wanting
my old body wasn't something I did something about right away,

(14:34):
but it was something that kind of haunted me throughout
my early adolescence. So when I was a sophomore in
high school, I was fifteen, I got a stomach bug
over Christmas break and I lost a couple of pounds,
And at Christmas dinner, I mentioned it to everyone at
the table. That was the kind of thing women in

(14:56):
my family mentioned to each other, you know, I lost
a couple of pounds, and my aunt said, you know,
it's just waterway, You'll mean it back, but um, I didn't.
And I found that I liked the feeling of being
just a little bit lighter. There was something about it
that felt like an unburdening. I liked the feeling of

(15:17):
my pants having a little more you know, air inside them,
if that makes sense. I liked the feeling of emptiness,
and I saw it more of that feeling that I craved.
And several months later I'd lost my period. I was intorexic,
and really quickly after that, the anorexia shifted into binge eating,

(15:42):
which is a really typical trajectory. Though I didn't know
this at the time, So that switch flipping happens for me,
you know, kind of fifteen going on sixteen, at the
very beginning of my junior year of high school. You know,
at one point you describe a paper that you read
in article in Psychological bulletin, and it describes binge eating

(16:07):
as a short term escape from an adversive awareness of self.
And that was like such a powerful phrase for me.
I think it could actually describe any number of addictions
at their root with well short term escape. First of all,
it's always a short term escape, you know, it's never

(16:30):
a long term escape um from an adversive awareness of self.
And you know what you've been describing with that sense
of the pot bellies of the women in your family
and the way that women would talk about their bodies
and your own sense of yourself getting your period at
the age of ten, is that adversive sense of self

(16:53):
that just I think like lights up all the switchboards mentally, psychologically, emotionally,
for you know, I need to turn this down and
find a way to not feel this or hear this noise.
Mm hmmm. Yeah, I'm so glad that that line, that
that sentence spoke to you because it's still to me
is among the best descriptions of what it is to binge,

(17:16):
and to some degree with anorexia too, although the quality
of not eating for me is slightly different than the
quality of eating too much. But I mean, the thing
with a binge is that as long as I was eating,
as long as my hand was on my way to
my mouth, as long as I was chewing something, I

(17:37):
didn't have to think about anything. There was only this.
I didn't have to think about any loss or pain
or longing. And even when it was over and there
was kind of a wave of self loathing that still
prevented me from thinking about anything else other than my
own disappointment in myself and the first of awareness that

(18:01):
I was trying to escape. Sure was certainly some of
it was about body, but but so much of it
was just about feelings of isolation or inadequacy or flawed
parts of myself that I didn't want to face, lack
of connection. A lot of this for me was happening
in high school and college, so you know, somebody hadn't
invited me to the party, or I wanted to be

(18:24):
close to someone who didn't want to be close to me,
or deeper things I didn't want to face, like my
parents divorce, things that were hard to look at about
my father. And then there's also your mother's drinking, which
runs throughout your teenage years, and then certainly your college

(18:46):
years becomes more serious as as you're starting to become
a late teen right mm hmmm. Susan's mom hides her
drinking and in a way become is a model of
how to have and maintain a hidden life. Susan's binge
eating is also very possible for her to maintain in

(19:07):
secret at this point. After all, she excels academically and
is admitted to Yale, but her binge eating takes on
a whole new level of intensity once she's away from
home and on her own for the first time. It
was so upsetting to me because I thought that being

(19:28):
out of my mother's house, being out of that kitchen
would fix it. That it was so you know, it
was just it was just habit, it was just setting,
it was just environment. And getting to Yale and finding
out very quickly that it wasn't was just devastating. I mean,
I would wake up in the morning, I would get
dressed in one of the you know, three elastic waist

(19:51):
skirts I had that that fit I would put on
my broken stocks because that was one thing that happened
in those years was I felt again that I could
not be myself and I felt I could not be
kind of a slender perfectionist I had once been because
I was no longer that girl, and I sort of

(20:12):
developed this new persona to accommodate my body. I embraced
being from Boulder. I smoked a lot of pot, which
I hated. I was. I'm one of the people. Uh
pot doesn't relax me, it just makes me paranoid. But
I was so you know, disconnected from who I was

(20:33):
in my own desires that I did it anyway because
I felt it matched the person I needed to be anyway.
So so I would, you know, get up, put in
my elastic waistkirt, my birkenstocks, go to the dining hall
resolving to you know, eat granola and soy milk. You
actually develop an alter ego, right, I mean she has
a name. Yes, Kasha Susan's alter ego's name is Kasha.

(21:01):
Susan is small, almost elphin, elegant, delicate. She's intense electric
as Kasha She wears birken stocks and a knee length skirt,
and she walks around campus dreamily, spooning ice cream into
her mouth. She is rubic and dazed, dreamy, an earth
mama who doesn't care about her size, doesn't even think

(21:24):
about it. So there's again this kind of attempt to
put on an identity, to create an identity. And you
actually you right at one point that Kasha could carry
the weight like you. Susan couldn't carry the weight, but
Kasha could, right, And you know, I wish, I wish
i'd know that Susan could carry the weight, and that

(21:47):
Susan needed to carry the weight. But I was hiding,
you know, I was hiding who I was, and I
was hiding the binging. And it was hard to hide
the midging. I mean, anybody who's been in a college
dorm situation, the feeling of never having a space to
myself was so strong in those early days. UM I

(22:07):
would kind of make my rounds of different food shops
on campus, and I would almost inevitably wind up on
the top floor of the stacks in the library with
kind of whatever. The tail end of the binge was
usually like a scone in a brown paper bag, and

(22:27):
then I would sit up at this little steady carol
beside this little arched window, and I would write. Writing
for me was a purgative act, kind of this ritual
purification that almost inevitably followed a binge. And I would
sit up there and I would read the two eating
disorder memoirs um that were in the library's collection. Then

(22:50):
it was, And there are many more eating disorder memoirs now,
but there were fewer than the librarhead too, and I
read them over and over again. I felt so isolated
and so alone, and I found real solace in these
other women's stories. You also described trying to research eating
disorders at a certain point in the library and the

(23:11):
books being constantly checked out. Yeah. I knew I couldn't
be the only one going through this, but it was
impossible for me to imagine telling someone, Although that's not
entirely true. As much as I fantasized about quitting, about
not binging anymore, I fantasized about telling UM. So I

(23:35):
was committed to secrecy, but I simultaneously wanted to tell
so badly. But I only wanted to tell once I
was over it. I had a very concrete fantasy actually
about what that would look like. Freshman year of college.
I would sit in my dorm room and my little
Macintosh um and I would write letters to best friend

(24:00):
cheva Um. But the letters were set in the future.
The letters were written from the me six months Hence,
I would be in Boulder for the summer and I
would write to my friend from this future me that
you know, I'd started attending this eating disorders group, and
then I would sort of lay out my story, lay

(24:21):
out what was going on for me. And I wanted
to tell because and eating disorder, like any addiction, it
leads to erratic behavior. It leads to guardedness, it leads
to hiding, that leads to deception, to you know, not
not telling the whole story. But I also desperately wanted

(24:41):
to be known and understood and close to people. But
it was it was too impossible to imagine telling until
I was over it. And then once I was over it,
the urge to tell went dormant for a long time.
We're going to take a quick a cure for a
word from our sponsor. There is such tension in Susan's

(25:11):
story between longing to be seen and known, but feeling
completely unable to share her deepest and most shameful secret.
We can't be known if we don't allow ourselves to
be open and vulnerable, but our secrets shut us down.
Susan has a very close friend in high school, Julie,

(25:32):
who she comes close to telling the truth, but she
stops herself. The two women lose touch for twenty years,
and then Susan sees Julie again at a reunion. She's
now thirty seven years old. Susan thinks of finally telling
Julie what she had been going through beginning in high school.
After all, now Susan has a loving family and a

(25:55):
thriving career, and all this happened so long ago, but
she's still in shame's guip. That was when I had
already started work on the book that became empty, on
the book that tells the story of these eating disorders.
But it was a very different book. It was meant

(26:17):
to be a book that intertwined a cultural history of
the teenage girl with the story of my own adolescence,
and at that point I had already written a draft
of it, and a lot of what had wound up
on the page was about binging, was about my eating disorders.
But I was too scared at that point to admit

(26:42):
that that was the book I wanted to write. So
I wasn't going to be able to sit across from jewels,
you know, with a glass of wine at a table
at our high school reunion and say any of this.
And I also wasn't ready to admit to myself that
this was kind of the story that I needed to
tell more than any other story. When did you have

(27:03):
the language for what you were going through? There's anorexia,
there's bulimia, which involves purging. At one point, you describe
something that I actually hadn't really considered before, which is
that excessive exercise, which is something that you engaged in,
is also a form of purging, the different kind of
purging than making oneself throw up. You know. It strikes

(27:27):
me and correct me if I'm wrong about this, But
it seems like there are places, almost like a Van diagram,
where eating disorders kind of meat and share certain characteristics
or become more subtle gradations as opposed to something being
you know, just clearly like in the d S M
four this is the diagnosis. It's a good question I mean,

(27:48):
growing up in the eighties inorexia and bulimia were the ones.
There were after school specials in first person essays about
those are the ones. I knew. Binge eating disorder. Yes,
it had a name. The researchers and psychologists were writing
about it in academic journals in the early nineties when
I was searching for information, But I don't think I

(28:09):
ever would have said I have binge eating disorder. I
knew the word binge because that was part of bolimia,
but I wouldn't have been able to say what I had.
I think I would have described it as it's bolimia,
but I don't throw up is probably the language I
would have used. I don't remember the first time I
saw the term binge eating disorder, but it was very

(28:32):
clear to me, you know, that that had absolutely described
my experience. My solution eventually to the binging was to
quit food, is how I put it in my head.
That was the way that I addressed it in my
early twenties, and I became pretty severely interorexic. And once

(28:52):
I got through that and started menstruating again, and you know,
went on to have healthy pregnancys and physically healthy adulthood.
I don't think I would have identified myself as anorexic.
It took me a really long time to get to therapy.
When I started therapy, I was forty five. I'm forty

(29:13):
six now. So I started therapy, you know, a little
over a year and a half ago, and it took
me a couple of months to look at my diagnosis code.
I just didn't want to know what it was. And
when I did, I saw it was anorexia. And my
first thought was, she doesn't understand. I had this impulse.
I wanted to take off all my clothes. I wanted

(29:33):
to show her like, I'm look at my body, I'm
not anorexic, which I now understand is first of all,
a part of the illness is not believing that you're
thin enough, that you're not intorexic enough. But also, you know,
even though I was underweight, I didn't look like the
emaciated kind of feeding to skeletal figure that one often

(29:58):
imagines when anorexia is a cooked anorexia is the diagnosis
is no longer tied to, you know, loss of a
certain percentage of body weight or cessation of the menstrual period. Um,
it's no longer as tied to size as it was
and instead describes like a more restrictive style of eating anyway.

(30:19):
So it's so it took me a long time to
embrace embrace the language. You can't quit food, and you
have to learn to make your peace with it, and
not only to make your piece with it, but hopefully
to find joy in it and delight in it and
nourishment and to learn to savor it. And I feel

(30:40):
like I'm finally at that place. I mean, for so long,
I just wanted to not be preoccupied by food or
distracted by food. Um, And now I finally moved to
the point where I want to love food. I you know,
I want to take pleasure and food as much attention
as there was in my family to you know, pot
bellies and the size of bodies. There was also a

(31:02):
ton of pleasure and meaning and food. My grandmother, the matriarch,
she was, she owned the first Queens and Art ever
made and had been subscribing to Gourmet since the second issue.
And she was just, you know, a fantastic cook. And
you know, I grew up with a mother who made
baked bread, so there was always a lot of beauty

(31:25):
and terror in food. And I feel like I'm at
the point in my recovery where I'm moving towards the
beauty part, which is a relief. Were you ever fearful
for your physical safety, for your well being? Were you
afraid ever that you were going to die? There was

(31:45):
a moment where one evening my freshman year of college,
I was up in the stacks and my regular study Carol,
And usually after a binge, my heart raced, but this
as a strange feeling where my heart felt like it
was slow. It felt like something was retarding it, like

(32:08):
something was in the way, preventing it from from beating
at its regular speed. Um, I'd eaten a lot. My
abdomen was extremely distended. I became scared that my stomach
was going to explode. And at the same time I
was having this thought, you know, I was telling myself
that's not something that human body could do. You would

(32:28):
throw up first. It's going to be okay, It's going
to be okay. But it's very frightened. And when I
went back to my room that night, and you know,
climbed into my top bunk in my dorm room, I
just prayed that in the morning I would wake still whole.
It is true that somebody can eat so much. I
don't think stomach explode is probably the exact thing that

(32:52):
can happen. I'm not, yeah, I'm not. I'm not a doctor,
but you know, it could compress, it could compress something,
or cut up circulation to your intestines. But that was
a singular incident. For me. I did often fear that
I was messing with my health. It's not good for
anybody to eat thousands of calories at once. My thousands

(33:14):
of calories. You know, people binge on different things, but
for me, it was sugar. It often felt like the
injection of a drug that the body isn't designed to process.
Like it like it. It felt bad. But but I
don't think I ever thought that I was going to die. Um,
except for that that one moment where I was scared.
I did think that I was, you know, driving my

(33:34):
life into the ground, and that I was not doing
good work or being a good person, or a good
friend or a good daughter, or you know, taking advantage
of the enormous privilege of Yale education. But that night
was the only night I ever really felt like I
might tip over into like real, real peril. I mean, anorexia,

(33:57):
you know is the far more perilous illness, and you
know has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder.
And I feel very lucky that I climbed out of
it before things got really bad. We'll be right back.

(34:26):
I keep thinking about the description of addiction from the
Psychological Bulletin. The language seems so apt, a short term
escape from an adversive awareness of self. But sometimes the
short term escape doesn't work, and when that happens, a
deep and terrible anxiety sets in in the form of

(34:47):
panic attacks. This happens to Susan halfway through her sophomore
year at Yale. A hallmark of panic attacks is that
the person suffering from them doesn't know what they are,
has no language for what's happening. Panic feels like a
bottomless chasm. It feels unsurvivable. One evening, when she's home,

(35:10):
it's so bad that Susan, at the age of nineteen,
crawls into bed with her mother. I've been experiencing panic attacks.
It was my sophomore year of college. I didn't know
what they were until I described them to a psychiatrist.
I've been I've been seeing on and off at the
Yale Child Study Center, and I felt so disconnected. I

(35:34):
mean as one does in a panic attack. I felt
so disconnected from my surroundings. I felt disconnected from my
own body. And you know, I think something that is
common among people who struggle with eating disorders or other
kinds of addictions is that one thing that is scary
about uncomfortable feelings, are uncomfortable emotions, is that you think

(35:57):
they're going to last forever. And that's one thing that
the substance does. It takes away that uncomfortable feeling that
you think is going to last forever. So panic attacks
were especially terrifying for me because I felt like this
was going to last forever. I was going to feel
disconnected from my surroundings forever. I was going to feel
like I was, you know, to use the phrase I
would have used then, going crazy forever. And one night,

(36:21):
lying in my bed, I just felt so lost and
so scared that, you know, I went down the hallway
to my mother's room. I was nineteen. I knocked on
her door. Um, I hadn't gone into a room for years.
She was drinking heavily in those years, and it was
something I didn't want to see, but I needed her
so badly that night, and I climbed into bed beside her,

(36:41):
and you know, there was something so comforting about being
beside my mother um in that moment, she was the
one who knew me first and best. And then the
next day she did something that I really appreciated at
the time. She gave me a book of essays by
Oliver Sacks. And you know, those essays were about people,

(37:04):
most of whom had some neurological injury, but who saw
the world in ways that were not typical. And I
just loved that she hadn't tried to say, oh, nothing's
wrong with you. By giving me this book of essays,
she had acknowledged that something might really be wrong, and
and also showed me that there could be beauty and

(37:27):
meaning in that and that that was a moment of
real reunion with my mother, with whom I had had
a contentious relationship with for the several years prior. Yeah,
I'm so glad you told that story. I think books
are also where we can so often find ourselves, especially
those of us who are grappling with secrets, because it's
impossible to share the secret but in a way it's

(37:49):
like you're sharing the secret with the book. Yeah, in
the same way as you were doing your freshman year
when you were reading the couple of eating disorder memoirs
that were in the you know, the Yale library right right.
I would wager that books saved Susan as much as
anything else, from the memoirs she read in the stacks

(38:12):
of the library to the copy of Oliver Sacks, to
her own book, the one she wrote in a blaze
of truth telling, the kind that takes no prisoners, least
of all oneself, the kind that sets us free. So often,
I think, possibly even especially with addiction memoirs as a genre,

(38:35):
there's a sense of having reached the you know, the
pinnacle of the mountain on the other side of recovery
and telling a story from there, and that always really
drives me crazy and also feels like hubris. There's a
moment near the end where you write, by writing this book,
I've moved not from illness to recovery, but from secrecy

(38:57):
to telling. I am in a liminal stage. This is
a vulnerable position to write from because I know there's
a lot I still can't see, and that really struck me, Susan,
because I feel like that's it's the truth. And in
a way, I felt like you had in mind the
person struggling who might pick up empty and see herself.

(39:25):
When I was struggling and found solace in other people's stories,
the sections I read and reread were always the parts
where they were struggling, over the parts where they recovered.
So these illnesses are so isolating, and I just needed
to know that, um, that I wasn't alone, and that
was more important to me in that moment than than

(39:47):
knowing that somebody had come out of it okay. And
as far as writing that for myself, I just felt
like I needed to write this book now, and I
just wanted to be as plain as possible about my
position as as a narrator. I keep on thinking about
shame and the silence that is the legacy of shame.

(40:11):
You went from being unable to tell even the people
who asked you direct questions to reaching a point where
you felt ownership of this experience such that you could
right this story, tell the story in great detail of

(40:32):
what it is that you've gone through, and what do
you think gave you the capacity to do this? At
this point, I mean, I think a couple of things.
So first, writing was always the way i'd um tried
to process this aspect of my experience, this this eating stuff, like,

(40:53):
writing was always my way of understanding it. So in
that sense, it was very organic. But as far as
it being a story that I felt like could be
a book that could be published, it was really my editor,
Hillary Redman, who encouraged me to do it. I signed

(41:14):
this a contract to write this book so long ago
that I went through three editors, and Hillary was my
third editor, And when she read the manuscript, which was
sort of a hybrid of the book I had been
contracted to write a cultural history of the teenage girl
and then the stuff about my eating disorders, she was like,
your this is the story. You need to tell the

(41:35):
story of your eating disorders. And I I still had
so much shame that I really needed somebody to give
me permission to say, I see you, I understand you,
this is what you need to tell. Do it. And
I think that until then I had felt I felt
like I couldn't admit that that was the story I

(41:56):
wanted to tell that I felt like a story about
an disorder. Somehow wasn't worthy, or that I needed to
apologize for wanting to tell it. So that was a
big step. But then, you know, writing, as you know,
like writing is a very solitary act, and the most
important thing that writing did was to get me to

(42:16):
start talking about it. I didn't start going to therapy
until I was done with the manuscript. I didn't tell
my husband, whom I've known since we were seventeen, we've
been dating since we were we've been together since we
were twenty. I didn't tell him about the binge eating
or about kind of the depth of what I struggled
with m during my adulthood until I was done with

(42:38):
the manuscript. So the manuscript was kind of the writing
was my gateway to talking. What has talking I felt
like because your husband seems and the way that you
describe him like a very adorn worrying and open and

(43:02):
wanting to know, really wanting to know you and questioning
at various points. You know, when you became too sin,
when you were in aorexic after um, after you stopped
being cheating, and yet you didn't tell. It's the difference
between telling, which is this intimacy, and being with oneself

(43:24):
on the page. What did it feel like when you
were finally able to do that? I mean, I was
so scared to tell him because if he had come
to me and said, you know, after years of knowing you,
I need to tell you this thing that I've never
told you before, I mean, I would have a whole

(43:46):
range of feelings. I might be hurt, I might be scared.
I hope I would also have compassion and sensitivity. But
I didn't know how he would react. And I remember
the night it was um one of my elder son
was at his first concert. He was at his first

(44:08):
rock concert, and our younger son was like in the
bathtub and he had the tub on really loud. So
I felt like there was privacy in space. And we
sat down at the table, the dinner table, and I
told him it wasn't a surprise to him that I
struggled with. I mean, obviously, like issues around control and
food and being too thin, like that stuff had totally

(44:31):
come up during our marriage. But the binging to me
was this deep secret that revealed, you know, that I
had so much shame about and that revealed me to be,
you know, somebody. I didn't want him to see me
as and and that night when I told him, you know,
I think initially he was confused. He didn't know what
binge eating was, and at that point I had very
little experience talking about it, and I felt sort of

(44:53):
inept and tripping over my words and speaking in half sentences.
And it wasn't until he read the manuscript that he understood.
And I will say, you know, it's going to sound
like a cliche, but it has been really transformative. Like
I said, we have known each other for so long,
but there is just this amazing new vulnerability and a

(45:16):
desire to tell him more and for him to say
more to me. I don't recommend keeping a secret from
your partner for decades, but in its wake, it feels
like a really special time for us. Now I feel
really fortunate about that. Family Secrets is an iHeart media production.

(45:50):
Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Michaluso is
the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special
thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have
a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a
voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.
Our number is one eight secret zero, that's secret and

(46:12):
then the number zero. You can also find us on
Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook dot com
slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Family Secrets Pot.

(46:42):
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.