“Pancakes, ladies?” My mom glides into the room wearing a pristine red gingham apron I’ve never seen before, red short-shorts, and matching four-inch red stilettos, and holds out a giant stack of pancakes plated on a red ceramic platter. Shola and I grab a few from a red rubber spatula and as she pirouettes back out, my mom stage-whispers: “I swear I put on five pounds just from the smell.”

“Marie Claire profile,” I say to Shola before she can ask. Shola already knows that my mother is not the type to make pancakes on an ordinary Sunday morning because: carbs. Not to mention my mom doesn’t usually color-coordinate her clothing with our kitchen utensils. In fact, this might be the first time I’ve seen her play sexy homemaker, though she does bake a lot of holiday cookies in Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel. In those, though, she’s always forced to wear plaid and cutesy Santa hats.

Readers of women’s magazines would be devastated to learn that unlike her party line—“I love nothin’ more than a burger and fries”—originally coined in a string of McDonald’s commercials in which my mother smiles while digging into a Big Mac, the real way my mom keeps so thin is, spoiler alert, by the time-tested method of not eating, a fast metabolism, religious exercise, and, to leave no room for error, a frightening amount of self-shaming.

My mom spins and does Pilates and works out with a personal trainer named Raj, who she pays to yell in her face and to push her so hard she sometimes pukes. As she likes to say, Fans don’t want to know how the sausage is really made. The truth is that fans don’t want to know that the body they celebrate as beautiful may in fact be the product of a clinical disorder.

True story: Despite the fact that McDonald’s residuals, at least in part, paid for this house, I wasn’t allowed to step foot into one. Isla and I only went once I had my own driver’s license, a tiny act of rebellion and curiosity that ended up giving both of us diarrhea.

Perhaps my parents have taken too much care with our digestive systems.

“One of those ‘at home with Joy Fields’ things. Carrie came early to mix the batter, so all my mom had to do was ladle it onto the pan in front of the reporter,” I explain to Shola. Carrie is my mother’s assistant and one of the many magical people who keep our lives running smoothly.

“Your family is so weird,” Shola says with affection and a full mouth.