The last night I stayed at the Chelsea, I almost died in the bathroom of Krispy Kreme donuts. I love Krispy Kremes because you don’t have to chew them. You can just hold them a foot in front of your face and inhale. Your skin will be left with an oily residue, as if you have been up all night shaking and sweating from a drug with more rock ’n’ roll than one deep-fried in fat.

I had done a week of filming and I was frightened. I hated handling the guns. I was getting claustrophobia from a scene shot three days in a row inside a broom closet. Sean was so kind and patient that it made me long for a tyrannical director, a screamer, a pincher. He was trusting me to know what to do, when I had so little trust in myself. That day I had met my costar for the first time, more of whom later. Suffice to say that he was so pretty and so Zen that he made me feel like a big, confused oaf. Just looking at him put the idea in my head and I was back on the bulimia bandwagon, the red-knuckle ride that leaves my index finger flaming puce.

I ate three hot donuts, then went to the bathroom and, because I couldn’t lock it properly, had to do it as fast as I could. I stuck my fingers down my throat. I had, by then, developed a quasisexual method: if I thrust my fingers down my throat in short stabbing movements, I could make myself gag faster. The donut came out in heavy globs. I couldn’t breathe and I felt my eyes popping.

As I bent over the bowl at Krispy Kreme, I said a little prayer for Scott’s ex-wife. I hoped she was praying for me. My prayer stuttered to a halt in little clogs of blood. I didn’t understand at first. Chocolate looked like blood to me when it was coming out of my mouth. Twizzlers looked like blood. So when blood came up I thought it was chocolate. They used chocolate in place of blood for Psycho, I reasoned. You can get away with more in black and white.