Chapters (55)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Cast of Characters
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Part Two
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- A note on the Author
Finally I was working on a film that I could truly say fed my soul, and yet I couldn’t stop eating. When I wasn’t needed on the set, I would raid the snack table, then go to my trailer and throw up. I would ignore as many knocks on the door as I could reasonably get away with, and when I could ignore no more, I would answer the door with tousled hair, squinting my eyes as though woken from a nap. The Mormon director started to get nervous. I stopped throwing up just long enough to reassure him of my commitment to the project.
Under the Krispy Kreme lighting I saw that I had really nasty scars on my arms where I had cut myself the day I got to New York. My hair was growing in jagged where I’d hacked it off, and the ink in my flesh was starting to spread from the very first tattoo. And I couldn’t think of any other way to hurt myself so I ate too many donuts and called it pain. It’s funny. It was funny. Until I came to, choking on the bathroom floor.
I looked in the mirror. My eyes were popped, as if I had been strangled. I looked into the basin of the toilet as if a nice pair of shoes might have emerged with the puke. Or a job. Or a new direction in life. A better life. My new, better life in the toilet.
Often, I’d look at the swirling in the toilet bowl and see Freudian patterns, Jungian dreams, Rorschach tests: a butterfly, a cloud in the shape of Ireland. Other times, after red vines or cherry jam, I’d see a shark attack, the remnants when all is quiet. Pouring out of my mouth, I’d recall Robert Shaw spitting blood on a boat, his torso crushed by Jaws.
I sat on the bathroom floor and remembered that when my mother died and my father, cousins, and their respectful colleagues were in the sitting room crying in turn as a madrigal, I edged out of the room. I always wanted to be with the grown-ups. But not then. Not anymore.
I went to her room and lay in her bed. I wanted to smell her on the sheets, recall snuggleclub, when I’d press my little bottom into her tummy and she’d wrap her bangled arm around my waist. But all her bedroom smelled of was deep, deep sadness. The sadness formed a hand across my mouth, chloroform knocking me out as it had done her. I wonder about genetic predisposition to depression and mental illness. I think it happened to me because I crawled into her bed before she had left it. I could, in that moment, have stayed there forever.
