Jenny Lauren, Homesick

Homesick

Jenny Lauren

Atria, Apr 2004, $24.00, 256 pp.

ISBN: 074345698

The author provides a harrowing insightful look from within of an individual suffering from the food disorder bulimia. When Jenny was ten she went to camp where she decided that she was too fat in comparison to her peers; she stopped eating until she was tossed from camp and her loving caring parents took her home. In ninth grade, Jenny, weighing under a hundred pounds, received advice on how to eat and lose weight: use ipecac. Over the next decade or so, she would continue her pattern of eating and puking until she wrecked her digestive system, something her doctors failed to understand.

Though gripping and incredibly discerning, this is not an easy biography to digest as the author literally punished her body to remain ultra unhealthily thin. Still, Ms. Lauren furbishes warning signs that frustrated and non-understanding family members often miss and the medical community ignores with the typical solution being the chemical fix. The scary part is that it is obvious that her family, especially her parents truly love and care for Jenny, but though highly educated, they rationalize her troubles. Difficult to continue reading about someone in real life destroying themselves (this reviewer almost shut down after 25 pages because the horror of self-flagellation is so graphically real yet tough to swallow), HOMESICK should be prime reading for doctors, students, and families who are in denial or rationalize away the food disorder.

Harriet Klausner