"My income now is such that I'm never truly hungry, but I still never feel full unless I binge."
 | By Eleanor Barkhorn Editor at Large, Opinion |
I must have read "I Escaped Poverty, but Hunger Still Haunts Me," an Opinion essay by Bertrand Cooper, more than a dozen times since I started working on it back in July. And every time, I noticed a new element of it that's remarkable. |
The essay focuses on Cooper's childhood habit of bingeing on huge amounts of food. The binges were rare: Cooper grew up poor, and it was not often that lots of food was available to him. But when it was, he writes, he had "a single-minded determination to obliterate any sense of my own hunger." |
The first thing that struck me about the essay is how uncommon it is to read a man describing a disordered relationship with food. I've read many accounts by women about their complicated feelings about food but very few by men. Cooper's straightforward vulnerability is disarming. |
On further reads, the bone-dry funniness of the essay jumped out at me. The themes of this essay are not light — it talks frankly about poverty and mental illness and violence. And yet it has moments when I couldn't help but chuckle, including this one: "Not eating was so vital to my getting out of poverty that whenever I hear my middle- and upper-class peers talking about their inability to abide some new diet, for one or two callous moments, I think, 'There's someone who wouldn't have escaped.'" |
And then, as we approached the publication date, I started to appreciate the essay's abundance of incisive, sneakily profound sentences. When describing a Thanksgiving he spent with extended family, he writes, "I was awash in gratitude, happy to be with people who liked holidays and were willing to spend money they didn't have to celebrate them." Near the end: "Pleasure commits experiences to memory, and I spent 26 years without much of it to speak of, leaving me mostly with bad memories and blank space." |
Though my work as an editor on this essay is done, I expect that I will return to it as a reader many times in the future — it's that rich. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
Forward this newsletter to friends to share ideas and perspectives that will help inform their lives. They can sign up here. Do you have feedback? Email us at opiniontoday@nytimes.com. |
Contact us If you have questions about your Times account, delivery problems or other issues, visit our Help Page or contact The Times. |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment