On Bingeing, On Books

In a previous life, my job was to help people get normal with food — not so much the planning and preparing of it, but how to make peace with it. How to coexist with it. How to be one of those mysterious people who can have cookies in the cupboard but forget they’re there.

I’ve got degrees ‘n stuff, but here is how I really learned how to do this:

When I got out of the Army I stayed in Germany. At the time, the only goal I could articulate for my post-military self was that I needed to get “normal” with food. Soldiers are almost all disordered eaters, FYI. I tried to get better about eating regular meals; I promised myself I could eat what I liked, and as much of it as I wanted. To be fair to the Army, much of who I am & what I feel worthy of goes back to being food insecure as a kid.

I watched the Europeans around me, and sometimes they watched me.

Standing at the counter of a famous chocolate shop in Brussels: I am sampling various truffles, ostensibly to decide which I want to purchase. Actually, I am shoveling them into my undiscerning pie-hole while the chocolatier himself watches in barely concealed horror. His family has crafted these beautiful confections for over three hundred years in that same shop, and he has to feign neutrality as he confronts the blatant disrespect with which I scarf the fruits of his labor. Americans, his expression seems to say. Gobble gobble gobble.

I did eventually buy the chocolate, probably more than was polite. I hope I remembered to be exuberant in my appreciation of what his family had achieved. I’m pretty sure I didn’t take the truffles home and show them any reverence. I couldn’t slow myself then — the permission to eat after so many years of restriction was too new, too exhilarating. I’ve gotten infinitely better at this over the years.

But the look on the chocolatier’s face was a transferable lesson. I think about it often as I read — how the authors have labored over each word, each sentence, each plot point that scallops toward a perfectly crafted and complete story. For too many years after graduate school, when I finally had time to read what and as much as I wanted again, I raced through books. I read too much, and much too fast. Often I was left with residual love for a book but no clear memory of what, exactly, I thought was so great about it.

Reading a good book, like enjoying bijou truffles, deserves a measure of attentiveness. Any kind of book can be good; any kind of food you like is fine — there are no book snobs, no food cops, in this article.

So this is my year to re-read. To go back to the books I say I loved but didn’t give my full attention to, the first time I read them. To savor sentences, and marvel over apt turns of phrase. I set my Goodreads Challenge lower this year to relieve the pressure to whip through big piles of TBR.

I need to get normal with books.