I can’t tell if I’m getting fat or not. It truly is becoming an obsession. I am going to be thin. I am destined to be thin. I amTHIN!!!I want to be so that people say, “Shit, I wish I could have a body like that.” They will if I get my act together.
…
I feel like a cow again. I gained two pounds. I still don’t like the direction. I’ve got to stop eating. I can’t help it though. (119 lbs. I want to be 110. Let’s see how fast I can do it.)
…
I’ve gained some weight back that I lost. But see, I don’t have a deadline to lose the weight like I did when the dance episode [Season 3, Episode 13] was coming up. I felt so much better then when my stomach was super flat.
I knew my anger toward myself, my self-denial of food, and my generally damaging relationship with it were all trauma-based. I had seen altogether too much at a young age, and any sense of control and safety was passing at best. Anorexia has been likened to a kind of OCD. When someone makes me feel out of control, I have to reassert that control, and anorexia lets me do that. (She is a bitch, though—she still sometimes sneaks her way in. But I now have the power to tell her to go fuck herself, too.) I’ve often said that if I could live in a Japaneseminkawith sliding doors, tatami mats, and maybe one bonsai tree, I’d be the happiest person alive. Like many traumatized people, I ache for control, and food is one place I’m able to achieve it.
The week before I turned eighteen, I wrote,
Wednesday, November 15, 1989, 11:07 p.m.
What can I say? Once again I feel fat. I think I’m getting a grip on why I do, so often. No guy = fat girl. A guy = skinny, happy girl. Go figure. Then work, hard work = skinny happy girl.
My diaries list almost endless problems with the men I picked to date. When I was seventeen, for a brief second, I hung out with Anthony Kiedis. I had gone to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers at this weird venue, a Masonic hall or somewhere just like that. I distinctly remember that we all sat on folding chairs, and there was carpet on the floor. At some point my friend told me that the lead singer wanted to say hi to me.
When Anthony found me, he had a top hat on.
“Why are you wearing a top hat?” I said.
“I want to go out with you,” he said. That’s not why he was wearing the top hat. He had ignored my question.
“Okay,” I said, realizing I probably wasn’t going to get an answer about the hat.
We planned a date to go to a farmer’s market—let me repeat that: Anthony Kiedis and I planned a date at a farmer’s market. That’s how punk rock we were.
Cut to: I’m sitting at a farmer’s market with Anthony and then my mom shows up to pick me up, buys herself a sandwich, and joins us.
My favorite thing that Antoine—that’s what we all called him—ever said to me was about how he sometimes avoided using deodorant.
“A horse will know me before they will know you,” he said.
I think it’s very important to be recognized by horses. Then Antoine dumped me, but right after he did so, he said, “Hey, could you do my laundry?”
And like a stupid fucking fan I did it.
My feeling has always been, “I’m going to fix you. I’m going to save you. I’m going to help you. I have the means to help you. I have the means to save you, and I have the means to fix you.” I loved the assholes and fuckups because they were interesting and different and musical and weird.
Many women find men they want to fix, counting on a serial hope that these men will become what we envisage for our lives. Sometimes it’s possible, but mostly, ladies, it ain’t. My universe always sent me beautifully fucked-up dudes in need of fixing. But maybe I was the one who needed fixing after all.
I was constantly in conflict with men who didn’t call me, who played games, who shifted their affections and ignored me. Partly this is because we were all so young, of course, but I also think I was fatally attracted to men who were troubled and selfish and self-centered. (This would come to be very true the older I got.) Andsomehow, I’d allied my self-worth and my disgust for my own body with the fluctuating attentions of young men who were unserious about relationships, if they thought about them at all.
What I desperately wanted wascontrol,and that control was often most fervently needed when I came up against cruel behavior.
A few years afterMarried…ended, I shot a movie in England, and someone in the production crew was so cruel to me, verbally abusing me, that I found myself controlling the situation by yet again severely limiting what went into my body. Most days I would have only soup for lunch. If there was one drop of oil in it, I would push it away, telling myself I couldn’t eat it. Some days I would have one bite—one bite!—of a banana, and nothing more. I even had a spin bike installed in my hotel room, and I’d spin all day long. Now, having a daughter and wanting so much for her, it kills me how I treated my young self.
I was down to maybe one hundred pounds, and one day I kept one of my best friends waiting while I did another forty-five minutes on the bike—she had traveled four hours across the UK to see me. When I finished my workout, she said to me, “You lookdisgusting.”
I hadn’t even looked in the mirror—I couldn’t bear to—so this was news to me. I remember sitting on the toilet that day and looking down at my stomach… only to find Ihadno stomach. All I could see were bones—rib bones, hip bones, bones bones bones. I used to joke back then that if my hip bones weren’t the first thing to enter a room, I was overweight.
Married… with Childrenwas the orphaned child of the Fox network—no one really paid attention to us. We were controversial, for sure,especially after the intervention of an anti-obscenity activist, Terry Rakolta, who single-handedly wrote letters to advertisers complaining about “blatant exploitation of women and sex and anti-family attitudes.” On the back of her one-woman crusade, we lost a bunch of advertisers—including McDonald’s and Procter & Gamble, the latter of which went as far as to say the show was a “negative portrayal of the American family.” I didn’t know what perfect American family they were talking about. With the controversy swirling, the show got moved from our original 8:30 p.m. slot to 9 p.m., post watershed. But our ratings continued to be solid, and within a year all the advertisers had returned. It’s probably worth noting that compared to today’s TV,Married…was incredibly tame, but we aired in Reagan’s America, replete with its rise of the religious right and tut-tutting from the Moral Majority.
I’d love to hear what Ms. Rakolta thinks of sitcoms these days, with their blow job jokes and backdoor fun.
Katey Sagal, who played my mom on the show, had the last laugh, of course. In an interview a couple of years ago she said, “We sent Terry Rakolta flowers every year. She tried to get us off the air and all it did was get us on the front page of theNew York Times.And it doubled our audience.”
