... having been breathed out

At twenty, when she was a junior at Barnard College living at home in New York City—and just as liable to falling through the crust of the world as she is now [in 1973, at fifty-two]—Pat first wrote about thin ice:

"We live on the thin ice of unexplained phenomena. Suppose our food suddenly did not digest in our stomachs. Suppose it lay like a lump of dough inside us and poisoned us."

Food has disturbed her on and off since she was an adolescent. She wrote to her professor friend Alex Szogyi (he was also a food writer) that food was her bête noire—and she has come to attach many confusions to the act of eating. France, the culinary center of the Western world, means nothing to her: “I don’t even like the food,” she writes from Fontainebleu. She thinks America’s “Nixon” problem is gastric: “the USA [is] suffering a prolonged attack of acid stomach, an irrepressible urge to throw up.” She herself often has the urge to throw up. Her idea of an attractive name for a cookbook is “Desperate Measures.” For a long time now [in 1973], liquids have been her most important nourishment.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 1: How to Begin, Part 1)

At various points in her (thus far truly superb) Highsmith biography Schenkar calls Highsmith’s troubled relationship with food “anorexia,” but based on the above I question whether that term is really applicable. Caveat that I’m only sixty pages in and there may be information I’m missing (though I did search the index for relevant terms); but every definition of anorexia I’ve ever encountered has had at its forefront body image and an intense desire to avoid gaining weight, as in these opening paragraphs from the Mayo Clinic:

Anorexia (an-o-REK-see-uh) nervosa — often simply called anorexia — is an eating disorder characterized by an abnormally low body weight, intense fear of gaining weight and a distorted perception of body weight. People with anorexia place a high value on controlling their weight and shape, using extreme efforts that tend to significantly interfere with activities in their lives."

To prevent weight gain or to continue losing weight, people with anorexia usually severely restrict the amount of food they eat. They may control calorie intake by vomiting after eating or by misusing laxatives, diet aids, diuretics or enemas. They may also try to lose weight by exercising excessively.

But what Schenkar is describing above isn’t motivated by weight loss or distorted body image. Rather, it’s the result of a kind of visceral repulsion, and a physical difficulty around the act of consuming food that verges on body horror. This distaste/disgust for food and the act of eating, which both Highsmith and Schenkar describe; this tendency to dwell on the possibility of the body rejecting what we put in it, and on the disturbingly “thin ice” separating nourishment from poison (ironically, Highsmith’s food aversion factored into her turning more and more to actually poisoning herself by replacing food with alcohol); this tendency to overthink the mechanics of eating and digestion until they become revolting; and the semi-panicked sense that one must sometimes resort of “Desperate Measures” in order to consume calories—none of that seems to me to hinge on weight control. From what I’ve read thus far, Highsmith definitely didn’t exercise excessively, unless you mean doing the underpants Charleston with a wide variety of women; and controlling her body shape doesn’t seem to have been a major consideration (and this was a woman who meticulously catalogued her every malady and self-criticism in over 8,000 pages of notebooks and diaries—you’d think we’d know). I mean I get why the word “anorexia” leaps to mind, since I don’t know a better one; but it also seems, in some fundamental way, inaccurate. Highsmith seems to have struggled to eat, rather than struggled not to eat; maybe that’s the real distinction I’m drawing here.

I suppose I would be dishonest not to mention that the Schenkar quote above is one of the most accurate descriptions I’ve ever read of my own difficulties with food.