Book Review: Purge by Nicole Johns

2009 at 9pm     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Published April 2009 by Seal Press

I finished this book almost two weeks ago, and it has taken me that long to wrap my head around writing this review. Purge:Rehab Diaries is Nicole John’s multi-format memoir of living with and seeking treatment for an eating disorder. It is a story not wholly unfamiliar  to those of us who grew up with Prozac Nation, Girl, Interrupted, and Wasted, we members of the Reviving Ophelia generation, but it is told with honesty, raw vulnerability, and a not-at-all-glamorous level of ugly truth that makes it stand out from the rest.

In Purge, Johns presents not just her reflections on her struggle with Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS), characterized by binging, purging, overexercising, and restricting, but treatment notes from her doctors and therapists, documents from her rehab program, and diary entries she wrote when she was in the thick of it. She presents her story with painfully vivid descriptions because she feels that “the readers deserve to know the truth” and because she hopes to dispel myths about eating disorders that she feels have been perpetuated by other authors.She wants us to know that an eating disorder presents a lifelong battle, one that may not always seem worth fighting.

Eating disorders are a subtle suicide, and I am choosing to live.

I don’t want to say too much about the contents of this book because I feel like it is one of those things you really have to experience on your own. You have to read Johns’s words, allow her to draw you into her world and her distorted, anxious thoughts, and get into her head. You have to feel the hunger and the worry and the constant pain, fear, and disappointment. But don’t worry—she’s not going to make you conjure it up yourself. She puts you right into her shoes.

One impenetrable Midwestern night, you are desperate because you are trapped in your life. There is no way out, so you binge on and purge an entire tube of Pillsbury rolls (half-cooked—you are too impatient to wait for them to bake), an entire box of chocolate Malt-O-Meal, a pint of Godiva ice cream, and a mug of chai tea. Though you know that constant purging and starving leads to dehydration, you don’t rehydrate when you’re done.

In bed, you can’t sleep. Your heart is skitterting erratically. You wonder if you’re dying. Maybe you won’t wake up in the morning. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

If that is what one night with an eating disorder feels like—at least with Johns’s powers of description—I can hardly imagine how day-to-day life felt. It’s no wonder Johns felt “at war with [her] body” and “always hungry.” When she enters treatment, she contemplates the difficulty of making someone who has never had an eating disorder understand what the experience is like. A therapist asks her how she is feeling that day, and she responds that she feels “fat.” Though the therapist contends that “fat” is not an emotion, Johns makes a pretty strong case.

How do you explain to someone—who has never had an eating disorder—that fat is a feeling?

…’Fat’ is code for feeling scared, angry, ashamed, hurt, and sad all in on. It is code for I don’t want to talk about it; just leave me alone.

Knowing that her experience is not representative of all eating disorder sufferers, Johns also presents stories about her fellow patients and her interactions with them. She describes participating in a variety of therapeutic activities and working to assess and challenge her faulty thinking about her body image. She tells us that her parents will not allow her to tell anyone where she is—they’ve made up a cover story and are lying to her extended family—because they are ashamed and disappointed, and she reflects on the ways in which their lack of support compounds her struggle.

Purge is not an easy book to read, but once you get into it, it’s impossible to put down. I tore through it in just a few sittings, and I got the general idea, but I found myself going back to re-read sections and see exactly how Johns phrased things for several days following my initial reading. This book is almost deceptively simple in that respect—there is a lot more to it than there first appears to be, and that depth combined with Johns’s willingness to really lay it all out there make Purge a great and important read for anyone interested in women’s issues and eating disorders. 4 out of 5.

Visit Nicole Johns’s blog to learn more about her and Purge:Rehab Diaries.

Special thanks to Eva at Seal Press for sending me this book to review.