I don't look ahead in books for fear that my eyes will land on an important sentence that will ruin the experience leading up to said sentence. I just don't do it. My wife, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. She flips through the pages, not concerned with knowing what's coming in the journey.
Last night, as I read Portia de Rossi's biography, Unbearable Lightness, I turned the final pages to find pictures. There weren't very many, maybe three or four, but after reading about her struggles and suffering and then seeing it, right in front of me, proved too much.
My wife had already looked at the pictures. They came as no surprise to her.
I sat there, on the sofa, and tried to keep reading to my wife. I couldn't do it. The pictures were unbelievable. But the last picture. The last picture where her body said, "I am dying a slow and painful death," while her face said, "I'm having the time of my life!" sent me into a depressive tailspin.
I looked at my wife, cooking dinner in the kitchen, and tried to tell her that I might start crying, but my tears beat me to it. My wife soon joined in. We were both distressed by Ms. de Rossi's honest account on how she came to be knocking on death's door.
Ms. de Rossi's book was well written, candid; a cautionary tale of how food and weight fucks us up. But that's not what got me. It was the way she presented the material. It slowly unfolded, bided its time, shrugged its shoulders along the way. It eased me into her diet, her excercise routine, her craziness. She said anorexia snuck up on her and that's how I felt about how she wrote her story. It snuck up on me too.
Reading about her weighing 82 pounds and how she got there was shocking on it's own. But manageable. Once I saw the pictures, and my mind wrapped around what truly went on, I couldn't get a grip on myself. It was heartbreaking.
Thankfully, Ms. de Rossi is better now. But if I weren't at work, the tears could still easily fall down my face.
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