Jackie Morse Kessler - Hunger

There really was a Lisa. Different name, though. Different everything, really.

For a short time, Lisa and I had been very good friends. She was like a sister to me. She was funny and charming and smart. And one summer, she told me about her eating disorder. Lisa was bulimic. And soon, I was too.

For me, bulimia was short lived. It was the better part of one year. All the while I was binging and purging (self-induced vomiting for me; I never did laxatives or overexercised), I knew what I was doing was bad for me, but I did it anyway. I even saw a therapist. I didn't tell her I was bulimic; I told her other things, though. And at the end of the session, she said to me, "I really don't know why you're here." I never went back; I figured that if she couldn't see there was something wrong with me, she wasn't worth my time.

I don't remember when I decided my relationship with bulimia had to stopmaybe it was when my dad almost caught me vomiting upstairs. But the day came when I approached my folks and told them flat out that I was bulimic, and I knew it was bad, and I was stopping. I told them all my tricks so they'd know if I was going back to bad habits. I got lucky. I was able to stop.

Since then, the only time I've purged was when a boyfriend broke up with me a few years later. I ate a carton of ice cream, then made myself puke. (The boyfriend is just a memory now, as is the bulimia.)

Lisa and I got into a huge fight. We stopped being friends.

She's dead now. I found out about her death many years later, and it felt as if I'd been kicked in the gut.

I regret a lot of things. I regret how I didn't give Lisa a second chance when she reached out to me, years after our huge fight, asking if we could be friends again. I regret falling into dangerous habits with her in the first place. I regret the damage I did to myself, physically and emotionally.

But I don't regret our friendship.

The Lisabeth in Hunger isn't the Lisa from my life. But I'd like to think that Lisa's spirit would be tickled over having a book in which shehowever looselyis the heroine.

I miss you, Lisa. And I'm sorry.

***

There have been other stories in which an anorexic person became Famine. One of them I wrote years agoa short story, also called "Hunger," published by the online magazine Byzarium. (It was a very different story than this book, but it certainly hit on some similar themes.) Another was from Marvel Comics. (Yes, I am a comic-book geek. Excelsior!) In X-Factor, an anorexic girl named Autumna mutant with the power to destroy foodwas tapped by a bad guy to become Famine (not the Famineno black horse for her). She and three other horsemen rode their mechanical steeds and wore bright costumes and wreaked havoc. Kapow! The good guys stopped them, of course.

I'd forgotten about Autumn, but I'm sure the notion of an anorexic teen becoming Famine started right there, when I was reading comic books. So thank you, Marvel Comics, for the spark. And thanks also to my dad, who got me into reading comic books in the first place.

***

Eating disorders aren't glamorous. Yes, there are a boatload of thin (and too thin) celebrities out there, on magazine covers, on television, in movies. That doesn't change anything. Eating disorders ruin lives. And they sure aren't something people can just turn on and off. Eating disorders are a disease.

Eating disorders suck.

If you have an eating disorderwhether you starve yourself or you make yourself purge or you exercise until you can't walk or you eat and eat and eatknow this: you are not alone.

And you can get help.

The National Eating Disorders Association (www.nationaleatingdisorders.org) is a nonprofit organization. NEDA provides support, both to those suffering with eating disorders and their families. NEDA helps teach people about prevention and cures. And NEDA can help people find quality care. You can call NEDA toll free and confidentially at 1-800-931-2237.

A portion of the proceeds from Hunger will be donated to NEDA. So if you bought this book, thank you for helping others.

So many people had a hand in bringing Hunger to life, and I am grateful to all of them.

Many thanks to Julie Tibbott, my phenomenal editor, who believed in this book from the start, and to the entire Houghton Mifflin Harcourt team. A huge thanks to my amazing critique partner, Heather Brewer, who is just as wild about Death as I am (and I have the statue to prove it!), and to Renee Barr, who has read everything I've ever written (poor thing!). To the Mopey Teenage Bears and to the Deadline Damesrock on! To my loving husband, Brett Kessler, for more than I could ever put into words. And to my astounding agent, Miriam Kriss, for telling me to get off my duff and write this book alreadyMiriam is the reason I finally got this book out of my head and onto paper, and I can never thank her enough.

During my famine research, I learned a lot about certain causes of world hunger, including rats swarming when bamboo flowers, flooded fields, and war. I learned about dirt cookies, and how some people are forced to eat the very rats that have infested their crops. I wish I could say I made all of that up.

But like eating disorders, world hunger is all too real.

Lisabeth Lewis didn't mean to become Famine. She had a love affair with food, and she'd never liked horses (never mind the time she asked for a pony when she was eight; that was just a girl thing). If she'd been asked which Horseman of the Apocalypse she would most likely be, she would have probably replied, "War." And if you'd heard her and her boyfriend, James, fighting, you would have agreed. Lisa wasn't a Famine person, despite the eating disorder.

And yet there she was, Lisabeth Lewis, seventeen and no longer thinking about killing herself, holding the Scales of office. Famine, apparently, had scalesan old-fashioned balancing device made of brass or bronze or some other metal. What she was supposed to do with the Scales, she had no idea. Then again, the whole "Thou art the Black Rider; go thee out unto the world" thing hadn't really sunk in yet.

Alone in her bedroom, Lisa sat on her canopied bed with its overflowing pink and white ruffles, and she stared at the metal balance, wondering what, exactly, she'd promised the pale man in the messenger's uniform. Or had it been a robe? Frowning, she tried to picture the delivery man who'd just leftbut the more she grasped for it, the more slippery his image became until Lisa was left with the impression of a person painted in careless watercolors.

Maybe the Lexapro was messing with her.

Yeah, she thought, putting the Scales on her nightstand, next to a half-empty glass of water (which rested on a coaster) and a pile of white pills (which did not), I'm high as a freaking kite.

And you're fat, lamented the negative voice, the Thin voice, Lisa's best friend and worst critic, the one that whispered to her in her sleep and haunted her when she was awake.

High and fat, Lisa amended. But at least I'm not depressed.

Or dead; the delivery man had rung the doorbell before Lisa could swallow more than three of her mother's antidepressants. Bundled in her white terry cloth bathrobe over her baggy flannel pajamas, Lisa had answered the door and accepted the parcel.

"For thee," the pale man had said. "Thou art Famine."

And once Lisa had opened the oddly shaped package, all thoughts of suicide had drifted away. Thanks to the pills, that was sort of the way she was feeling now, as if she were driftingdrifting slowly like a cloud in the summertime sky, a cloud shaped like a set of old-fashioned scales...