Roth - This Messy Magnificent Life

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To my teachers

J ust once, Id like to read a piece on Geneen Roth that does not mention food.

All those thousands of articles over the years have driven home the radical message she carries, embodies, exudesthat food and weight are not the problem or the solution to the wound, or to the losses of so long ago that we try to numb or redeem by stuffing or starving or weighing or rejecting ourselves.

Yes, her pioneering books were among the first to link compulsive eating and perpetual dieting with deeply personal and spiritual issues that go far beyond food, weight, and body image. She changed my life twenty-five years ago when I read my first Geneen Roth bookthe same day I swallowed ipecac in an effort to lose just five more pounds, which would make all of life spring into Technicolor, like when Dorothy lands in Oz. I had never before made the connection that the way we eat is the way we liveand that our relationship to food, our bodies, money, and love is an exact reflection of the amount of joy, presence, and oxygen we believe we are allowed to have in our lives.

Never before had someone expressed so brilliantly, and with such wit, that curiosity and self-love were the way homenot the latest diet, kale cleanse, or fair-trade coffee colonic.

So I discovered Geneens writings on food, and was hooked. Yet there is just so much more to her.

For starters, there is the exuberantly real, and the cranky.

Geneen is brilliant about psychological and spiritual matters, the deepest levels of healing. She can speak with profound honesty before a thousand people who are moved to tears by her radical acceptance of who they are, and what they have thought and triedsometimes for decades, often as recently as that morning. But she can also be a goofball with a wild imagination. Somehow she manages to be hilariously self-deprecating while also being militantly on her own side, moment by moment. She also invents new languages. Passages in this book made me laugh out loud.

There is her life with her pets, with whom she shares great comfort and joy, and gleans wisdom about restoring our primal connection to Love. I think she might have a pet disorder, though. You may have read her book about the sainted Blanche, her two-hundred-pound cat, or heard of her darling and elegant poodle Celeste. Or perhaps youve encountered Izzy, her current dogwho, ironically, has disturbing food issues, including anorexia. Izzy is the only dog I know that I can leave in my kitchen with the cats bowl. (A portrait of Blanche, who was male, still hangs in a place of prominence in Geneens living room, as might, in other homes, a painting of the Queen.)

There is her beloved Matther husband and best friend and foil, who conveniently shares the disorder regarding pets. I never think of one without the other. Astonishingly, Matt is very loving and gentle about her other fixation: fancy sweaters. As far as I know, he has never said a word when she has brought home the latest, although he does make a quiet keening noise. (None of usincluding Geneenknows what the sweater thing means, and I do not feel prepared to discuss it further here. Im just saying.)

There is her smile, which is huge and irregularone of a kind, almond-shaped, toothy, and frequent. She not only laughs at all my jokes, which I love in a girl, but laughs with infinite compassion at herself and her foibles, failures, victories, silliness, and ordinary human behavior.

There are her tears of empathyfor the child she was, for us all, for how hard it is here, for how deeply weird and impossible life and families can be, and for the world.

There is her contagious delight in the sensuous. I have seen her nibbling a bit of exquisite dark chocolate for whole minutes, as if it had to last her the month, savoring it as if God had given her and only her this one and only piece. Some of the essays in this book will help you learn to do this, toowhile also teaching you radical forgiveness if you have recently set upon a sack of Halloween candy like a dog.

I love the depth of her spirituality, and her absolute, total commitment to it (along with the pets... and the chocolate... and the sweaters). I also love her plainsong erudition, which is in equal proportion to her thrilling humanity.

I can tell Geneen any horrible secret I may have, one that I believe reeks of depravity or madness or general loathsomeness, and she will hear me, and say the three greatest healing words on earth: Oh, me too. She will reach out to stroke the back of my hand and smile that almond smile.

And man, can that girl pay attention. And so she knows. She knows our hearts, because she listens to hers. She pays attention to her best friends, to strangers, to God, to pets, to Matt, to her spiritual teachers, to the grasses and birds, to the cats, the dogs, the child.

Many pieces in this book, and in fact in Geneens lifes work, center on developing the trust and intimacy with ones own deepest self that are necessary for practicing radical self-care, awareness, and good boundaries. Perhaps as a result, Geneen is as generous as anyone I know. A few weeks ago we were on the phone and I mentioned that I was frantically cleaning my house because people were coming by for a fund-raiser for a village school I support in Myanmar. A few days later, her huge check arrived in the mail.

Geneen reads the same way she did as a little girl: as an act of devotion, discovery, salvation, meditation, and joy. This has helped her to hone her God-given gifts as a writerher innate curiosity, her elegance and truth-telling, her brilliant or hilarious turns of phrase, her care.

Forgiveness is the center of her being, of her life. From that springs a deepening awareness of It Allones tummy, the physical hunger; ones skin, longing for gentle touch and accepting eyes; ones body and its incarnational realms; ones heart, the umbilical link to God; and what e.e. cummings called the gay great happening illimitably earth.

Oh, yes, the food stuff. Has anyone elses writings on compulsive eating and the healing of the heart, mind, and body thrown the lights on for more people, or changed the lives of more of us when we sit down to eat? Or pull up a chair at the fridge? Or open the half-pound bag of M&Ms in the 7-Eleven parking lot? Has anyone else helped so many of us develop the muscles to keep ourselves companyloving companywhen were halfway through a sack of Cheetos, or starving ourselves yet again, or purging, or crying in a fluorescent-lit dressing room while trying on swimsuits?

Some of the stories in this book will give you insight and encourage self-forgiveness around money. And here is the scariest thing of all: this book will encourage you to become big and juicy and real, no matter what your parents, your teachers, and your culture have told you over the years.

There is a lot in this book about learning to make (or let) food be about food, and love be about love. There are also stories about the path of learning to trust yourself alone in a room with a cakeor, for that matter, a pile of bills, a clutch of memories, a family, or a set of deadlines. There are stories about true love, loneliness, and the places in between. There are stories about God, and writers, and parents, and gardens. But mostly these are stories about us, as told by Geneen.