Geneen Roth - This Messy Magnificent Life A Field Guide

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

PREVIOUS BOOKS BY GENEEN ROTH

Lost and Found

Women Food and God

When Food Is Love

The Craggy Hole in My Heart and the Cat Who Fixed It

Breaking Free from Emotional Eating

Feeding the Hungry Heart

When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair

Appetites

Why Weight?

Scribner

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

The names and characteristics of some individuals in this book have been changed.

Copyright 2018 by Geneen Roth & Associates, Inc.

Illustrations by Kristen Haff, inspired by From the Tide Pools to the Stars by Erin B. Hughes

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Scribner hardcover edition March 2018

SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or .

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Interior design by Jill Putorti

Jacket design and illustration by Kristen Haff

Jacket art inspired by From the Tide Pools to the Stars by Erin B. Hughes

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-8246-4

ISBN 978-1-5011-8248-8 (ebook)

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.