The Plight of Parenthetical Polly

Tonight I'll be at the 92Y with Malcolm Gladwell! Tomorrow I'll be at Oblong Books with Lacey Schwartz Delgado!

Friends,

Feast On Your Life is out in the world. The reception has been wonderful. Grab one of the last tickets to see me with Malcolm Gladwell tonight at 92Y in live taping of Revisionist History, or come hear me talk with Lacey Schwartz Delgado tomorrow at Oblong Books!

Dear Tamar:

For the last week, I haven’t been able to stomach food. Nothing seems appetizing, nothing seems appropriate to eat. I’m deeply unhappy in my relationship. I can’t leave, because his mother is dying. I think I’m in love with my dharma teacher. My father has started dating a much younger woman, who—even worse—is incredibly boring. I HATE my job even though it’s my dream job. When it comes time to eat, for the first time in my life, I feel irritated to have to think about food, so I drink coffee or diet coke or gatorade or hot chocolate and I don’t cook and I don’t have an appetite and I don’t want to think about cooking, a thing I have done (well!) since I can remember. This is compounded by the fact that I spent several years marinating my brain in fringe dietary communities who would insist on diets composed of exclusively oysters and carrots and well-cooked mushrooms (for eg), which somewhat broke my brain regarding what is and is not “healthy.” Where do I even start? How do I feed myself as to not go insane? Can woman live off hot chocolate alone? (P.S. Many congratulations on the publication of your book.)

-Parenthetical Polly

Dear Parenthetical Polly,

When my father died, I stopped eating. I stopped again when my grandfather died, and again when I broke up with Ben, the man I’d been engaged to marry. During that last not-eating, I told my friend, Olivia, that I’d been caught off guard, taken by surprise. Where did this come from? I asked her. Olivia kindly told me I was full of it. It came from the same place as the earlier not-eatings: Fear and loss of control. Fear of loss of control. A loss of control over my fear.

That’s all the anecdote you’re getting, because this is too important for the indulgence of my digressions. The answer is No. No, a woman cannot live off hot chocolate. Or gatorade or coffee or Diet Coke. A woman needs and deserves more and better food than that, and I want to help the woman in question find her path toward it.

Of course, you know. It’s why you wrote, in a gesture so graceful that it brought tears to my eyes. I recalled a moment like this in my new book. A woman was scared, driving, and she asked a friend in the passenger seat to take her hand. “Take my hand,” she said. (So much for no more anecdote!) You just did the same thing. You said, “Take my hand.”

Now, holding your hand, I turn to your question, “Where do I even start?” The answer is that you start with love. What you love is up to you, but it’s where you begin. You’ve described a number of circumstances, any of which would be enough to knock a human off balance. Even the most resilient of us would feel out of control if we resented our partner and our parent, hated our job, and burned with unrequited love. I’ve changed my wording from “off balance” to “out of control” because a reason some of us over-control eating during instability is that it is one thing that we can control. It is one of the few things we do daily—multiple times—that seems to only affect us, and be out of anyone else’s sphere of influence.

I believe that that is why your anguish has set up camp in your appetite. Because it is something you can control, while you feel paralyzed in an unhappy relationship, angry at a parent, miserable at work, and nurturing confusing feelings for a teacher. And because it is so natural to attach one’s need for control to food, I’m not going to trouble it. Let’s leave the very legitimate desire for control there—and turn to love.

I offer you the poem that opens my book: Love after Love by Derek Walcott.

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

I offer the poem mostly without commentary. I only to underline that you are the only person who can greet yourself at your own door, and the only person who can smile at yourself in your own mirror. You are the only person who can offer yourself such hospitality.

Now, if you won’t—if the idea of doing it is repugnant and you wince at my suggestion that you be so kind to you as to offer yourself wine and bread, then I think you must be extraordinarily angry at yourself. Too angry to greet yourself or pull out a chair or offer simple food. And if you are that angry, that is fine. But you must be angry while still being in love. You have been angry with loved ones before. If they are cold and hungry—as you can see they are because you noticed that they had only coffee for breakfast and gatorade for lunch and hot chocolate for dinner, then you grimace and stomp around and boil them a kettle. You set down their tea cup perhaps a bit more roughly than necessary. You toy with serving them the smaller portion of pasta—because you are angry, but it is lunchtime, after all—but in the end you give them the larger one anyway. You stay and you stomp and you feed, and the anger fades. And the love that collected you there with them remains.

Here’s an excerpt from a poem called Boomerang Valentine by Andrea Gibson.

When it comes to love the only thing I’m certain of is:

you are the best thing

that has ever happened to you.

Whoever you are. You’re a quitter? Great.

There’s plenty worth quitting.

A sore loser? Who isn’t?

Got no discipline? Maybe discipline is for bodybuilders

and closeted gay monks.

Picture a magician

so attached to being perfect

he cuts off his own legs to pull off the trick.

Picture the 738 selfies I deleted

before I took one I was willing to show to the world.

Picture me wishing I could get all of them back—

my so-called flaws stacked like baseball cards

I know will be worth something someday,

like compassion, like tenderness,

like my capacity to think myself a catch just because

I have never seen a chandelier I didn’t want to swing from.

On days I have a hard time keeping warm

in my own weather, I imagine what the flower wanted to say

to the first human trying to name half its petals love-me-nots:

No, that is not how anything grows.

Of all the violence I have known in my life

I have never known violence

like the violence I have spoken to myself,

and I have seen almost everyone around me

hold that same belt to their own back,

an ambush of every way we’ve decided we’re not enough,

then looking for someone outside of ourselves

to clean that treason up.

You know how to love. Your letter to me is steeped in it. You once loved the partner you now resent—and you love yourself at least enough to know you want out. (Again, you can be angry at yourself for not finding the way out yet. But there is self-love in acknowledging a bad fit.) You loved a career path enough to pursue it. You love a parent enough to be hurt by their choices. In this moment of tumult, some it comes from a feeling of unexpected yearning—maybe even love.

You must give some of this love to yourself. You can give it in quiet forms that don’t challenge the parts of your mind that over-marinated in ideas about what’s unhealthy—carbohydrates? seed oils? sugar?—because you’re not quite resilient enough to stand up to that challenge yet. You can, instead, treat this self that has let you down—by losing resolve, by losing her path, by losing control—as kindly as you would another loved one who has misstepped. Make a pot of rice and a pot of lentils and serve a bowl of them steaming hot, ignoring protestations about “not being hungry,” but only nodding kindly and making sure that the lentils are seasoned with enough salt and cushioned with enough olive oil to make another bite irresistible, and that the rice is cooked at the right ratio of water for the type of grain.

Warm a can of chickpeas, drained then rebathed in olive oil and water, with cooked garlic, salt, and black pepper, cooking and heating them until they’re very soft and almost saucy. Boil a pound of little pasta, which can certainly be any of the great gluten-free kinds, and marry the two for a meal that cannot be called unhealthy by any of the fringes, no matter what they espouse. Here’s my recipe. Make polenta and eat it with only olive oil and a fried egg on top. Serve yourself bowls of foods you can eat with a spoon, cooked by your hand, in a quiet moment with the kitchen light only dimly lit.

Dear cook, the book on which you congratulate me narrates a year of my searching for happiness in small kitchen moments. At this juncture in your life, you must not rob yourself of small joys, even if the withholding is easier. Food and feeding so reliably provide opportunities for delight that you cannot afford to eschew either. Not to mention that I can tell, even from here, that you must be hungry—even if the anger you feel at whoever got you into this mess is obscuring the growl. Parenthetical Polly, I’m afraid you are incorrect. You are not parenthetical. Neither is your eating. You are cast in the lead. And you need energy to act.