Books |
Judy Collins: Cravings: How I Conquered Food
By
Published: Feb 26, 2017
Category:
Memoir
Who doesn’t know Judy Collins? The music is burned into our memories. But the woman who made the music? If you haven’t read her memoirs, you know nothing.
I am an enthusiastic acquaintance/borderline friend of Judy Collins, as but we’ve never talked about her life and I haven’t read her memoirs, “Cravings: How I Conquered Food” was one surprise after another. Simply: would you have thought Judy Collins had two decades-long addictions, alcohol and food?
“Cravings” is two books in one. The first is a chronicle of her secret life, a story of shame and denial that becomes a story of courage, resilience and health. The other is a set of profiles of important diet gurus, from Dr. Atkins to Andy Weil. That second book is unnecessary and a distraction, and if I had been her editor, it would be gone, even though publishers insist they can’t charge X dollars for Y pages. They can. And her publisher should have, because all by itself the Judy Collins to-hell-and-back story is important, helpful and inspiring. [To buy the book from Amazon for $15.85, click here. For the Kindle edition at $13.99, click here.]
Her food addiction started innocently, with a mother who loved to bake. Fudge, meringue pies, Toll House Cookies — her mother created love offerings to her daughter that were drenched in sugar. By 7, Judy was getting her sugar fix from Bazooka bubble gum, Necco Wafers, Almond Joys, Mud Pies and Peppermint Patties. When polio struck at age 11, she dipped her fingers into a glass of pineapple juice.
With adult came another addiction: alcohol. “As an active, working alcoholic with an eating disorder,” she writes. “I yearned for serenity and was tormented for much of my life by longings, addictions, and painful crises over food: bingeing, bulimia, weight loss and gain.”
It is the law of the entertainment business: You can be a drunk, you can be an addict, but you can’t be fat. Judy Collins internalized that law: “I was determined from an early age that I would never get fat. I would rather die.” So she took a path known to many: “I have thrown up in the bathrooms of a thousand restaurants; bought bags and boxes of sweets and eaten them at one sitting… taken laxatives for years on end; done colonics and starvation cleanses.”
The romances, the career highlights, the bitter losses — they’re in her other books, but they’re well summarized here. Her turnaround began when she read Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi and began to look inward with a measure of calm. And her book is certain to bring some sufferers to GreySheeters Anonymous, where the only requirement for membership is the desire to stop eating compulsively. After 11 years of serious bulimia, she started their program.
And now? Judy Collins has been sober now for 39 years and free of bulimic purges for 33 years. “My mind is clear, my heart is light, my health is perfect,” she writes. If that line were a song, you’d want to give it to everyone.
EXCERPT: Chapter 1, “My Journey”
We ourselves are the battleground . . . All the power of transcendence is within us. Tap into it and you tap into the divine itself.
— Deng Ming-Sao
I was born in Seattle, Washington, on May 1, 1939. That year, Germany invaded Poland. The Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., so Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest and facilitated Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling won the Pulitzer Prize. Maxwell Perkins, who also edited Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, had given her good advice: He told her to write about her own life.
My father would read The Yearling to me from his copy in Braille, pausing as he read to tell me, first, that a woman could win the Pulitzer, and, second, that a woman could do anything she set her mind to. He said I should always tell my own story, as she had told hers. Daddy was telling his, on his radio show, to his children, and in his journals.
Unfortunately, Mother burned Daddy’s journals after his death.
But I always knew what he meant.
Daddy and Mommy and I lived in a little house on a hill with a lawn that sloped down to the street, and there are pictures of me after a rare snowstorm going down that hill on a sled. And there I am again, in my pigtails in the summer sun, my naked body splashing in the washtub, a huge smile on my face. Even the black-and-white pictures show that I was blond, with curls and a bright pair of eyes.
As a tiny girl, I knew that my father was blind. I tried to make him see me; I talked and danced and sang. I knew he was fighting some kind of battle. But not because he could not see — he seemed to be perfectly at ease with that, even as he felt my face to know what I looked like. He would sometimes say there were advantages to being blind, like being able to read in the dark. No, it was some other battle.
I remember running, being excited, moving fast, almost in a blur. I was in a hurry from the start, walking at nine months, trying to catch up before I ever had a clue where I was headed. I knew I had to keep up with my blind, brilliant, talented father and with my mother who was as thin as a whip and always cooking, cleaning, driving my dad to the radio station to do his show, making my bed, braiding my hair, making my clothes on her Singer sewing machine. The Singer caught my imagination and I would hum along with the treadle. It was hurry, hurry, hurry, there was so much to be done, so much to see—I was seeing for my dad and soon I was the eldest of five siblings and running around helping my mother take care of them, changing diapers, cooking, babysitting. I would take a break and then it was back on the track, hurrying to get to somewhere.
The only time I really stopped hurrying was when I was singing, playing the piano, reading, or acting in a play. As a child, I was trained in the skills that would be required for me to survive, and to thrive. To shine on the stage, entertaining. What was missing in my training was the “rule book” — how to survive, how to get through life when I was not doing that thing that is my passion, when I was not onstage. Finding out how to live out of the spotlight (and in the spotlight, finally) was something I would have to nearly die to learn.
There are pictures of my grandparents at their golden wedding anniversary in 1943 on their porch in Seattle and the wedding cake that I devoured when no one was looking, making a dent in the back of the pristine white layers—a dent I covered over with more frosting. I did not want to be scolded on their special day, sent to my room or made an example of: Look at her, ruining that nice wedding cake.
My father, who had been blind from the age of four, was a man who saw more than most men I have known—sensitive, gifted, and inspiring in the way he managed every day of his sightlessness. Photographs of my father and the family crop up in boxes, in letters, in the folders my mother saved, folders of report cards and prom notices and newspaper articles about my father, and me, and the family. Photos of Daddy’s fraternity brother Holden Bowler, who was my godfather and who had a golden voice like my dad. They had been in Phi Gamma Delta at the University of Idaho.
Daddy was an alcoholic, born with the genetic disposition to the illness, a Jekyll and Hyde who could turn from charming to terrifying when he was at his worst. He drank whiskey—Johnnie Walker and Four Roses—and like me, he loved sugar and kept chocolate-covered cherries in his sock drawer where he hid what he thought was his secret. All of us children knew they were there, whispering to us from among his tidy, carefully folded socks. We would haunt his sock drawer and his other sugar hiding spots. Over time, I would find them all.
He would dig into sweets, pies, cakes, divinity, fudge with the exuberance of an addict and the joy of a satisfied husband. Mother, who did not seem to have our compulsions, was a fabulous baker and cook—as well as chauffeur, friend, and fan of my father’s many talents, even when he was too drunk to notice.
My father had a head of beautiful, full, mostly auburn hair tinged only slightly gray, right up to the time he died. He was always working on keeping his weight down. He would mow the lawn barefooted so he could “see” where he was going, getting the feel of the grass under his toes. He sometimes smoked — referring to his cigarettes as “coffin nails” — lecturing all the while about the dangers of smoking. His pipe was always in the pocket of whatever jacket he was wearing, and he packed the bowl with Old Briar cherry-flavored tobacco, though he occasionally smoked a cigar. I thought that a pipe tasted better than any cigarette I ever smoked.
Daddy was also a reader, and in our house, books were required possessions. My father read to all of us children from the time we were tiny. He would sit on the edge of my bed and run his fingers over the pages of the big Braille volumes from the Library of Congress—history, mystery, and the Russians—War and Peace, The Double, Chekhov. The books he read were big, weighty tomes that stood many feet high stacked against the wall. He once told me that when he could not sleep he would count the books he had read in his lifetime—hundreds of books, in Braille or on what he referred to as “talking books.” They arrived bound in heavy twine-wound squares. Daddy thought if you had not read Moby-Dick by the time you were seven, there must be something wrong with you.
Reading has been a lifelong obsession of mine, a preoccupation. As I read I began to learn what others did to control their demons. There were spiritual routes, and there were pragmatic ones as well. The two, for me, are inextricably linked. I always had a belief in some higher power in the world. I went to church, sang in the choir, loved the hymns. I learned to pray early in my life, wishing our Methodist practices could magically invoke the smoke and mirrors and meditations of the Catholic Church. Bring on Thomas Merton, bring on the saints! I longed for drama!
I discovered that there have always been pilgrims in the search for abstinence from food, alcohol, and drugs, as well as relief from despair and depression. There were those who were looking, as I was, for a spiritually uplifted life. And as I got older I began to pray for a different relationship with food and alcohol.
I knew early on that we were a family troubled by alcoholism and some kind of addiction to food. There were arguments about the liquor cabinet — Mother would lock it up and Daddy would break the lock in the middle of the night.
And I have come to understand that the effects of addiction are not limited to the drinker or the eater but have an impact on the entire family, and sometimes on our friends, too. The denial, the recovery, the relapses—they affect everyone. And I would come to understand that food addiction, like alcoholism, does not play favorites. But at that time I was sure our family had been singled out because of some moral defect of which we had no memory or knowledge. I slowly began to understand that these illnesses strike the rich and the poor, men and women, the infamous and the famous, peasants and royalty, housewives and bankers.
I followed in my father’s footsteps, beginning with music and the piano lessons and soon with the passion for alcohol and sugar. I was transfixed by the desserts my mother whipped up, whirling her right arm in a circle until the confection was fluffy. She added crushed pecans to the mix, and I got to lick the spoon and the bowl. From the age of three I knew that nothing could make me happier than devouring sugar in any form, at any time. Best were the fudge and divinity, the pies with meringue or made of apples or pumpkin, the Toll House cookies. Sugar fueled my race through life.
It was the beginning of my dance with the devil.
