Fat Woman Walking

The Author with Auntie, Summer 1968 _____________________________ “D IET.” Can you tell me how that word makes you feel? Oh, Lord. Don’t tell me you’re a Gestalt... No, Ms. Lee. Eclectic. Dabs of Freud, Jung, Horney, Skinner, Rogers, Ellis, and ‒ yes ‒ some Perls. I’d hate to think I’ve traveled all the way into my inner depths just to find a Cuckoo in a hot tub.... I like to think that I take the best of what psychiatry has to offer and give to my clients what they need. Now, then, where were we? “Diet.” Ah, yes. You were going to define that word for me. Well, maybe to ordinary people, “diet” is just another word in the English language, having one or two meanings, the primary denotative being, “to cause to take food” as a verb, and “food or drink regularly provided or consumed” as a noun. Then there is that lesser denotative meaning, a dieter’s term, which has to do with eating by prescribed rules established by doctors, nutritionists, families, peers, frie...

Photo on left: The author and her grandmother, June 5, 1968, just before she left for L.A. Photo on right: The author's mother ____________________ I have a complicated relationship with my late mother. I spent most of my youth in my grandparents’ custody, for my time with Mother had been sporadic and haphazard – life, in her house, often filled with drama, domestic violence (on her part; she married nice men), and insecurity. Mother was smart, beautiful, artistically talented, and sweet – when she was sober. When she was drinking – which was most of the time – she was unstable, mean, and slurry. It was like she was speaking another language, which, in a sense, she was: the language of drink. The language of drink is a mish-mosh of incoherence and mispronunciation with a good dose of anger. Woe-be-onto-me if I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me. She never hit me – she saved that for her men – but she had a way of making me feel as if I were the ...