Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me-Reader! Bruder! as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to “see” others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.

We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people’s misery make us happier or more content?

I had a feeling that day that I was losing something, that I was mourning a death that had not yet occurred. I felt as if all things personal were being crushed like small wildflowers to make way for a more ornate garden, where everything would be tame and organized. I had never felt this sense of loss…My yearning was tied to the certainty that home was mine for the having, that I could go back anytime I wished. It was not until I had reached home that I realized the true meaning of exile. As I walked those dearly beloved, dearly remembered streets, I felt I was squashing the memories that lay underfoot.

I was not a scientist. I was seeking a form of life which would be continuous like a symphony. The key word was the sea. It was this oceanic life which was being put in bottles and labeled. Underneath my feet, moving restlessly beneath the very floor of the hotel, was the sea, and my nature which would never amalgamate with analysis in any permanent marriage…It was that day that I realized once more that I was a writer, and only a writer.

It was too much the sort of thing I would do: Take a sad private matter, give the facts in technicolor detail to perfect strangers, and thus relieve myself of my life. And then later, I would feel cheap and empty, deeply dissatisfied, like a verbal slut, the girl who’d give it all away to just any old anybody.

It has been argued that food and eating have replaced sex as our foremost cultural taboo. To some extent I agree with this but would point out that the taboo is not against food, or sex, or flesh, but against a loss of control. Our most hallowed virtue in modern society is self-control, personal “power” (also the most hallowed virtue in my own family). If you thumb through the cannon of philosophy, you find Augustine and Co. speaking of women with the same fear and virulence that we now use to speak of food, as something “sinful,” something that “tempts,” something that causes a loss of control. “The slimy desires of the flesh,” Augustine writes. Note: not the flesh itself, but its desires, arising from the flesh, dismantling our control.

But, as is always the case with bulimia, it is at once tempting, seductive, and terrifying. It divides the brain in half: you take in, you reject; you need, you do not need. It is not a comfortable split, even early on. But early on, its pros seem to outweigh its cons. You have a specific focus, your thoughts do not race as much. They stay in an orderly row: go home, eat, throw up. The problem in your life is your body. It is defined and has a beginning and an end. The problem will be solved by shrinking the body. Contain yourself.

It is commonly assumed that women with eating disorders have a neurotic fear of sex, and that this fear manifests itself in a desperate attempt, at puberty, to stave off the increasingly visible sexual signs of their bodies. Some women do have this fear, but in some cases the reasons are perhaps less related to an individual’s own fear of sex — I personally was not afraid of sex, merely ashamed that it so fascinated me — than to a fear that other people will see them, and judge them, as sexual. Eating-disordered people are often far more concerned with other people’s perceptions than with their own feelings. Fear of sexuality may well have something to do with a culture that has a highly ambiguous, conflicted view of female sexuality, as well as a family that shares this perception.

My neurosis surprised even me. All of a sudden, I was a mess. It’s quite possible that I had some preexisting depression and/or anxiety disorder and/or mania, and the confusion simply gave it a chance to surface. And it did surface…I developed an acute, bizarre fear of everything. I was a walking bundle of anxiety, crying easily and afraid of the dark, the kids at school, the teachers, the sun, the moon, the stars. I got it in my head that prayer would work. I began to pray constantly, frantically, as I peered around me to see if anyone was watching. I dropped to my knees, pressing my nails into the palms of my hands, praying wildly for God to forgive me, muttering manic prayers that would’ve made little sense to any god.

The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book’s true epiphany. You know you’ve completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights.