Verified by 
Frank Bruni, The New York Times restaurant critic, was or is bulimic. We know this because he published a brave excerpt from his forthcoming memoir in last week's The New York Times Magazine. (The memoir, Born Round, will be published in August. The photos and details in the book will reveal his identity, which will end Bruni's five-year run as the NYT critic).
The excerpt is amazing because of Bruni's honesty about his lifelong battle with food. He was born with an extraordinary appetite (subtler tastebuds? extrahuman metabolic needs?). Evidence for his oddness comes in the fact that as an infant, he could eat about three times what a grown man would eat. According to family lore, he'd throw up in his highchair, in protest, if denied a third hamburger. As a teen, his appetite was also embarrassingly robust: He'd eat three hot dogs before his brothers could finish one; six slices of pizzas were a normal lunch.
To deal with his irrepressible desires through high school and college, he tried Atkins, restrictive eating (mirroring the tuna-only and popcorn-only diets his mother adopted), vegetarianism, fasting, amphetamines and excessive exercise. In college, he battled serious bulimia and avoided sexual contact out of shame.
The amazing part of this story is that Bruni was able to contain his addiction so that it eventually led to a fantastic career. We often think of our addictions in a completely negative light: as the parts of us we need to pluck out. Bruni is one of those resilient oddballs who owned his addiction--and found enough control over that beast to tap the talent, like the pearl, inside of it.
Our addictions are more informative and even affirming than we give them credit for. Addictions say an amazing amount about who we are and what we know: what we see as lacking in the world, and how we dream of alternative ideals. In other words, people aren't alcoholics for arbitrary reasons. They're processing loss or something else. Food addicts also have unique insights about food, and exceptional dreams of satisfaction. If we're addicted, our brains are churning with knowledge about some problem. That churning is not all negative--because people who churn know more about their object of inspection than others do. They're often in the position to offer solutions (or great restaurant advice).
History is filled with people who were inventive because they refused to disown their addictions. They did have to contain their addictions to the point at which they became manageable. Not all of us can do this. But once they did, they made something memorable from the struggle with identity.
For (my favorite) example, Franz Kafka was a pathological loner. He felt as if he were useless if he were not writing fiction. "To keep madness at bay [I] must never go far from [my writing] desk, [I] must hold on to it with [my] teeth," Kafka wrote a friend in 1922. He felt dead if he was not writing. He was anorexic, almost always alone, living at home through his 30's, and singularly devoted to solitude. He proposed marriage three times but ran away from the altar every time because of his need for control. "Any relationship not created by myself...is worthless; it hinders my movements, I hate it" he wrote in a letter in 1916. "Nothing [but writing] will ever satisfy me," he wrote in his diary in 1914. Seen through one lens, Kafka was a sick guy who needed to work through his rigid defenses. Seen from another lens, he was attuned to, and chose to pursue, a meaningful darkness. He named an obsession, did not quite let it kill him, and left us the great literature of his nightmares.
Then there's the Marquis de Sade, famous for his sex addiction. He went to prison for his obsession. But this choice--to pursue his excessive needs over a life of normalcy--had some productive results. He changed the way we think of sexual possibility.
Darwin had autistic leanings: more interested in the details of birds than in family and friends. But his pursuit of his oddball fixations led to our theory of evolution.
Simply pathologizing addiction or obsession is a way of saying that addiction is the rotten piece of identity. But addictions are also signs of who we are. They signal our sensitivities, whatever drives us, and our potential to invent. Frank Bruni initially suffered shame for overeating. He did hard work hard to curb his addiction's most dangerous aspects, like bulimia. But in his obsessions, he also saw what his talents were. And, he refused to simply pluck those aspects out of his character. Result: Over the past five years, he has determined where New Yorkers eat.
see my book here [amazon 0143112252]
