By Crystal RennWhen I was leaving yet another psychiatrist the other week and he saw the title of this book he laughed and said 'Are you trying to tell us something?' Since he had been so understanding throughout the session (unusual in my experience of psychiatrists), I managed to see the funny side.
Although I have a lot of admiration for how Crystal let go of her disease, I could not relate at all to the second half of the book (her recovery and emergence as a plus-size model). This was probably because; 1 I have never been a model, and 2; Because it was modeling that trapped her in anorexia, and modeling which steered her out. Her book indicates that her illness largely came about due to pressure from the outside, while mine resulted mainly from the inside.
It has however made me look at models with more compassion than I did before; I was quite oblivious to the fashion-model industry. I guess I get angry at people blaming the media for eating disorders in young girls, and I forget that actually being a model is an entirely different thing. Many models starve because they have to look frail and that is part of their job.
‘I look at pictures from that time and I’m stunned. Not at my thinness – unlike some anorexics who always think they’re fat, I knew on some level how thin I was. No, what astounds me in those photos is my blankness. There was no light in my eyes.’
‘Coco Rocha... “I’ll never forget the piece of advice I got from people in the industry when they saw my new body,” she told the Associated Press in 2008. “They said, ‘You need to lose more weight. The look this year is Anorexia. We don’t want you to be anorexic, but that’s what we want you to look like.’”
‘It wasn’t always this way... Maybe it’s a response to the rest of America getting heavier. If you see human heft as déclassé... then extreme thinness can be a way of distancing yourself from and seeming more high-class than the people you scorn.’
