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We would binge and purge only before school dances or just before we were going home for the holidays, and then we would ferret away all the chocolate brownies and ice cream we could get and gobble it up until our stomachs were swollen as though we were five months pregnant. Then we would put our fingers down our throats and make ourselves throw it all up. We assumed that we were the first people since the Romans to do this; it was our secret, and it created a titillating bond between us.
Later it became ritualistic, with specific requirements: I had to be alone (it is a disease of aloneness) and dressed in loose, comfortable clothing. In a catatonic state, I would enter a grocery store to buy the requisite comfort foods, starting with ice cream and moving to breads and pastries--just this one last time. My breathing would become rapid (as in sex) and shallow (as in fear). Before eating, I would drink milk, because if that went into me first, it would help bring up all the rest later. The eating itself was exciting and my heart would pound. But once the food had been devoured, I would be overcome with an urgent need to separate myself from it before it took up residence inside me. Nothing could have stood in the way of my getting rid of it, differentiating myself from it--from the toxic bulk that had seemed so like a mother's nurture in the beginning--because if it remained within me, I knew that my life would be snuffed out. Afterward I would collapse into bed and sink into a numbed sleep. Tomorrow will be different. It never was. What an illusion that there were no consequences to be paid! It was years before I allowed myself to acknowledge the addictive, damaging nature of what I was doing. Like alcoholism, anorexia and bulimia are diseases of denial. You fool yourself into believing you are on top of it and can stop anytime you want. Even when I discovered I couldn't stop, I still didn't think of it as an addiction; rather, it was proof that I was weak and worthless. This seems utterly preposterous to me now, but self--blame is part of the sickness. For me the disease lasted, in one form or another, from sophomore year in boarding school through two marriages and two children, until I was in my early 40s. My husbands never knew, nor did my children or any of my friends and colleagues.
Unlike alcoholism, bulimia is easy to hide (except from mothers or friends who have also suffered from the disease). Like most people with eating disorders, I was adept at keeping my disease hidden, because I didn't want anyone to stop me. I was convinced that I was in control anyway and could stop tomorrow if I really wanted to. I was often tired, irritable, hostile and sick from this, but my willpower to maintain appearances was such that most of the time no one knew the true reasons behind it.
•LOVE, SEX AND BARBARELLA
Fonda set off to study painting in Paris in 1957, where she fell in with the chic set and fell in love with the director Roger Vadim, who had his own ideas about what constituted a good romantic relationship.