Portia De Rossi became famous playing Nelle on Ally McBeal in the 1990s and more recently as Lindsey Bluth on Arrested Development. She's a talented, funny actress, but more importantly: Portia De Rossi can write!
Her 2010 anorexia memoir, Unbearable Lightness, is the best of the first-person examinations of how this disease plays upon the minds of its victims and the subtle nuances of its manifestations. What's refreshing about Ms. De Rossi's account is not its candor (it is candid, but several ANA books have been that), but the fact that it's written by someone who understands and pays attention to narrative.

She's a better writer than you need to be to pull of a "famous person with a disease" memoir. She's skilled enough that you come away feeling she could have been writing about any subject at all and pulled it off. Rather than a "descent into madness" story line, she narrates the highlights of her successful career, with the disease acting as a counterpoint to the outward show of ease and talent. She is almost clinically dispassionate in her assessment, showing the thinking of a practicing anorexic from the perspective of recovery several years later. Somehow, she is both the subject of the story and a fully omniscient narrator telling what makes the subject behave as she does. You get to see the drama unfold with something like a director, or writer, at your elbow, explaining the action.

This will be my "go-to" book for anyone looking to understand what an anorexic patient experiences.

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Ed Said, U Said bills itself as an "eating disorder translator." Co-written by journalists who themselves have recovered from anorexia (and hail from Australia like Ms. De Rossi), the book is directed to parents, doctors and others who care for someone with anorexia. The thought patterns of an anorexic person twist, writhe and get caught in strange channels. Much of the interior monologue of the sufferer is so strange, it can't be imagined by those who haven't experienced it.

This book reveals that inner monologue through example conversations that take the form of twitter responses or a text conversation. This makes the exchanges succinct and to the point. The authors fill in explanations of the sufferer's inner voice by giving the disease its own handle - @Ed. Ed is sick and strange, but he needs to be understood, if our communication is going to have the effect we hope for in various situations. 

When a parent or a physician make an innocent statement such as, "Wow, you are looking healthier!" the typical anorexia patient may hear something like, "Haha! You fell for our trap. Now you will get fat!" The book shows how the hidden language that exists between the person with the eating disorder and those trying to help, functions to sidetrack communication and slow progress. With a handle on the tone of the hidden language and by running through the most common mistakes, parents, friends and clinicians are likely to do more good and cause less pain to the person they care for.

This is a very practical useful book for anyone who lives, works with, or is friends with an eating disorder sufferer. Unlike Unbearable Lightness, it's unlikely to be of interest for anyone not personally connected to the disease.

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Decoding Anorexia, by Carrie Arnold is about the transition that's happening in anorexia science. Over the last two decades (though your doctor probably doesn't know it), the actual mechanisms of anorexia pathology have started to become clear. The locations in the brain that function differently in anorexia are being found by functional MRI. The neurochemical alterations in dopamine and serotonin that pre-dispose and reinforce starvation and hyper-activity in these individuals have been measured and confirmed. The hormones from the fat cells and the gut that regulate food intake frequency and quantity, so well-described for obesity, have been found to perform similar (generally opposite) functions in anorexia.


For all these reasons, what used to be considered a psychological disorder with physical consequences is now understood to be a biological, neurological disorder with psychological consequences. 



This idea is not new. The fact that starvation (for any reason) can cause bizarre behavior has been documented in starvation experiments (such as Keys, 1950) and in natural disasters or wars where starvation is an accidental consequence. Many eating disorder researchers have long entertained the possibility of "reverse causation" for anorexia (that starvation causes the psychological phenomena, not the other way around) but until the science was able to back up their suppositions, few people would listen.


Carrie Arnold's book is a collection of findings from the cutting edge of anorexia research, which shows that the era of misunderstood causation and mis-applied therapeutic counseling for anorexia is nearing its end. This is important news. Anorexia carries with it the highest mortality rate of any "psychiatric" disorder (including major depression). Past treatments have been an utter failure, with the majority of patients going through repeated inpatient treatments, never-ending outpatient treatments with chronic, frequent relapsing symptoms which make life progress difficult to impossible. 


With new insights into actual causation (It's not the mother's fault!) real treatments can focus on what is actually different about the anorexic patient, compared to normal peers. This has ramifications for useful drug development as well as designing new therapeutic approaches more in line with current neuro-psychology science. This book can serve as a primer for anyone wishing to learn about the new understanding that is emerging in the field of eating disorder research-with rich lists of references of the scientists currently doing this groundbreaking work.