As an only child who moved around a lot, Emma Specter learned to comfort herself, as a lot of kids do, with familiar foods — whether it was the Dunkin Donuts she sought out in Rome or the candy bars she stock-piled from Manhattan bodegas. By the time she entered high school, she’d begun using food as more than just a source of soothing, but as a kind of numbing agent she’d administer in secret. Mindlessly eating cookie dough to the point of physical discomfort, she discovered, could help ease the pain of life’s most unpleasant moments — that is, until the shame set in, followed by an urge to count calories.
Specter eventually came to identify this behavior as bingeing, an eating disorder she describes viscerally in her memoir, “ More Pease: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for ‘Enough ’” ( HarperCollins ). Bingeing can look different for different people, but for Specter, it involves “shoving food furtively into my mouth as quickly and passively” as possible, she writes. Her debut book, which pairs a deeply personal (and often humorous) narrative with academic research and journalistic inquiry, explores the origins of her disordered eating while also searching for a motive: “Why do I do this?” Specter said in an interview.
The Los Angeles-based Vogue culture writer is still trying to answer that question. In addition to lots of therapy and introspective writing, her process so far has been to interview writers, scholars and fat activists.