Unbearable Lightness
Portia de Rossi
Unbearable Lightness is Portia de Rossi's memoir of a lifetime of starving and bingeing and purging as well as part of a lifetime hiding her sexuality. "Since I was a twelve-year-old girl taking pictures in my front yard to submit to modeling agencies, I'd never known a day when my weight wasn't the determining factor for my self-esteem," she writes with weary honesty. At her most perilously anorexic, the publicly glamorous TV star weighed 82 pounds. Ten months later, in the depths of bulimic bingeing, she had doubled in size. As an autobiographer she reports this with a vivid eye for detail, particularly about foods devoured, foods refused, and the ways a woman can hide her self-destruction, particularly when posing under the searchlights of fame.
The blunt, pity-free matter-of-factness with which de Rossi shares secrets and lies about her eating disorders and her sexuality makes this forthright confessional story at once shocking and instructional, especially for younger women who may be secretly suffering on their own.
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