Love, Finally: Untangling the Knot Between Mothers, Daughters, and Food - Rilegato

Roth, Geneen

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0593733738 ISBN 13: 9780593733738

Casa editrice: The Dial Press, 2026

Riassunto

We all inherit stories about belonging, bodies, and worth. Many of those stories begin with our mothers.

An illuminating inquiry into the complicated relationship between what we eat, what our mothers taught us, and what we believe about ourselves—from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Women Food and God

"This book is both a love letter and a must-read for every woman who's struggled to find peace with her body, her mother, and food.”—Christie Tate, New York Times bestselling author of Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life

For nearly four decades, Geneen Roth has been a trusted voice guiding women to give up dieting and end compulsive eating. Her books have sold millions of copies, and her workshops have months-long waiting lists. But only recently, when she was diagnosed with cancer, did she begin to understand how deeply entwined her feelings about her body are with her relationship to her mother. And, she realized, this is true for almost every woman: the voice inside our heads, the voice we use to talk to ourselves, which criticizes the size of our thighs or the softness of our stomachs—these are all-too-often the voices of our mothers.

Roth was determined to untangle her sense of self from her mother’s judgment. Working with a blind eighty-six-year-old wisewoman, Roth learned to distinguish between her mother’s influence and her own truer inner knowing. Roth began to see that it was not what her mother said or did that made her unhappy, but what Roth believed about herself because of what her mother said or did. For the first time, Roth began to understand how peace does not depend on external circumstances—you do not need to wait for someone else to change—it relies only on what you yourself choose to believe.

Written in her signature style—funny, self-deprecating, soulful—Love, Finally is Roth’s story of discovering the deeper awareness that set her free. This transformative, healing book is an essential roadmap for anyone who wants to repair their relationships with food, their families, and themselves.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

GENEEN ROTH is the author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestsellers Women Food and God, When Food Is Love, and Lost and Found. Her work has been translated into fourteen languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide. Over the past forty years, she has worked with thousands of women in workshops and retreats, deepening the themes that run through her books. Geneen has appeared on numerous national shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, 20/20, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and The View. She lives in California and Hawaii.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Chapter One

Sugar Smacks

It is June and time for my dreaded yearly physical. I am twelve years old. My mother walks with me to Dr. Modlin’s office on the corner of our block. We pass our next-door neighbor, Lucy Klein, standing outside in her bright yellow muumuu hoisting up an American flag. We nod hello as my mother quietly whispers, “Someone needs to tell her that lipstick is supposed to stay on her lips and not touch her nose or her chin.” We continue past Ethel and Fred Shapiro’s house with the window box of bright red geraniums in front and past Marion and Len Singer’s house with a rusted fountain in the yard.

Later, much later, my mother will call Dr. Modlin “a pig and a sadistic bastard” because he forgot to tell her that going cold turkey off the barbiturates he’d prescribed might kill her, which it almost did. But then, we lived on Eightieth Street in Jackson Heights, New York, and everyone on the block revered him because when you are Jewish, as we all were, a doctor is a step away from God.

I am frightened of Dr. Modlin. His wavy hair, his baritone voice, his rainfall of judgments about how fat I am. Every time I see him, which is weekly because he is my father’s tennis partner and best friend, he tells me I am fat. He asks when I am going to lose weight.

As we get closer to his office, which is at the bottom level of his house, I look at the tiny stained-glass window of a swan in the corner and try to calm myself down because with each step, I feel more and more agitated. I tell my mother I feel sick. She says I am imagining it. I tell her I don’t want to go into his office. She tells me I must go, that if I want to go to sleepaway camp, I must get a physical.

As soon as we ring the bell to his office, I throw up Sugar Smacks on his doorstep. My mother says, “Well, I guess you really were feeling sick.”

Pat, the doctor’s daughter, the one who told me she knew my mother before I did because she is four months older than I am, swings the carved wooden door open, notices the pool of half-digested cereal, and says, “Yuck.” My mother says, “Pat, please tell your mother that Genie was sick outside the front door.”

Inside Dr. Modlin’s cave of an office I shiver and my hands shake. I step on the scale. Eighty-eight pounds. Dr. Modlin clucks his tongue. “You’ve gained twenty-two pounds since last year; you are getting fatter and fatter. You need to lose weight now.” I turn to look at my mother, who is nodding. She thinks I am fat, too. The doctor listens to my breathing, thumps here and there for a few minutes, and tells me he is finished. As we are leaving, he says, “And you are allergic to chocolate, so if you are eating it, stop.”

On our way home, my mother says, “Well, that wasn’t so bad. It will be good for you to lose weight. And knowing that you are allergic to chocolate is also good.”

“But how does he know I am allergic to chocolate?”

“Doctors know things that we don’t,” she says.

That night, I eat five frozen Milky Ways.

My mother is standing next to me as I reach into the refrigerator and pull out Dannon vanilla yogurt. She says, “Yogurt is fattening, too.” I am fourteen and have been on a diet (or a binge) every day for three years.

I say, “What am I supposed to eat?”

She says, “As little as possible.”

The next day I eat only Grape Nuts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She doesn’t realize this because she is sleeping when I leave for school in the morning and out with her friends when I return. She doesn’t like to cook. She isn’t interested in what we eat or when, only the effect of it on my belly, arms, thighs.

When she took a baking class with her friend Mimi and brought home a warm cinnamon Bundt cake, my brother and I ate half of it immediately.

“That’s the last time I ever bake anything,” she said, furious. “It took hours to make it and it took you two minutes to eat. And besides, young lady,” she says, glowering at me. “A minute on the lips is years on the hips, don’t you know that by now?”

A month of eating two apples follows the month of eating nothing but Grape Nuts. I don’t think about nutrition. I don’t think about protein. I think only about calories and limiting what I eat to less than a thousand calories a day. Still, I gain weight. My body, a boy in my class says, is made of circles.

When I get off the bus from camp at the end of the summer, my mother looks at me and says, “You are so fat you could have rolled off that bus.” We go immediately to Dr. Mende, whose nurse Cathy, sits in front of a desk with fifteen bins of colored capsules.

Cathy has platinum frosted hair, wears bright blue eyeshadow, and a ring in the shape of a lion’s head on her index finger. I am captivated by the emerald-green and sunflower-yellow pills. Cathy weighs me, injects me with something, I don’t know what, I don’t ask, and counts out fourteen yellow pills for me to take home. I keep looking back at my mother, who is sitting on the brown fake leather chair in the office. She is nodding. “This is a good thing,” she says. “This will help you lose the weight you gained at camp. You can’t keep going like this. You are going to turn into one of those fat ladies in the circus.”

I stay on the diet pills for four years, transitioning from yellow to white to my favorites: the pretty green ones. I don’t lose more than the twenty pounds I lost that first month but I am afraid to go off the pills, convinced I will gain back the weight.

I am fifteen years old. My mother and I are walking to the basement. Down the carpeted steps of black-and-white circles, under the bronze angel chandelier with two dim bulbs in her hands. We turn right at the bottom and walk past my father’s cubbyhole of an office. The Al Hirshfeld cartoon of Judy Garland with a single Nina drawn into her microphone. The caricature in which my father’s head is almost as huge as the wad of dollar bills he is holding.

We walk farther into the bowels of the basement—past the old black camp trunk with the brass locks, the boxes of baby books, my Garden School cheerleading coat embroidered on the right side with my name—while my mother is chattering. “I want you to see my clothes and what I’ve hidden.”

She opens a gray metal door inside another storage room and reveals a long rack of clothes with their price tags still on them. The smell of cedar fills my nostrils, throat.

A black Chanel suit with gold buttons.

A pumpkin-orange gown with sequins.

Five silk blouses in varying colors of gray and white.

Seven dresses, all black.

Multiple pairs of pleated Mr. Dino wool pants in black, brown, white.

A dozen pairs of shoes stacked in their boxes on the floor.

The rack of clothes is so long that I can’t see its end.

“Mom,” I say. “My God. You have an entire store here. Look at these clothes!”

“Listen to me,” she says, “because your father is not past cutting us off without a penny. It’s important to get it all now. If he offers you something—anything—take it even if you don’t need it or like it. The day is coming when the supply will dry up, and you don’t want to be without.”

I nod. Take anything, everything, whether I want it or not. Catastrophe is coming.

Later that week, I will escort my new friend Linda to the cedar closet and show her the supply. We notice a pair of white pantaloons with pink-and-black polka dots. They look like clown pants. We decide to empty out my old clothes from the camp trunks and take them and the pantaloons to the thrift store in town.

Two days later, my mother is tearing around the house ranting about the missing bottoms to her very expensive Chester Weinberg outfit. They look like pantaloons, she says, have you seen them? I lie, say, “Of course not.” I call Linda on the phone, tell her we need to get over to the thrift store immediately.

We spend hours sifting through moldy clothes: old smelly pajamas, brocade blouses, pants so big they could fit both of us. Mink stoles with heads and teeth and eyes on them. No clown pants.

“Someone,” I tell Linda, “must have wanted to join the circus.”

Linda tells her father, who is a famous clothes designer, about the pantaloons. He tells Chester Weinberg, who is greatly amused by our misfortune and sends a new pair of pantaloons to my mother.

I am twenty-two. “It’s a group grope,” I tell my mother when my boyfriend, Will, and I move to Buffalo, New York, to live with Amelia and David, the couple from Omaha, Nebraska, we met while hitchhiking. “We switch partners every Monday after dinner.”

“What do you eat for dinner?” my mother asks.

“Really, Mom, that’s what you want to know?”

“Well, that and what you do after you switch.”

“Monday dinners are tuna fish casserole with Campbell’s mushroom soup and crumbled potato chips. After dinner we have wild loud sex.”

“I have two more questions,” my mother says: “How good is the sex and do you have sex with the woman or is it just the men who switch?”

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: The Dial Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2026
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0593733738
• ISBN 13: 9780593733738
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 256
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile