Eating Disorders

...ba href=/eating disorder/a/b, attempted suicide and obsessive love affairs, Rogers falls for a tall, dark and enigmatic man called Dan.

From the start it is an intense relationship, perhaps unhealthily so.

A year or two into it she suspects he has a drinking problem; after several years she knows it is alcoholism.

But knowledge and naming don't necessarily help, not when you are in love, and the story is thus not so much about living with an alcoholic but something broader and more fundamental, where Rogers is forced to confront the heady irrationality of her love, with its tortuous pleasures and pains, and the truth about her own dependence on a dysfunctional partner.

The first flush of love over, Dan begins spending more time at the local pub, deriding Rogers and her literary and artistic pursuits (despite being an artist himself), keeping his room in a state of filth, hiding great stacks of bottles in and under the house, regularly peeing in the garden and maintaining a level of personal hygiene that would make a street derelict blush.

Added to this are the denial, mendacity, depression, paranoia, unreliability and generally mercurial nature of the alcoholic.

What seems so solid about a relationship one day can seem so flimsy the next.

Together they make art as well as love, but it soon sours: he, disdaining her professional career as a designer, is determined to suffer for his art and certainly never make money from it.

When her writing becomes a relief and a necessary means of self-e...

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