In feeding her addiction, Erica Rivera wasted away. There was nothing she wouldn’t try: starving herself, exercising obsessively, chewing and spitting, binging and purging. If she wasn’t the thinnest person in the room, she was nothing…
At twenty-four years old, Erica Rivera appeared to have it all: a B.A., two daughters, a successful husband, a house in the suburbs—and a great body. But under the surface, Erica was struggling with an addiction. What began with a diet to lose the baby weight after her second daughter’s birth spiraled into a self-destructive obsession with dieting, bingeing, purging, exercising, and, ultimately, anorexia.
Although the addiction to her eating disorder, and the depression that stemmed from it, nearly cost Erica her life, it wasn’t until her very young daughters began to imitate her actions that she decided to get help. Tracing her disordered eating and body-image patterns across three generations of women in her family, Erica was able to get to the root of her own problems and show her daughters where happiness truly lies: in loving oneself.
Insatiable is the raw, candid, and strangely uplifting story of one woman’s plunge into the depths of addiction and her fragile fight to climb back out. With plainspoken sincerity and self-effacing humor, Erica Rivera chronicles a lifelong battle with obsession, depression, and self-hatred. Though her road to recovery has not been easy, Erica is reassuring in her honesty—and inspirational in her triumph.
Excerpt
“Erica, my recommendation is for in-patient treatment.”
The statement hits me like a sledgehammer. Every internal function—heartbeat, breath, hunger pangs—stops. If anorexia were an airplane, I’d be the passenger watching the nose-dive into the ground from a window seat. Of all the possible treatment options—partial outpatient, intensive outpatient, one-on-one—I never fathomed this.
The fear kicks my brain into gear and the consequences of hospitalization come roaring into consciousness. I’ll miss Christmas, Julia’s birthday, New Year’s. I list all the phone calls I’ll have to make: to my ex, my parents, my brother, my boss. If I’m not released by January, I’ll have to withdraw from school.
Suddenly, tears held hostage for so many months spurt from my eyes.
“No, no, no!” I whimper, drawing my knees into my chest, rocking myself, clenching my fists. I want to bolt from the chair—hospital attire be damned—and race down the hallway and into the streets. I want to sprint barefoot to my daughters, scoop them up, take them to bed with me, and hibernate beneath the covers until this all goes away.
Reviews
"This is a deeply felt, moving account of turning obsessions into passions, of becoming free to meet love on its own terms. Written in an original style and propelling structure, INSATIABLE reveals the heart of a young woman, struggling to face her demons. The triumph is that she managed to become whole.”
---Natalie Goldberg, author of Old Friend from Far Away and Writing Down the Bones
"Erica Rivera has written a fierce, difficult, honest book about living with, an almost dying from, food disorders and anorexia. As readers, we experience the painful, intimate details of a life taken over by the author's desperate struggle to make herself so thin she becomes barely a shadow. We see the enormous cost of this illness, and feel gratitude and a sense of hope as Ms. Rivera takes on her demons, and finds her way back to a life worth living."
--Deborah Keenan, author of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected
Poems
"The most candid, poignant memoir of war with one’s body that I’ve ever read...INSATIABLE is dark, yet richly funny; raw yet refreshingly candid. Somehow, Rivera weaves a story that is both terribly sad, and, at times, absolutely hilarious."
--Katie Drummond, www.trueslant.com
“…once her eating disorders take off, the book takes off, too, and Rivera hits her stride. She writes passionately and eloquently about the voices in her head that berate her and belittle her for eating just about anything at all, and the "punishment" she must endure afterward…Rivera is to be applauded for her unflinching look at the deeply unpleasant details of her affliction…”
--Laurie Hertzel of the Star Tribune
"A gripping account of life inside an eating disorder and how one individual escaped through the bonds of motherhood, INSATIABLE is an inspiring personal memoir of turning struggle into triumph."
--Ira M. Sacker, M.D., author of Regaining Your Self" and "Dying to Be Thin
"INSATIABLE is not, like any memoir about an eating disorder, an easy read. There are binges and paeans to suicide and disturbing moments when Rivera leaves her two sleeping toddlers to go for a run. I found the chapters in which Rivera plans to commit suicide the most compelling, and they most starkly show the depths to which Rivera sank over the course of her eating disorder.
Yes, there are dramatic, detailed descriptions of food here and what Rivera did with it, everything from amassing it to hiding it to chewing and spitting it. In one scene, her daughter's keen sense of smell sniffs out the binge Rivera is sneaking. In many ways, this is telling, in that Rivera is able to hide her affliction from many around her, including her parents (despite a teenage eating disorder episode), but her daughters bluntly call her on her issues. Rivera, to her credit, does not gloss over these moments, or the ones where she ignores her daughters to focus on Ana and BB (anorexia and Binge B---h, as she calls them). By personifying her eating disorder, she helps make it relatable.
Rivera doesn't necessarily get into where her eating disorder came from, though she touches on the instability of her childhood; instead she focuses on the damage her eating disorder did to her thinking, her body and those around her, including men she dates after her divorce. It's to her credit as a writer that some of the most beautifully written scenes are the most unnerving. Other reviewers have pointed out that Rivera was self-involved; indeed, that seems to me the very point of this memoir, that food, above all else, was what ruled her (well, food combined with body image). Even when doctors questioned her motives, she resisted, enthralled by her affair with Ana.
I've read many eating disorder memoirs and while, to a degree, they all echo each other, due to the nature of the subject matter, Rivera's stands out both in covering the children and family life, and the nuance of the writing. While extreme, Rivera's body dysmorphia will also, sadly, be familiar to many women."
--Rachel Kramer Bussel, creator of Cupcakes Take The Cake blog and editor of multiple erotic anthologies
“INSATIABLE: A Young Mother’s Struggle with Anorexia” is a memoir of Erica Rivera’s heartrending struggle with an eating disorder as a young mother of two daughters.
Rivera, a local Twin Cities author, tells her story with intense candor, engaging humor, and at times, in overwhelmingly stark detail. Her story is a piercing and vivid recount of the very real consequences of eating disorders—isolation, depression, physical deterioration and struggle for life. Her story is poignantly raw and vulnerable; and at times feel like too much of both.
As much as sometimes you may wish there were far fewer details of the eating disorder, there is always the compulsion to turn the page to find the hope you so desperately want to hear her find.
The hope is there, at the end of the book, in the last few pages. It is a small, but strong and determined flame of recovery that Rivera celebrates and cares for with all the grit the eating disorder took from her.
Rivera treats her story with the great respect and somberness the struggle deserves, while at the same time using her finely-honed creative writing skills to deliver unexpected and sometimes tear-inducing humor. Her skill as a writer is evident and her ability to take a hard look at her life is admirable.
When asked by a reporter what she wanted people to know about eating disorders and why INSATIABLE came to be, Rivera said: “When I was anorexic, I felt so omnipotent. Now I can’t stress enough that eating disorders cause serious harm and they can be fatal. Had I know then what I know now, I’m sure I would have made different choices.”
INSATIABLE is painful to read and at the same time hard to put down. This may not be a book to read in the middle of an eating disorder. It may be too difficult to read, too much pain to absorb, too many details to see. But, for all the difficult details, it is a story of hope. It is a sure demonstration that light can be seen in the darkest hours.”
--Reviewed by Jillian Croll, The Emily Program’s Director of Education, Research and Program Development
"Very real and raw."
--www.carrotsncake.com
"The writing is awesome."
--Vincent Zandri, author of As Catch Can
