Life without cheese: worth living, but complicated!

For reasons relating to nursing, I'm on a no-dairy diet for the foreseeable (nursing) future. Yes, I'm now one of those people. What follows is... something? Advice, I guess, fully on the nursing-mother end of things, or really for anyone in a similar conundrum.

The thing is, I'd apparently been on an all-dairy diet previously, given how difficult this has been. I thought of myself as someone who was sort of squicked out by plain cow's milk, but it turns out this was very selective squeamishness-veganism as it were, and that once you put together steamed milk in espresso drinks, milk in cereal, cheese (including those soft ones I couldn't eat while pregnant), baked goods, chocolate croissants in particular, and just generally eating foods whose ingredients I couldn't begin to guess, that's a lot of dairy! I keep returning to the Kate Moss line about nothing tasting as good as skinny feels, and thinking how false it is. Because unsurprisingly, eliminating cheese, ice cream, iced lattes, and pastries from my diet has made me thinner than pre-pregnancy and I would prefer the version with food. (My days also involve library baby time, not runways, which might enter into it.)

That said, I'm trying to get creative about this whole no-dairy thing. After all, there are people who give up dairy to be chic and wellness-y! Which comes in handy I suppose when needing to eliminate the ingredient for other reasons. So many vegan bakeries! So many milk imitations to put in coffee for an additional charge of 50 cents!

That said, my impression - perhaps Toronto-specific - is that Western approximations of dairy-including foods are ugh, and that the answer is (some) East Asian food. With that in mind, I went to H-Mart and rather than buying almost everything, went with full-on everything. Stroller is useful for this.

Going with cuisines that wouldn't be expected to contain (much) dairy also has the plus of not being the thing where it's assumed that you're eliminating dairy as part of a general all-ingredients-pose-problems diet. It's really just dairy I can't eat (at least, as far as I know at this point; I am jinxing myself), which makes me that much more interested in the presence of all other ingredients. If I can't put milk in cereal, I'm not going to rule out soy milk as well. If baked goods can't contain milk or butter, am not about to leave out eggs and flour. And yeah it's probably the moment to get past whichever near-vegetarianism I'd landed on.

I'm trying to treat this as an opportunity to buy the fancy groceries I wouldn't otherwise when I was still spending (redacted) per grocery trip on cheese. I have visions of complicated meals, of the surf and turf varieties. The reality: three halves of Montreal-style bagel with - because I'm running out of non-cheese topping ideas (enough peanut butter, enough avocado) and can't look at another egg - tahini. A steep learning curve, this.

Breast is OK-est

It can be challenging in the beginning.

That much is admitted even by breastfeeding proponents, but what "challenging" meant remains remained mysterious until it all played out.

First came the span of days when baby's eating needs exceeded my milk production. And the things you're meant to do to help this (insofar as it even can be helped - there's basically the day when the milk comes in and that day hadn't yet come) are, eat well and get rest, neither of which were possible what with the days-old baby in the house. This was, at the time, all-out terrifying.

Eventually I spoke on the phone with a lactation consultant who (for free! Canada!) explained everything. But first, the healthcare hotline I called instructed me to feed every 1.5 hours, as in to *start* each feed at those intervals, which effectively meant feeding continuously because newborns eat more slowly. It didn't make sense. It still, in retrospect, doesn't make sense. I was also advised - as I later learned this hotline advises everybody, no matter the reason for the call, but I had not realized this - to go to the emergency room.

Then came engorgement, something I suspect is discussed less than it ought to be because it sounds vaguely erotic, although it is, I promise, anything but. It started with armpit pain, then became what it sounds like, and ultimately escalated to a very frightening shivering spell, where I was just shaking as if I had a fever, but I didn't (yet another emergency room near-miss), and this is a thing that can happen, but won't necessarily, so you don't learn about it ahead of time. This is the much-awaited milk coming in, but it paradoxically makes it more difficult to feed. It will then repeat itself, if less dramatically, on the occasions when the baby sleeps for more than 3 consecutive hours in the night.

Next were the three or so weeks of intense pain every left-side feed. (Present from the start, but initially overshadowed by the rest of what was happening.) Of the there's-nothing-to-do-about-it sort (not the famous bad latch, just something about how my own body apparently works), so I was advised to take over-the-counter painkillers, which I was already taking what with having recently given birth. Took a bunch of those!

Eventually the feeding bit itself got sorted. Enough so that despite the above, I'd fall into the category of women for whom nursing - thus far, at least - works. The above is, again, what it looks like, or can look like, when it works. With enough maternity leave to give it a proper go (though even in Canada, recommendations for length of nursing well exceed leave), with a body that wound up being capable of this, and a baby prepared to do her part. My nursing's-been-a-breeze privilege is showing, except for the few days when I thought (and had medical reason to think) it wasn't working and that my baby was going to starve. And now - now! - I can appreciate the positives. That it's easier than preparing bottles, for one thing, but also, the bonding bit - present from the start, of course - is more front-and-center when the throbbing-pain part has subsided.

*****

There's the general advice for those first few weeks, aimed at all new parents but especially those feeding the baby from their bodies: Just focus on the baby, and ignore what can be ignored, and let those assembled around you deal with everything else. This makes approximately no sense, either. It assumes a next-level support system, some sort of amalgam of the best of what everyone on online mom forums describes, without any of the worst. There's this assumption that chores are things like dusting or scrubbing the bath, i.e. that can be ignored. Well! Laundry and dishes, those really can't be put off indefinitely. (Big regret: not temporarily switching to disposable dishware for 2-3 weeks at the start.)

Basically, the ideal situation for breastfeeding assumes, then exceeds, such things as 'supportive partner' or 'maternity leave'. It assumes a woman sort of permanently reclined, emperor-style for (at least) the first six weeks, getting non-intrusively fussed after by an army of people whose single focus is making sure she feeds the baby. Who think breastfeeding is a worthy pursuit (maybe hard to believe in some haute-crunchy milieus, but not everyone does!), but who will also be supportive if for whatever reason nursing doesn't work out and formula is needed.

Which leaves that other bit: If you're the only one who's feeding your baby, and your baby needs to eat every couple of hours, you're not sleeping. (For your partner to support the endeavor, they're not sleeping either.) And you're not going anywhere. Or maybe you are, but bringing the baby, but if it's winter in Canada and too cold/icy to go out with a baby, then yeah, no, not going outside. The latter only becomes an issue, I found, when the former has (in its limited way) resolved. That is, if you're getting three hours of sleep a night, it's hard to get stir-crazy. If, however, you're at 7 or so, albeit interrupted, the outside world again seems quite interesting, but what are you meant to do about this? In my case, it's meant leaving the apartment when possible, but trying to accept that Fahrenheit single digit days, we're staying in. There's a mall nearby, and we're regulars. There are baby fitness classes semi-nearby (for mothers' fitness, that is, but apparently there's a way to bring a baby?); those have had to wait until weather permits a trip to semi-nearby.

To go the nursing route, you have to believe in it, which means reading, yes, but not getting bogged down in contrarian and feminist literature about how it's all pointless and correlation is not causation and you may think you're doing the right thing but Actually you're just engaging in the choice that happens to be favored by the Brooklyn haute-clog-wearing set. (I used to live in Brooklyn and once had mid-range clogs, but foolishly did not time that part of my life for the baby-having one. But I'm sure it made some sort of cultural impact on me all the same.) If you're breastfeeding, you're in many key ways opting into being pseudo-pregnant for another year or so. And pregnancy? Worth it for the end result, but not the most fun in and of itself. There, it's the difference between baby and no baby. Breastfeeding or not, it's between one sort of feeding and another, so the stakes are a touch lower.

Some of the rules (the ones that drove me up the wall, at least) go away, and you can resume eating sushi and runny cheeses and soft-boiled eggs and lox and and and you get the idea. (I'm still in the mode where I neeeeed to eat these sorts of foods as often as possible.) But alcohol is either forbidden (according to one government pamphlet) or just needs to be very carefully timed, to the point that it is, in effect, forbidden. (After full-on abstaining during pregnancy, and being too tired for the first month or so after, I have on a couple occasions reminded myself what beer tastes like, but what an entire beer is like, that I have only the vaguest recollection.) Curious about those actually-effective skincare products you've been reading about (now that you've gone and started looking a decade older, all at once)? Nope, not starting on those, either. Coffee... I guess that's also something you're supposed to avoid, but there's also the thing where you're supposed to stay awake on no sleep...

And maybe the most daunting: Interested in not having quite as much of a paunch aka not still looking pregnant three months in? Exercise needs to be carefully timed in terms of feeds because there are only certain points in the nursing cycle where jogging could possibly be comfortable. And making any sort of change to your diet is risky because - as when pregnant - it's not just you you're feeding. So, eat up! But you also maybe don't want to swing too far in the food-restriction-is-evil direction, when you know full well the reason you're where you're at is a continued third-trimester approach to, specifically, salt-and-pepper potato chips. Or when your physique goal remains fitting comfortably (as versus squeezing) into the cold-weather winter coat that cost $$$ a few years ago, such that you're for sure not about to buy another one, but now, when you try to zip it up, it feels like the zipper's about to break. I don't know.

*****

Ultimately, the answer to why I've gone this route (thus far - always add the thus-far because you never know and also because in some estimations, being a completist as it were means lasting for years plural) is, because it's what's done, what I started doing, and it's maybe the better way, maybe? For reasons it's not so much that I can't articulate as that I'm not sure about, having read conclusions in all directions, and having zero expertise in this area myself. I don't believe, in general, that natural is better, or even means much of anything. I don't feel cooped up in the sense of wanting to run away with the circus. I do, however, eagerly look forward to the days when my now-infant can join me in eating a sandwich.

Post-postpartum

The verdict is given at the six-week appointment: Are you back to normal? Your normal, not Gisele's, but both may seem similarly implausible. Six weeks is when - at least if you're nursing - your uterus is supposed to have shrunk down to its original size. This is a giant unspoken euphemism for: if you still look pregnant at that point, it's the pregnancy-exacerbated addiction to salt-and-pepper potato chips, but not pregnancy itself. (Or just... pregnancy more generally, which involves more than an expanded uterus? But anyway.)

The personal: It has been 10 weeks and while I feel a bunch more with-it than I did, say, 5 weeks ago, I still look... not just bigger than pre-pregnancy, but somewhat pregnant. I had and hadn't expected this. All bodies are different, so there's no actual answer to how permanent this and all other bodily changes might be.

There's all sorts of empowering language about this online: You just created and birthed a whole new human being! Be easy on yourself! Which, sure. But then there's life in the clothes limbo where the maternity clothes are excessive (or just too dreary to keep wearing), but all pre-pregnancy clothes - pants at least - seem like they belong to a small doll of some kind, so little of your current body would they possibly contain. (Admittedly this was the case with those black Levis from the get-go. What was I thinking there?)

And then this is all paired with the not-vanity physical aspects of recovering from childbirth - as much as a line can even be drawn.

And if it's winter in Canada, and your preferred form of exercise is jogging, and the only gym nearby costs $180 a month and that's with a discount, getting back (?) in shape - at whatever size - is a challenge.

What I've found, maybe of use to others, maybe not:

-Move more, but don't diet. This is essential if nursing but probably the way to go regardless. So I'm forcing myself to jog, a bit, despite the terrible weather. (High school winter track, in an only slightly less-cold climate, was good preparation.) Also to do many dog-walks I might otherwise pass off to spouse or dog-walker. But apart from trying harder to remember that vegetables exist (even in winter, in Canada) and staying away from potato chips, I'm not changing how I eat.

There are practical aspects to this choice as well as values-ish ones. Practical being, having a newborn means scarfing down something, and quickly, when time permits. (I have not turned into a different person, so there are not casseroles or bean soups going into my freezer on Sunday nights. But now is not the moment for the David Tanis recipe where use of foraged asparagus is encouraged.) Values more like, I have a daughter, one who for better or worse will not be coming of age on the Upper East Side in the 1990s. Worse perhaps global-politics-wise but in terms of having the option of avoiding thinness-is-everything culture, better, I hope?

It can hard if you grew up in that culture to look at your newly-very-pudgy waistline and not think, this is a problem something must be done about. So I sort of allow myself to think this, but then remind myself that whatever the build is that results from eating normal food and getting some exercise is the one I'm best off having.

-'Invest' in jeans in the size you actually are. Just do it, don't overthink. I resisted doing so at first, both because I believed (correctly) that my build at 3 weeks postpartum or whatever would not continue, and because I figured (incorrectly!) I'd be fine alternating between sweats and leggings indefinitely. Turns out, it does wonders for a sense of normalcy, of resumption of life outside a postpartum haze, to put on some pants - yes, with stretch - that have a zipper.

But... get nice jeans. I don't necessarily mean $200 (a road I personally have yet to go down, now or otherwise), just ones that you genuinely like, and that don't feel temporary. Because who knows! They very well might not be temporary, and you don't want to be aiming for size goals rather than in-shape-ness ones all because you're sick of wearing crummy jeans in your 'just for now' size. I ordered two pairs from Everlane - one in black, inspired by Andréa in "Call My Agent!", and another in dark denim inspired by my need for a pair of regular jeans that can close around the waist - that are so nice that this will be the silver lining if I wind up having to get rid of all my previous pants.

-In-person clothes-shopping is not going to happen. Certainly not if you're carrying your baby in a carrier, or exclusively nursing (which in my experience means you never have more than 2 hours apart from baby, and get antsy after 30 minutes). Or if it does, don't expect to try anything on in the store. Normally I don't do online shopping. I have gotten over this.

-Accessories, always the obvious choice when clothes are for whatever reason complicated. But shoes are tricky because walking around with a baby (in winter, at least) is limiting style-wise even to those who don't normally wear anything all that impractical. (Got a pair of Blundstone boots in the third trimester and am trying to remember that I own other shoes, but the traction they provide on the perma-ice outside is making this difficult.) Bags, same - whatever it is will need to fit some baby-stuff, if not necessarily nearly as much as diaper bags suggest. But I ordered myself a bracelet (this, from Shlomit Ofir), which just arrived, and now feel massively more elegant. Have painted my nails red to go with. And the velvet scrunchies I bought in my last third-trimester outing-of-sorts (tacked onto a trip to the dentist) do liven up a sweatpants look.

Inside-outside

Hello again, reader(s), from the other side. Necessary short version: All is well! Baby is great! Blog will remain my own holdings-forth and will not be about the baby herself, both to preserve her privacy and because there is at this point not a tremendous amount even to overshare if I were so inclined. (Newborns eat, sleep, and go to the euphemistic bathroom. Mine is no exception in this regard.) 

The difference between pregnant and not is hard to overstate, if a whole lot less about physique than I'd have imagined. True, I no longer look nine months pregnant, which is of course a good thing seeing as I'm not, but size-wise my goal is not a bikini, or even jeans, but to fit into my usual winter coat by January, when it will likely become necessary. Mostly, it's about being able to take a shower and not panic that maybe it's too hot for the baby. To eat lox and soft cheeses, but also just to eat a bite of something that tastes a bit off and not think, oh no, food poisoning, which bacteria could it have been?? To walk down an unsteady construction-site ramp into a Krispy Kreme near the doctor's office, knowing that the baby is across the street with my husband, and not inside of me.

And I suppose it's nice to know, principle of the thing, that I could have a drink, even if practically speaking, this is something has to wait until you can be sure your baby can make it two whole hours between feeds. Those Rodenbachs I bought just prior (and made a habit of knocking over in the fridge in search of food over the past many months, so who knows what state they're in) are still there, and I'm sure I'll get to them at some point. 

Oh, and it's amazing not to feel like I'm going to faint every day between breakfast and lunch, no matter how many iron supplements and snacks I'd throw at the problem. To sleep deeply and (sort of) comfortably, even if for limited stretches of time. And all of this after what was, on paper, an easy-enough pregnancy. (No morning sickness - just food aversions - and none of the serious pregnancy complications.)

Of course, there's also childbirth, which is reputed to be painful (even with pain medication), and with good reason. WWPD will not be host to a play-by-play of my own experience, but let it be known, an experience was had. One that, much like pregnancy itself, is tough to categorize as easy or difficult. I have not, shall we say, rejoined my local running group just yet. Recovery... takes a moment, and I write this from somewhere in that moment. Certain basic actions - going on a short walk, or picking something up from the floor - sort of went from being near-impossible for one reason to being similarly challenging for another. But at least things are trending towards easier rather than more difficult.

I've heard plenty about the claustrophobia that can come of feeling tethered to a baby, and, sure? You are tethered! If you breastfeed and are still in the time period where you aren't yet supposed to pump, your baby-less outings are by definition short ones. (Short and mildly nerve-wracking, but possible.) But the version with an actual baby is a whole lot more fun than where it's that what's stopping you from trying the ultra-hip nail salon you've been contemplating for a year is your own dread of the walk from one end of a subway platform alllll the way to the other, or concerns about the fumes, or the (remote but you never know) possibility of infection. That's really the big difference - when you're pregnant, depending your... outlook? belief system? life experience?, a baby feels like a hoped-for outcome you can't quite count on, and could jinx at any time. Whereas once there's a baby, that much is, at least, for sure.

Ready or not

Hello, this time from one day past my due date. This means, I suppose, that the end is in sight. Also that I feel as though I should be offering up either profundities on The Experience, or at the very least, some sort of account, public but basically for myself, of this rather key transitional life moment. But my mind isn't quite up to profound, so random-assortment it is:

-There is no "ready." In some senses everything is flawlessly lined up, and I'm old-but-not-ancient (although I certainly feel ancient), and yes, have been with my husband a long time. I have zero qualms or ambivalences about the change that's to come. But I mean! I have never been a parent before! I have never given birth before! Yes, I took a childbirth class, but that was so abstract! I have no idea what any of this is like, really, having barely been around babies, just on a practical level. I know enough to know it isn't like first getting a puppy, but if we're talking personal experiences I can relate this to, that's all I've got.

-Had thought by this point we'd be living in a two-bedroom but we are not. I want to say that this feels like (to put it in millennial terms) an adulting fail, but then I think about how I'd feel if we'd just spent our every cent on a two-bedroom the same square footage as our 1br rental, and one in a less convenient spot, and am thinking staying put for the time being may have been the way to go.

-I have not batch-cooked anything. The freezer has, like, ice cream, gnocchi, and Korean rice cakes. The car seat... I mean there is a car seat, newly-purchased and Canadian safety standards approved, but it hasn't been installed because there's no car. (Am still not entirely sure I don't want to come home from the hospital via what is, after all, a door-to-door public bus route.) But there are bags with stuff in them from lists and that's a thing you're supposed to have done. I just have to keep reminding myself that the advice online is for people who don't live in urban downtowns.

-It's not so much 'getting my body back' I look forward to as being able to reach things in cabinets. I'd anticipated the not being able to bend over thing (and... you sort of still can, it's just awkward.) But if you're already short and then can't get as close as usual to countertops or the sink or whatever, your options in the getting a glass down department quickly become limited. And fine, I also miss wearing regular pants - even if these are going to be pants in a different dress size than before (as seems inevitable, at least for a while), if they're not sweatpants or leggings, that would be a plus. Along similar lines: I'd imagined no-alcohol for nine months would be at least a bit more noticeable than it was. Meanwhile I've been so much more fixated on what it will be like to again be able to eat absolutely whatever (except romaine lettuce, I suppose, which is off-limits to all), without wondering about pathogens. I don't even mean the usual list (sushi, etc.). I just mean the ability to eat whatever and not have to think about it. OK and I also mean a very specific bagel with lox and salmon roe, sold at an establishment not that far from my apartment.

-Was listening to a BBC Woman's Hour podcast about the immediate postpartum period, which some are now calling the "fourth trimester." The guest was explaining that it's actually not super helpful to tell new mothers that they look great-as-in-healthy, because it puts pressure on them to deny any struggles. Something similar is true, I think, of pregnancy itself. Without going overboard with haranguing acquaintances for innocuous/well-meaning small talk, I'd say that... yeah, it can be frustrating to hear that you look unwell (which if you're as baseline pale as I am, plus your iron levels are so-so, you will hear, often), and to hear from passersby that you're clearly doing well, when... you haven't slept through the night in months, and have had to stop work earlier than anticipated due to almost fainting while administering a midterm. There's a binary to how these things are discussed - an easy or difficult pregnancy - that I don't think quite covers how these actually go. And it is, for obvious reasons, the "easy" bit that's easier to publicly discuss. 

"As if it were nothing"

I knew Taffy Brodesser-Akner's feature on the status of the diet industry in an ostensibly post-diet culture would be brilliant before I started reading it, given author and angle alike, and yes, it sure was. Diets are passé, but eating less to lose weight is not. If you'd ever wondered about how that's supposed to work (I had! I had wondered this!), you need to get to it.

It's a deeply reported piece, as well as a personal one. Brodesser-Akner leads with the reported, not the autobiographical, but it's hard to picture a story working at the level it does if it were written by a journalist, however talented, who lacked personal experience in that area. The personal angle comes through most clearly in the conclusion:

A skinny woman was eating a cupcake and talking on her phone, tonguing the icing as if she were on ecstasy. Another skinny woman drank a regular Dr Pepper as if it were nothing, as if it were just a drink. I continued walking and stopped in front of a diner and watched through the window people eating cheeseburgers and French fries and talking gigantically. All these people, I looked at them as if they were speaking Mandarin or discussing string theory, with their ease around their food and their ease around their bodies and their ability to live their lives without the doubt and self-loathing that brings me to my arthritic knees still.

I've read through a handful of the piece's nearly a thousand comments, which was enough to see I was not the only reader to wonder about the "ease" Brodesser-Akner says she witnessed. It seems possible, I think, both to respect her response to seeing thin women eating non-diet foods, and to question whether "as if it were nothing" is an approach to food our society ever really allows women, of any size. Which is something she argues, or at least suggests, elsewhere in the piece, when she writes, "A woman’s body isn’t neutral. A woman’s body is everyone’s business but her own."

What that conclusion describes might be called thin privilege - that is, the blithe indifference of the thin to the struggles of those for whom every bite is fraught. But is thin privilege, in that understanding, something all or even most thin women have ever experienced firsthand? Is it the typical experience of slimness?

Let me be clear: In a society that stigmatizes being fat, it's advantageous not to be fat. In one that valorizes thinness, it helps still more to be thin. If you're someone who has never had to wonder if you'd fit in an airplane seat, or if the store has a large enough size, if a doctor has never suggested you lose weight, you probably can't get what such experiences are like, and may have never even considered them. If I were privilege-categories dictionary dictator, that would be Thin Privilege.

But how many thin people - how many women especially - experience "ease around their food and... their bodies"? Is that thin privilege? Once you include people who were once fat but are currently thin due to tremendous effort, and once you add to those the ones who'd be not-fat regardless but remain thinner still due to (yup) tremendous effort, you're talking about a whole lot of... effort. (See Alana Massey's excellent essay on this phenomenon.) Some of that effort crosses the line into diagnosable eating disorder territory. That which does not will nevertheless often take up huge amounts of time and mental energy that could be going absolutely anywhere else. Throw into the mix women whose thinness is the result of stress or illness - here, see Maris Kreizman's - and you've got quite a lot of women who absolutely reap the unfair advantages of thinness, but maybe don't experience thinness as "ease."

I point all this out not to say that well actually, thin women have it worse, or even as bad. Certainly not. Rather, it's that because these two things - societal weight obsession and sexism - are intertwined the way they are, they're that much more difficult to dismantle. In theory, "wellness" and so forth might have proven a great equalizer, reminding that you can be living well, or not, at any size. As Brodesser-Akner's piece makes painfully clear, it's done nothing of the kind.

Dieting has long been the default (not universal, but yes, default) state of women's food consumption, as well as an activity engaged in by women and men who - because society has deemed them fat - are trying to lose weight. The concept of "clean eating" manages to somehow merge existing fatphobia with a purity requirement extending to all women. It's not a chipping away at thin privilege. It's the worst of both worlds.

"Nuts, how many in one serving?"

Elle addresses a topic new to women's magazines: what is it, exactly, that's "making us all fat"? Who exactly is meant by this first-person-plural isn't clear - the accompanying photos (of models, of the author) show slender women. Are we really all fat? In womensmagazineland (and Elle is usually the best of the bunch!), yes, we really are all fat. All of us are works in progress, in need of some kind of cleanse or lifestyle change or euphemistic improvement. Or so it was - the pendulum seems to have swung, and we're no longer in euphemism territory. We're back where we started, with already-slim women shaming one another for having not chucked entire food groups. Women's mags, too, have joined the backlash against PC, and are now back to triggering disordered eating through a more direct approach.

Two things jumped out at me about the piece. The first was the title (or maybe just the Twitter title, Twitter being where I found it), which had something to do with "green juice," which is apparently making all of us fat. Even those of us who still haven't gotten around to trying it. The strip mall with the Japanese supermarket and Trader Joe's won out as today's excursion. But I shouldn't get complacent; sushi is also making us fat. And bagels, although that's not going to surprise anyone who's ever come across an article of this genre before.

Actually, Justine Harman's framing of this piece - which is an interview with a lecturer in This Is Why You're Fat Studies - is brilliant. The gist of it is that all of the "Cleaneatalian" foods are - paradoxically - the ones that are making us fat. Skim lattes, green juice, and almonds - almonds! - are the problem. (Typing this reminded me of some almonds a few feet away; they're now at hand. Said almonds are at this very moment in the process of making me fat.) Of course, what sort of "problem" are we talking about? The article's aimed at the kind of woman who is not, in fact, fat. Or it's aimed at flattering the reader into thinking she's already slim but could be thinner still. It's not (just), in other words, a service-journalism piece alerting readers that the proverbial lowfat Snackwells are actually more fattening than fruit, especially if you respond to the reassuring packaging by eating the entire package. It's more along the lines of, you think you're doing everything? You're not - there's more.

Which brings us to the other thing that jumped out: Harman describes the diet-peddler she's interviewing as "the kind of glowing brunette you might see shopping at Whole Foods in lightweight cashmere while you're wearing your linty Lulus and snacking on Snapea Crisps." This is some of the most impeccable lifestyle writing I've ever seen. Harman managed to make wearing Lululemon to Whole Foods sound shabby.

A glutinous post

According to South Park, gluten is very dangerous. Josh Modell criticizes South Park for being late on the gluten game, but wait! Jane Brody's column today is on "a real condition called non-celiac gluten sensitivity, or NCGS." Of course Brody has to specify that it's "real," because the default assumption is that non-celiac gluten avoidance relates to the tendency of pasta's deliciousness to prevent those Zara jeans from closing comfortably.

Anyway, it's a tough one. It seems likely that a) this is a thing, or to use the scientific term, "real," while b) dieting is also real, and the wish to lose 15 pounds discreetly is more common than gluten insensitivity of any kind. As a 21st-century American in the demographic for this, I can say I've at the very least met gluten-avoiders who fall into all three categories (that is, celiac; not-celiac-but-medical; and trendy-and-dieting). There's a danger in under-diagnosis, but also one in normalizing the treatment of common food items as poison in the general population. I mean, of course it's (kind of) good for the few who can't eat gluten that avoiding it has become trendy, but by the same token, if every population that either can't or won't eat an ingredient had such luck, there'd be nothing left. And then there's that other set of people - "orthorexia" may be the official term, but there are plenty who are... whatever the equivalent is of what gluten insensitivity is compared to celiac - who suffer disproportionately from these societal notions.

What would be ideal, then, is if the coverage of whichever sensitivity or intolerance would be done in such a way as to raise awareness that this condition is out there, without inviting readers to assume, by default, that whatever it is is no longer to be considered food, because Science. Personally, I have no idea how this could be done, but it would be great if it somehow happened.

"Bambi legs"

So. What is this? Humblebrag-the-article? ("With pale skin, red hair, gangly arms, and clumsy legs, I’ve been told I look like either a manga character or a high school senior. There is no mature beauty about me. [She is 30 and has a baby.] Rather than mourn that fact, I dress to embrace it.") Trolling? ("What grown woman wants to risk looking childish in an expensive designer dress? That would be me.") Something in between? ("[L]ike my mother before me, who got carded well into her thirties, I’m often mistaken for a student.")

Or is it some sort of personality issue on display (or - it's writing! - that of the author's narrative persona)? ("Undeniably, there’s a small thrill, a tiny power in rejecting other women’s standards, in playing the provocateur. And in knowing firsthand the one sure way to win the attention of every man and piss off every woman in any given room: Wear thigh-high socks.")

Or is just obliviousness? ("Kate [Moss] herself was a revelation, a one-woman shift in the beauty paradigm who made it seem possible that there was an upside to being built like I was.") It might be super-highbrow thinspiration, which is, if nothing else, not something one sees every day. Not a genre one sees much of, which is probably for the best.

Whatever it is, it's strangely compelling. Well done, Stephanie La Cava. I may be a year older and an unthinkable number of pounds heavier than you are, I may identify with exactly none of that article, but it was, I suppose, food for thought.

Speaking of food, see also her Grub Street Diet. Although it, too, should probably come with a trigger warning of some kind.

"Squirmy"

When does adulthood begin? There are the articles regularly placing it older and older, according to the latest neuroscience. The 'the human brain only stops developing at' articles, according to which I, at the tail end of 30, am probably too young to be making any major life decisions.

But the real ambiguity is the one surrounding college students. We've decided that they're too old to live at home but too young to pay their own way. If 60% of 20-somethings and early-30-somethings are getting financial help from their parents (how I read the relevant, startling paragraph), that's not a phenomenon that can be dismissed as impacting only the rich. Certainly if you consider that those not receiving help are probably clustered mostly on the older end of that range. The way the economy is now structured, it's unlikely that a 20-year-old, especially one in school, is entirely financially independent. That exceptions exist, or that many managed this in a different economy, is a distraction.

But we still have this notion of 18 as adult. And it's this tension that leads to messes like the one described in this week's Social Qs:

I am the mother of a 20-year-old college student who is still on our family health insurance plan. I was confused about a benefit statement we received regarding her visit to the gynecologist. The insurance company told me the charge was for fitting her with a diaphragm. I am not sure if this is correct, but my husband and I disagree whether it’s appropriate to discuss it with her. Thoughts?

Philip Galanes answers the question in a way that almost makes sense, until you remember that the child in question is 20:

Of course you should talk to her! What are you waiting for — your daughter to hit menopause? If you suspect the bill is incorrect because your 20-year-old is not having sex, let me assure you that you are probably wrong (statistically speaking). And whether your daughter likes it or not, it is your job as a parent, along with her father, to insist on a running dialogue about her emotional and psychological readiness for all kinds of adult activities she is on the verge of undertaking — including sex. 

As with many important talks, this one may be squirmy to start. So, whichever of you is better at intimate chatting should sidle into her bedroom one night, and ask her sweetly about her love life: “Anyone special?” And no matter what your personal views of premarital sex, let her know that you just want to help her make the right decision — for her. Feel free to wax poetic about waiting for true love, but for God’s sake, make sure she knows that a diaphragm will not protect her from sexually-transmitted diseases. Now, get to work, Mom!

A 20-year-old looking for contraception is, one would hope, informed enough to know which forms do and don't prevent STDs. If she's gone to a doctor for said contraception, seemingly the doctor would also discuss this with her. 20 seems sort of ancient to be learning the facts of life. A conversation about this with one's 10-year-old might be "squirmy," but with one's 20-year-old, it's squirmy in the same way as it would be squirmy for any adult to discuss any other adult relative's sex life. A 20-year-old should feel comfortable going to her parents in a time of crisis, but what, in this case, is the crisis? This seems like a case of an adult behaving sensibly.

More to the point: isn't doctor-patient confidentiality supposed to be a thing? Again, maybe there would be some emergency situation where that would have to be breached, but does a 20-year-old getting contraception count as such?

But it's the parents' insurance! They are paying for the diaphragm, so they have the right to... what, exactly? It *is* an awkward situation. It's now appropriate (says the government!) to stay on one's parents health insurance until 26, as well as quite possible to be employed without benefits. So the health information of generally functional 25-year-olds is open information for their parents. Should the parents happen to be writers of overshare (and who isn't these days), they're thus free to spill not only anonymously, to advice columnists, but in any public forum they desire. 'My Millenial Child Has Herpes,' coming soon to a magazine cover near you. But back to the matter at hand: 20 is at one and the same time too old to ask for a parent's permission (or owe an explanation!) for something so private as contraception, and too young to deal with this truly independently.

The answer I always lean to, for this sort of thing, is the one that will rile my libertarian readers: get the state involved. For people of limbo age, in higher education or the lowest, most precarious rungs of employment, basic living expenses and health insurance should come from the government. The parents (and non-parent adults) are still paying, yes, but in tax dollars. This would apply not to children, but to those in whichever age range we determine is both definitively adult and realistically tough to be 100% self-supporting at in our economy. Maybe 18-22, maybe 18-25. This would accomplish two things. First, it would level the playing field at a time in people's lives where this is especially key, but also especially possible to address. (An equal playing field within the childhood home is, for obvious reasons, more complicated.) Second, it would take away the awkwardness around children owing not just society but their parents specific behaviors as adults. Because it's not exactly that the 20-year-old's mother is wrong to want to pry, but that society should be structured in such a way that this would be considered outrageous.

Very important thoughts of the morning

-In the past week, I've spoken French while driving; read (part of!) Kafka's The Castle; and gone running at 7:30am. All of these because of peer pressure. I'm starting to think my friends are not just lovely people I enjoy spending time with, but good influences. (Otherwise it would be singing along to Bastille while driving, reading one of those contemporary novels that inevitably ends up being set in Brooklyn even if I hadn't realized this when choosing it, and running later in the day or not at all.)

-Into The Gloss has taken a refreshing step away from reminding us that Parisian women are effortlessly chic to ask readers about their hometown beauty looks. The way the post is framed, I was worried that what they're looking for was a bunch of 'where I come from, everyone's tacky and conformist, unlike in NY/Paris/London where I live now, now that I work in/want to work in Fashion', but the results are far more varied.

-Jezebel kind of gets but kind of misses the point of "You Did Not Eat That." And oh, the comments. I have my doubts about "thin-shaming," and I say this as someone who has, yes, been thin-shamed. I mean, it's a thing if you're thinner than is generally considered attractive, unhappy about this, yet constantly being accused of having dieted to get to that build. I'm sure that does get frustrating. But when we-the-merely-not-fat stand accused of "anorexia," or listen to (mock) disbelief that we eat carbs, are we actually insulted, really? I mean, beyond the way it's insulting for your body to be commented on no matter what? It's more woman-shaming than thin-shaming, if anything, because one doesn't leave such an interaction (at least I don't) thinking life would be easier if one were a different size. One just leaves feeling sort of gross in a generic leave-me-alone sort of way, and extra-gross if it happens in a professional context.

Further thoughts on "off"

There is, on the one hand, mental illness, which is an umbrella term for various illnesses. These are unfairly stigmatized; physical illnesses, too, are unfairly stigmatized, something that seems to get lost in these conversations, but mental ones could well be more so, so the calls to stop the stigmatization of mental illness are reasonable. There's on the other hand "mental illness," which is the retroactive determination that anyone who commits a terrible crime is (or, if the crime, as they so often do, involves their own death, was) suffering from a condition of some kind. I don't even mean the 'to kill a bunch of people, you'd have to be crazy!' line, let alone 'people who do such things are sick', where "crazy" and "sick" aren't used medically/sympathetically. I mean that we're meant to grasp for any trace of a reason (apart from: guns, and yes, I'm aware that this latest incident included knife violence) that any such incident has occurred, and to provide a retroactive rounded-up diagnosis.

So here's my question: Isn't it further stigmatizing mental illness to cry "let's talk about mental illness!" every time someone commits a massacre? As in, further associating mental illness with murderousness or a kind of off-ness that may be exhibited by someone with a diagnosis, but that's altogether its own thing? And in this particular case, not only was the guy from a rich and well-connected family and being thoroughly looked-after psychologically, but the diagnosis they'd come up with was... high-functioning Asperger's and (although this may be redundant) trouble making friends. Gosh. Him and who knows how many millions of other young men, men who aren't particularly violent.

But this is all there is to cling to, right? The other purported non-illness factors floating around are each one more ridiculous than the next: divorced parents, the trauma of being biracial, and having made it to the ripe old age of 19 (he was 22 when he committed this crime, but apparently began planning it three years prior) without finding a girlfriend. These are none of them reasons someone would go and kill a bunch of people. Surely if these are the reasons, his violent reaction to ordinary life circumstances (coupled with what seems to have been extraordinary socioeconomic advantage) suggests insanity of some kind. But insanity-as-in-illness, or insanity in the colloquial sense of "off"? Or have we now decided that these are one and the same, and that everything once thought "evil" is merely an illness same as any other, and our sadness should be as much over the lack of a proper diagnosis as over the tragedy that ensued?

You maybe did eat that

NYMag is right, youdidnoteatthat is hilarious. What it is, for the don't-click-on-links brigade: an Instagram that reprints photos of fashion-and-lifestyle bloggers and other fashion sorts posing with food, along with captions such as, "After reviewing several dozen photos of @iza_goulart in various states of undress we are going to go with#youdidnoteatthat."

This is, as followers of the fashionz know well, a longstanding thing - photographing models with food, or, in text, interviews where whichever ingenue of course orders a cheeseburger. Instagram, selfies, and the ever-expanding pool of online fashion celebrities have together made it possible for a parody site to take off.

What the site makes fun of is, among other things, the idea that to be Fashion, a woman must be not only thin, but naturally thin. It's much more chic if you think she's eating a dozen macarons as a mid-morning snack. Predictably enough, there's at least one commenter who's being all, you know some people who are really thin do eat, right? When, eh, that's sort of beside the point. It's not so literal.

And yet, I'm also reminded of the (WWPD-coined) concept of "naturally fat" - the belief that any woman able to fit into a standard-size airline seat has surely not eaten a carb in decades. Not just models, or the visibly emaciated - of whom some are naturally as thin as you see, but not many. Women who are thin in the sense of, they're not fat, but who are what might better be deemed... healthy-looking? Normal-BMI-looking? Neither fat nor thin? I thought this most in conjunction with the photo of the woman from Cupcakes and Cashmere - who has now, it seems, blocked youdidnoteatthat. Is it really inconceivable that this woman (who is, incidentally, built almost exactly like I am) eats bread? Is this really in the same category as Gisele posing with a giant tub of pasta?

To be clear, it's possible that anyone of any size (including someone obese) diets to be that size, and would naturally be heavier. But what's a reasonable assumption of someone very underweight who is, for example, paid to stay that size (thus the criticisms of the fashion industry) doesn't really carry over to the more... to the people who are not all that thin, and are not runway models.

What bothers me about this, to reiterate, is really this idea that every woman, always, is (or ought to be) a physical work-in-progress. Whatever a woman looks like, we're meant to imagine it's the result of tremendous effort. "Naturally fat" is about reinforcing the idea that if any woman eats, well, food, she will (no matter her build or appetite) become fat - fat enough for fat-shaming and doctors' tsk-tsk-ing, not just too fat for a size zero or a runway career. Which is not merely a false assumption, but a dangerous one.

The catch

Here's a new one: I found the perfect, most flattering dress at Zara. Fabulous, almost space-age style, yet flattering in shape and color. Under $50. Really, truly, wardrobe-revolutionizing gorgeous. One of those rare mass-market items that might have been tailor-made for the person trying it on.

The problem? From the moment I put it on, I developed a kind of splotchy rash on my neck, right where the fabric touched my skin. Then, the longer I had it on, sort of developing all around that area. It was snug in the neck, but so are turtlenecks, other shirts I own. This has never happened to me before, and isn't something I'd ever heard of happening to anybody. I suppose there are fabric allergies, but my only known allergy is to cats; how would cats make their way into a fast-fashion dress? (If you have to ask this question...) Whatever this condition was, it faded not long after I'd put on my own clothes and left the mall. (Yes, the mall - what, is a Zara on a big city street that much better?)  

So? What was this? Google is not bringing me to stories of others allergic to dresses, Zara or otherwise. This doesn't appear to be a thing. The dress, according to its label (no record of it of any kind online, as far as I can tell), is mostly polyester and part stretch material - nothing bizarre. Could it be the dye? Is there any other possibility?

I could see the temptation of deciding, princess-and-the-pea style, that this means I'm allergic to cheap clothing and simply must wear only the finest, but this item cost more than most of my existing clothes, so whatever it is, it isn't that.

Pure

Rumors are circulating that a recently deceased young mother and socialite died as a result of month-long juice cleansing. Apparently a cleanse is normally something one does just for a few days, so the results, whatever they may be, are limited. While I have no idea if there's any truth to these rumors, it stands to reason that a liquid-only starvation diet would be maybe not so healthy. Even - yes, even! - if the liquid in question came from kale.

But so goes the pseudoscientific conversation about health. We're told to eat only real foods, and that many ordinary ingredients (milk, white flour, any flour) are unnatural, too processed, not what we evolved to eat. This sort of approach may hold some value for those with specific medical conditions that require specific dietary changes. And whether or not anyone needs to lose weight, there are surely some who, if they did so sensibly, wouldn't be harming themselves. But it seems a mistake to treat one's diet as infinitely perfectible. If what you're eating agrees with you, is it necessarily disastrous to keep doing what you're doing? Could it be that the psychological strain of self-flagellating over use of white rice rather than brown is greater than any physical damage that choice could possibly inflict?

But it really is all so mixed up together, the health and beauty goals in all of this. Into The Gloss, an addictive beauty blog with no significant health angle, profiles a woman whose mysterious (and waistline-expanding) disease improved once she changed her diet. One might think that this woman's advice would be of use primarily to the others suffering from Postural Tachycardia Syndrome, about which I know nothing, and am quite prepared to believe responds to these dietary alterations. But we instead get a headline, "How To Successfully Transition From Junk Food To A Vegan Diet," suggesting that your everyday reader of a beauty blog would benefit from emulating this woman. I mean, "how to"? Why would the general public get instructions on how to eat if you happen to suffer from this rare disease? We do get a mini-disclaimer at the end, that it's great if you just eat more vegetables, but this is all very much presented as, the ideal would be to take things all the purity way.

While yes, transitioning away from an all-junk-food diet is sound enough, universally-applicable beauty and health advice, what you're moving towards might just as easily be a diet of real foods in the common-sense sense, and not a vegan (and, some Googling of this woman's recipe plan informs, gluten- and refined-sugar-free) transformation. Why not, if you do not suffer from a rare disease, consider a diet that allows eating in ethnic restaurants, at friends' houses, etc? Again, but put another way: is the danger greater from an ordinary loaf of bread, or an extreme purity-seeking approach?

Fitness strategies for the desperate

It was, as many readers no doubt noticed, a cold winter in parts of the U.S. Was and is. While I'd been very good about running in the fall, when the ice arrived, and I couldn't alternate between the treadmill and running outside, it all kind of came to a halt. Various minor winter-blah illnesses further conspired to get me as out-of-shape as possible as quickly as possible. The prospect of a half-hour of guilt-free weekday sitcom consumption failed to cancel out the two frozen minutes' walk to the gym. Did I mention I've gotten very used to life with a car? 

So behold, my plans for battling running-inertia. 

-Make appointments to go running with friends in the area. This means keeping a mental - maybe even physical - list of who might want to do this, and being a bit more the organizer than I usually am. But seeing as all that needs to be organized is a time and place to show up in sneakers, I can probably handle it. 

-Announce to the aforementioned list that I am about to go running, not so much to go with people (people do tend to require notice) as to compel myself off the couch. There, the danger is in spamming my friends, but the chances of my doing this (the running or the emailing) often enough to constitute spam are low indeed. 

-Bring Bisou! Except I'm never quite sure this counts as exercise. With all the sniffing and marking, there's not much continuous jogging involved. But it has a certain undeniable two-birds-one-stone advantage.

-Save the better and longer podcasts for running, i.e. not for dog-walks. That would be Dan Savage, of course, or the Marc Maron interview with Lena Dunham. That would most definitely not be anything about recipes from NPR. 

-Tell myself (and this I've been doing, sort of) that it's a damn shame not to run when it's warm out. (Check!) Convince myself that anything above freezing counts as "warm." (Eh...) 

-Be a French aristocratic fashion model (who says things like, "See, I've had this great chance in life of being born with good genes. I was born tall, with a pretty face (not to everyone's taste, I concede), and a thin body."), move to Paris, and hire someone called Bruno to whip me into shape.

"Jansson's Temptation"

Food diaries exist. Right? This is a thing? I remember we had to keep them for a week freshman year of high school - a week when I happened to eat many eggs, I recall, and had to account for my cholesterol consumption in biology class. I haven't had reason to keep such detailed track since. But today, what I ate probably does merit one, and since I don't think Grub Street's knocking, WWPD it is:

-At what felt like 4am, due to some combination of the time change, the need to catch a particular train at Princeton Junction, and having stayed out till almost midnight (old age), but was probably more like 8am, I think I had grapefruit juice, some Raschera cheese without crackers (by which I mean matzo) because I was all out, and coffee.

-At my Canadian-family reunion - in New York, not Canada - I first had a giant cappuccino, with sugar because it seemed useful, what with the sleepiness. Then I had gravlax, which was excellent if unfortunately partially covered in a cream sauce of some kind (and as for why that would be a problem, despite my very much enjoying a whole-milk cappuccino, clearly this is not a nutritional concern, but some kind of latent picky eating that reemerges if surrounded by enough family members), with a side order of something called "Jansson's Temptation." I was not the only cousin curious to know what was so tempting to this Jansson. Alas, Jansson seems to like an anchovy-flavored potato gratin. Fortunately, there's no combination of potato, cheese, and salt I can't enjoy.

-At the Paris Baguette on 32nd Street, I had a mini mochi doughnut. Dessert!

-Iced coffee from Stumptown. Black, no sugar. Delicious. $3.50, so it really should be.

-Against all sleepy odds, and thanks in no small part to that iced coffee, made it home via the stretch of pothole that is the trip between here and Princeton Junction. Fed and walked a stir-crazy poodle. Once back from the walk, had plain pasta with more Raschera, which may or may not be a cheese that's meant for pasta, but it melted nicely. Wanted to include vegetables of some kind (there's kale-of-best-intentions in the fridge, and some winter asparagus), but exhaustion ruled out that possibility.

-Fell asleep for an undisclosed, insufficient amount of time. Woke up ready for... dinner? Second dinner? Remembered, and consumed, the remaining non-doughnut mini-mochi, because all it required, preparation-wise, was opening the package it came in.

Let it be stated for the record that this is in no way representative of my usual habits. But if you're doing an NPR show or writing a Well blog post about the failings of the modern Western diet, feel free to cite this diary as Exhibit A.

"[I]t's not about you"

So, the comments. There are, as is inevitable, a bunch of people praising the author for being a wonderful person (whereas the carers who don't write books or essays about their experience get classified with the people who have no such difficulties, or are somehow lacking in the sensitive quality that would compel anyone halfway literate to send narrative versions of family members' medical records to the Times, using real names, and turning the result into a book if at all possible).

There are also a number making variations of the same argument: that mental illness is stigmatized, and the author's placing medical information that is not his own, without his brother's consent, is justified because then we'll all be having this great big conversation about mental illness, after which point no one will feel the need to keep such matters a secret. Which... doesn't quite add up. If more were known about serious mental illness, maybe more who need it would seek treatment, and maybe there's be a bit more understanding about "mental illness" and violence, things like, if someone's bulimic, they're no more likely to commit a violent crime. But I can't imagine the end result would be that one might disclose on a first date that one suffers from severe schizophrenia and learn that thanks to the new regime of destigmatization, your date is no less interested in seeing you again. Same deal re: a job interview. People are discreet about all kinds of things, including mental and physical illnesses, for a reason. There's no grand, sweeping destigmatization that would change this. "Outing" loved ones isn't courageous. There's no means-justify-the-ends excuse.

Other commenters, meanwhile, note that they themselves suffer from mental illness (and yet are capable of reading an article and composing a sensible response - imagine!), and that they'd prefer if their family members not mine this for material. One writes that if any of his family members "were to approach me about a book project, i already know my response: it's not about you."

Which is... exactly the issue here. Another person's tragedies may impact you somewhat, or even tremendously, but it's clear-cut whose story this is to tell. If you've learned something profound from the experience, you can do any number of things - advocate for a cause, write a novel that fictionalizes the situation, be of help to this person - but not publish confidential information without someone's consent. You can't decide, prior to getting that consent, that you'll publish something with that person's identifying information regardless of their approval.

New frontiers in overshare

Jay Neugeboren cared for his mentally-ill adult brother for decades. This fact alone means that the default response to his essay about the topic is going to be that the author is a wonderful person, a wonderful brother, helping shed the stigma on mental illness. That's how it goes with such things - readers are so caught up with a story about a person being sensitive that they respond to the sensitivity that's been depicted, and not to the insensitivity inherent in sharing confidential information without someone else's consent. Why can't we separate these things out? We might congratulate Neugeboren for dealing with a difficult situation (albeit one we the general public shouldn't know he's dealing with), while also questioning the ethics of telling the story itself.

For what I'd one day like to be the last time, another person's medical history is that person's story far more than it's the story of any caregiver. That goes even for medical conditions in need of destigmatization. (Who's more stigmatized - the person with mental illness, or the one suffering indirectly?) There's no Very Important Story caveat.

Neugeboren's piece isn't so much about his brother as about the process of deciding to write on the topic, which he already did, publishing that book in 1997. His initial impulse, twelve years before writing it, had been correct:

"To publish the essay [a non-fiction piece he'd written earlier about his brother; not this essay in the Times], I quickly came to believe, would be to exploit the misery of his life in order to advance my life as a writer. I abandoned the project and decided to stick with fiction."

Correct! What changed?

"A dozen years later when I was talking with my literary agent about Robert, my agent asked if I’d ever considered writing a nonfiction book about my brother’s life."

Ah. Neugeboren now felt "it was time to tell the story," which surely has nothing to do with his having learned that this was a book that would sell.

Although this is not, strictly speaking, a case of parental overshare, it has many of the hallmarks of the genre. Neugeboren's brother depended on him. Neugeboren had access to incredibly private details of his sibling's life, beyond the usual. His brother wasn't so incapacitated as to not know what it means to be written about, but still ended up in the situation of a parental-oversharer's kid:

I hoped Robert would not be angry or upset and that he’d collaborate with me, but with or without his cooperation and approval, I was determined to find a way to tell the story of his life because I was beginning to understand that it was central to the story of my life.

I'm not even sure what to say about this. We're supposed to be happy that, after the fact, Robert approved? I mean, yes, that's lucky, but it doesn't change the initial violation. While a child can never give consent to being written about, a mentally-ill adult potentially can, but is also at risk of being written about regardless.

But here's where I get stuck: Neugeboren is a fiction writer. He's capable of writing fiction and getting it published, which is more than can be said for most composers of family overshare. Why was non-fiction so necessary, even without the consent of the very real person he was writing about? Am I a terrible person for assuming the reason is that confessional non-fiction sells? Or is that acceptable, so long as one views this in terms of raising awareness to the greatest number of people, and nothing so crude as selling books.

"Journalism"

The latest internet explosion is over a very odd husband-and-wife pair of articles (the wife's so problematic it's now only available cached) complaining about a Twitter account in which a woman, Lisa Adams, describes her experience with breast cancer. Like, that's really it. These are two high-profile articles, one in the New York Times, the other the Guardian, complaining that a woman's upset that she has cancer.

Bill Keller's add-on to his wife Emma Keller's earlier piece is extra strange, filled with mistakes, and based on the callous and just plain weird premise that his own elderly father-in-law's end-of-life decisions have something to do with the medical choices made by a very ill but not currently dying mother of young children. Why write an op-ed urging a specific, real-life, non-war-criminal woman to give up on life? I mean, at what point did that seem like a good idea?

But it's Emma Keller's piece that interests me here, because of this sentence: "She'll tell you all about her pain, for example, but precious little about her children or husband and what they are going through." Gaaaaaahhhhh!!!!!!! Why on earth would someone criticize social-media sharing for not including private details about family members? Our stories are our own to tell. Overshare is when it's someone else's medical details, or (as was discussed in a "This American Life" While as a rule, I tend to prefer fiction to memoir, I kind of think that if the issue is that you're very ill and want to leave a document about that, you're excused from coming up with what some blogger might deem optimal literature. And this is, as Zeynep Tufekci points out, why a Twitter account along these lines is so valuable. But really, more power to Adams if she's restricting what she says about her family.

Tufekci rightly faults both Kellers for shoddy journalism. Which... OK, it's a quick news cycle, and few things are investigated as much as they should be. Generally speaking, I, unlike Tufekci, think it's fine to link to (public!) social-media posts without gaining deeper knowledge of the person posting. But here... there's the incomprehensible stance taken and the fact that the Kellers presumably had a few more resources available to them as journalists than the typical intern or freelancer trying to meet a quota for the day. If for some reason they had to write about this Twitter account, they might have gotten more facts straight.