Five years ago, Lorri Benson heard muffled gagging coming from the downstairs bathroom in her home. Once she pounded on the door and her sixteen-year-old daughter Taryn opened it, the excuses that spilled from her mouth ranged from denial (“I haven’t been doing it that long”) to shame (“It’s not a big deal”) and stopped nowhere in between. For the next three years, Taryn struggled with bulimia and through two rehabilitation facilities while her mother and family reached out from the sidelines in an effort to save her.
But as Lorri told me in a phone interview from her home in Naples, Florida, her role as Taryn’s mother had to be redefined, the main lesson that Taryn and Lorri hope to pass on to other families through their co-written book, Distorted.
Since one in five women now struggle with an eating disorder and 90 percent of women with eating disorders are between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, their shared story is necessary. Taryn became one of those statistics while pinching her sides at thirteen.
Taryn shares her first journal entries in the book with words of self-loathing: “Fat. Awful. Gross. I hate my body,” which Taryn said stemmed not only from a complete lack of self-esteem, but also from a society that pushed perfection.
“I hated myself and the levels I was willing to go through to [perfect] my body and society breeds that. Even if you don’t count the weight loss and diet pills and obsession with weight, we’re obsessed with appearance and girls who will do everything to get it.”
Lorri reiterated it’s about attaining the impossible.
“Nobody tells these thirteen to fourteen year old girls about digital reproduction, and they think, ‘How come I still have this?’ They are trying to attain something that is out of their reach.”
In Distorted, Lorri and Taryn trade chapters, writing about the typical mother-teenager emotion-filled dance. But in this story, there’s lying and hiding which Lorri thought was normal behavior for most teenage girls and for which she saw no red flags until she noticed her weight loss and heard the sound on the other side of the bathroom door. As a former producer of Donahue, she figured she knew all she needed to know about eating disorders.
