There’s an Equation to Explain This: An Interview with Sarah Gerard

Not even five years ago, I went through a compulsive addiction to taking up less space. I wanted to inhabit less of the world, to see my bones show through the skin and be pared down to my skeletal size, maybe less. My eating disorder had so much less to do with eating than with a desire to be less. It wasn’t about vanity, even. On some level I knew I looked terrible all angled, washed out, and cold. Anorexia is supposed to be such a common disease, yet, deep in the throes, I never found a book that understood me and my disease, that didn’t paint me as a cheerleader or the desperate Queen Bee of high school. Nobody saw me as more than a cliché.

Enter Sarah Gerard’s parse new novel, Binary Star. The tale of addiction as told through two lovers, an unnamed girl struggling with an eating disorder and her boyfriend, an alcoholic, the story traces our inner desire for perfection and the methods we use to numb ourselves upon realizing we may never make it. Binary Star is the first thing I’ve ever read that understands eating disorders, I imagine less than coincidentally because Gerard herself has found herself in the depths of the disease. For the first time in my life, I saw on paper a character who wanted to inhabit less physical space, to have her clothes orbit around her frame, in the same terms I thought were entirely unique to my own disordered line of logic. I read the whole book in a couple hours, unable to steady myself until I knew how it would end.

I was able to ask Gerard even more about the story, hear her insights on writing realistically about disordered eating, learn about her research into the astronomical themes in the book, and more:

Sarah Gerard

Kati Heng: Reading Binary Star, I immediately assumed you must have gone through some form of eating disorder, like it would be impossible to write so vividly about one without going through it on your own. Then, I wondered if that was an insult—to just assume that you couldn’t imagine it and write so well without having one? Maybe it’s just that I haven’t read any other work about eating disorders this true. What do you think?

Sarah Gerard: I think in order to write about anything well, you have to understand a character’s struggle as your own. On the other hand, people have written stories about pirates who have never been pirates. I think in any story, a writer has to relate to the human experience regardless of what that is in the story. There’s the present conflict and then there’s the deeper yearning that the character experiences, which actually is the motor of the story. So, on one hand, no, I don’t think it’s unfair or insulting to assume that as a writer I’ve had an eating disorder if only because I’m writing with some kind of realism; but on the other hand, I don’t know that it really adds anything to an author’s credibility to know whether or not he or she has experienced that particular conflict.

KH: Maybe it’s just so amazing to me because I’ve never read anything else about eating disorders that felt so realistic. Do you know anyone else who has written well about disordered eating?

SG: If you’re asking for recommendations, I don’t know if I feel comfortable giving any. While I was writing the book, I was looking to write about this struggle with a new approach, some way I’d never seen it approached before. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I didn’t want to tell the story in a traditional way. I wanted to try to be very authentic to myself.

KH: One thing I love about the character is how smart she is. Usually, we see characters with eating disorders as consumed by their own vanity, but she has other interests, like astronomy. Why don’t we see more characters with eating disorders as being dimensional people?

SG: An eating disorder is never really about vanity. If it were, it would just be a diet. And it’s not – it’s an addiction. I don’t want to say this is always the cause, but I think people who struggle with addiction are oftentimes very intelligent people. In my immediate family, I see all these addictions, yet I think I come from a family of very smart people. A lot of eating disorders, especially anorexia, are found a lot among college students, among people who come from rather affluent backgrounds and are educated. That’s not always the case, but it happens more often in that population. I think there may be shallowness in it and certainly it has a focus in things that would appear to be not important, like appearances, but it’s never only about that. If it were, you would just change your hair style.

KH: Was it hard for you to relive that time in your life while writing?

SG: I relive it all the time. It changes all the time, though, because I’m not active in my disease anymore, so I’m not feeding it in the same way, but I see it cropping up in my life in different ways. From one day to the next I have a different idea about what it was or what it is. I mean, are you asking was it hard or was it scary?

KH: Both I guess?

SG: I can’t say that it was scary, but it’s always hard. Writing is always hard. Especially if you’re doing a kind of writing that’s very personal. It’s really emotionally difficult, but I wasn’t really afraid that something would happen to me that I wasn’t expecting. I don’t think that it’s more powerful than I am. I wasn’t scared, but it was certainly difficult.

KH: For a while, I personally used veganism as a hiding place for my eating disorder. I read that after your own recovery, you stopped being vegan and vegetarian so that you wouldn’t have restrictions on your diet, but you’ve since began being vegan again. How do you control having restrictions on your diet without going over the edge?

SG: I don’t consider veganism a restrictive diet, because I eat a lot. You can be a vegan and still eat a lot, more than enough. And I actually feel better about what I’m eating knowing that what I’m eating is good for me and good for the planet. Being vegan is a lot about getting all the right nutrients and eating when I’m hungry and stopping when I’m not hungry anymore and drinking a lot of water. But mostly, I don’t think about my veganism as something that is a tool for hurting myself. I think of it as the opposite of that, as a tool for nourishing myself and nourishing the planet.

KH: Were there any books that you used for research for Binary Star?

 SG: Yeah. I mean, every book that I’ve ever read has somehow aided my own writing. I don’t know that I used any particular book for research, necessarily. I tend to read books around the topic I’m writing in order to help shape my own ideas. In terms of doing the research for the writing on astronomy, I used university websites and Wikipedia and scientific journals and things like that. I mostly used places that tried to pare it down so that I could get the concept across in a way that is widely relatable, and if the concept was too vast, it didn’t belong in the book. I wanted more entry, [through] foundational concepts.

KH: How long have you put those two topics, eating disorders and astronomy, together? Was there a moment when they clicked together, or did you always know you wanted those two themes in the book?

SG: I didn’t make a lot of decisions beforehand; they just kind of appeared together in the first lines of the book and I kept going with them. It was almost lucky the way that they fit together continuously. While I was researching the astronomy, I just noticed the language would also be appropriate for talking about the body. I didn’t have to force them together. I didn’t go searching around for a metaphor; it was always there.

KH: Finally, how do you keep your books at home? Do you organize by category or alphabetize? Do you keep them on bookshelves?

SG: I have two large bookcases that I use for fiction and general-interest nonfiction. I have a separate, smaller bookshelf that I use for children’s books, poetry and philosophy, and then I have a couple of bookshelves above my bed where my husband and I keep books that are particularly special to both of us. He has a lot of film books and photography books on that shelf and I have Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Lydia Davis’ The End of the Story. I have The Secret Garden on there as well. On my husband’s desk, he has books he uses for his research, and on my desk I have books that I’m using for my research. And then we have a step by the front door where we have books that we’re giving away for donations, when we get around to it. And then there are books by the chair, in between our couch and our bed. There are books that have just arrived in the house, that I’ve just brought home. They’re all over the place.

KH: You keep the philosophy with the children’s books? Is there a reason behind that?

SG: Yeah. I’m not sure that I can really articulate it. I think poetry and philosophy go naturally together, and I think poetry and children’s books go naturally together. And by children’s books, I mean picture books. Young adult books don’t really go there. There’s some sort of mathematical equation that will explain this, but I don’t know what it is.
 
 
 Kati Heng is a Chicago-based writer and glitter obsessive. You can find her on Twitter here, read her book reviews here or check out her anti-street harassment tumblr here.