Thanksgiving is no picnic for compulsive overeaters. As one woman in a Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous meeting I attended put it, “I am so incredibly grateful, because it’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and I didn’t spend all of yesterday with a fork in front of the refrigerator! I used to just kill myself preparing this abundance of food for my whole family, and then the next day, when everyone was gone, was my day to eat. I wouldn’t even get out of my nightgown. And I always made sure it was my nightgown so there would be nothing constricting my waist. I would just gorge and gorge, then nap, then gorge some more.”

Many recovering food addicts bring their own “abstinent” meal (no sugar or flour, and with very specific quantities of protein and carbs) to any Thanksgiving get-together, a decision that isn’t always well received by their loved ones. “My mom wasn’t happy about that!” another food addict said. “She said, ‘Why can’t you just have what we’re going to have?’”

The answer, of course, is simple: Because she’s an addict.

Ellen, the food addict I followed for more than two years for America Anonymous (in the worst of her addiction, she ballooned up to 300 pounds), put it this way: “As much as you explain food addiction to people, they don’t really get it. I have no control over certain foods… People will say, ‘Don’t you ever get a treat?’ But I’m a food addict, and I can’t stop at one treat. If I eat certain foods, I will ruin my life. So I have to live what some people see as a really radical life.”

I am incredibly grateful for the following review of my book, which will run in the January issue of ELLE:

In America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life (Simon & Schuster), journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis follows people struggling (and mostly managing) to prevail over self-destruction. To his credit, he doesn’t attempt definitive answers to the big questions; instead, without didacticism he lays bare their realities, allowing his subjects to speak for themselves.

The result is a graceful, compelling book focusing directly on people, not on concepts or proscriptive ideas. The subjects are a varied bunch: Jody, a blind drug and alcohol abuser and founder of several sober-living communities; Janice, a grandmother and recovering crackhead and junkie; Kate, a shoplifting wife and mother; Todd, a bisexual, bodybuilding meth addict and steroid abuser; Ellen, a food-addicted Jewish wife and mother of three; Bobby, a junkie; Marvin, an alcoholic in a retirement community; and Sean, a young sex addict.

Denizet-Lewis relates their successes, relapses, and struggles to stay clean with warmth, clarity, and a deeply refreshing, unpuritanical frankness. Rather than posing as a disembodied authority, he freely expresses his feelings and opinions and comes clean about his own sex addiction. As a result of this courageous narrative strategy, he emerges fully as vulnerable and flawed as the people he writes about.

In the end he concludes that the more we delve, the more complex and individual addiction appears. In laying bare the irreducibly personal nature of the struggle, he advances the conversation about addiction in a profound and important way: as closer to home, more idiosyncratic and nuanced than many might suspect.—Kate Christensen

For more early reviews, go to Reviews