I Had No Idea - Knowing an Eating Disorder

06/14/2026

“Love Jesus; when you love Him much, you will love sacrifice even more.”

- Saint Padre Pio

06/14/2026

❤️❤️❤️

I spent the first half of this book rolling my eyes at Diana. Then Jodi Picoult made me eat my words.

Diana O'Toole is insufferable. There, I said it.

She has a five-year plan. She has a boyfriend who is basically a golden retriever in scrubs. She believes that ordering a specific salad for lunch will somehow manifest her dream life. She goes to the Galápagos Islands during a global pandemic because her boyfriend can't come and she doesn't want to waste the nonrefundable tickets. She complains about the lack of WiFi while he is intubating dying patients in a New York City ICU.

I hated her. I wanted to reach into the audiobook and shake her.

That is not a criticism of the book. It is a confession of how thoroughly Jodi Picoult hooked me.

Wish You Were Here is a pandemic novel. I know. We are all exhausted by the pandemic. We lived it. We do not necessarily want to read about it. But Picoult does something strange and brave here. She uses the pandemic as a crucible, not a backdrop. She forces her characters, and her readers, to sit with questions we have been trying to avoid since March 2020.

The setup is deceptively simple. March 2020. Diana's boyfriend Finn, a surgical resident, is supposed to propose on their romantic trip to the Galápagos. Then COVID hits. Finn is called to the front lines. He urges Diana to go without him. She arrives on the islands just as they shut down, hotels closing, borders sealing, a beautiful prison with giant tortoises and turquoise water.

She is stranded with an old woman named Abuela, her son Gabriel, and his troubled teenage daughter Beatriz. She has no luggage, no itinerary, and no control. For someone like Diana, that is a waking nightmare.

The first half of the book is slow. Deliberately slow. Picoult wants you to feel the heat, the isolation, the way days blur together when you are trapped somewhere beautiful and everything you thought mattered has been stripped away. Diana starts to crack. She starts to question her five-year plan. She starts to wonder if she even loves Finn or if he was just a checked box on her life checklist.

And then she starts to fall for Gabriel. A handsome local artist who is everything Finn is not. Present. Grounded. Comfortable with uncertainty.

I was angry at her. I was rooting for Finn, who was back in New York, drowning in PPE and death and the impossible math of who gets a ventilator and who doesn't. Picoult cuts between the islands and the ICU, and the contrast is brutal. Diana is learning to paint. Finn is learning to pronounce people dead.

Then the twist happens.

I will not spoil it. But I will say this: I gasped. I went back and relistened to the first half, looking for clues I had missed. I felt the entire foundation of the story shift beneath me. And I realized that my anger at Diana, my judgment of her choices, was exactly where Picoult wanted me.

The twist is not a gimmick. It is a mirror. It forces you to ask: what would you do if your life was not your own? If the people you loved were not who you thought? If every plan you made was built on a premise that turned out to be false?

I cannot tell you how the book ends. I can tell you that I cried. I can tell you that I have thought about Beatriz, the daughter, the one hiding her pain behind a bright smile, every day since I finished. I can tell you that I will never look at a painting of a tree the same way again.

Does the book work? Yes. Is it frustrating? Also yes. Diana never fully earns my sympathy. Finn gets a raw deal. The twist, for all its cleverness, leaves you with more questions than answers.

But maybe that is the point. The pandemic left us with more questions than answers. Our plans were a joke. Our certainties crumbled. We are all still trying to figure out who we are on the other side.

Read this book if you are ready to sit with that discomfort. Skip it if you want a clean resolution. Either way, Picoult has done what she always does: she took a messy, timely, uncomfortable topic and made it impossible to ignore.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4nkfleb

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06/14/2026

Music discovery (because at the end of the day music is what I’m here for) 🩷🩷🩷

The official music video for David Bowie & Mick Jagger - Dancing in...

06/13/2026

“Don’t worry to the point of losing your inner peace. Pray with perseverance, with faith, with calmness and serenity.”

- Saint Padre Pio

06/13/2026

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You know how some books just feel like a warm blanket? That's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for me. I'd been meaning to read it for years, and I finally picked up the audiobook narrated by Kate Burtonand honestly, it was the perfect way to experience it.

Set in the tenements of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, around 1912, the story follows Francie Nolan from age eleven into her teens. But that makes it sound like there's a plot, and there really isn't, not in the traditional sense. Nothing huge happens. You're just… living with the Nolans. You're sitting on the fire escape with Francie, watching the world go by. You're feeling the gnaw of hunger that never quite goes away, the embarrassment of wearing clothes from the charity barrel, the electric thrill of a perfect Saturday when you get to spend a penny on candy.

And yet, it's one of those rare books that makes you laugh out loud one minute and cry the next. I found myself genuinely caring about these people, Katie, the fierce, exhausted mother who scrubs floors so her kids can have a chance; Johnny, the singing waiter who's all charm and dreams but can't hold onto a dollar (or his sobriety); and Francie, who is just so achingly earnest and observant.

Kate Burton's narration deserves a special shoutout. She doesn't just read the book; she inhabits it. She gives each character a distinct voice without ever being showy. You can hear the lilt in Johnny's voice that makes everyone love him, and the hard edge in Katie's that comes from sheer survival. She made me feel like I was eavesdropping on a real family.

More than just a story, this book left me with some thoughts that have stuck with me. Here are four of them.

1. You Can Grow Anywhere (Just Look at That Tree)
There's a tree that keeps popping up in the Nolans' yard, a "Tree of Heaven." It's the scrappiest thing you've ever seen. It grows out of rubbish heaps, through cracks in the pavement, in places nothing else can survive. Francie's tree is exactly that. The novel isn't sentimental about poverty; it shows how it grinds people down. But it also shows this stubborn, almost defiant will to keep going. The tree isn't a symbol of easy success; it's a symbol of tenacity. It's the lesson that you can come from cement and still find a way to reach for the sun.

2. Reading Is the Ultimate Escape (and Weapon)
Francie's life is hard, but she discovers early on that a book can be a door out of any room. There's a moment when she realizes she can read, really read, and the world opens up. Her grandmother, Mary Rommely, who can't even read or write herself, gives Katie some of the wisest advice in the book. She tells her to forget about teaching facts and figures. Instead, she says, teach Francie about fairies and legends, about "the mythical figures of storyland." Why? So that when life gets ugly and it will, Francie will have a "secret world" to retreat to. That hit me hard. Imagination isn't a luxury; it's survival gear.

3. The American Dream Is a Complicated Thing
This isn't a rags-to-riches story where hard work magically pays off. It's messier than that. Johnny Nolan, Francie's father, is a dreamer, a beautiful, kind, alcoholic dreamer who can't quite figure out how to make the dream work in real life. Katie, on the other hand, works herself to the bone with no illusions. And then there's the grandmother's practical, almost brutal advice on how to escape poverty: save every penny, even if it means sitting in the dark to save oil, buy damaged vegetables, and eventually own land. The lesson here is that the dream isn't about luck or even just hard work. It's about tiny, relentless sacrifices, generation after generation.

4. Learn to See the World Like It's Your First or Last Time
This is the one that really stayed with me. Francie has this ability to find magic in the mundane—the taste of a pickle, the warmth of a cup of coffee on a sad morning, the sight of her father struggling up the stairs with a Christmas tree, singing his heart out. There's a line toward the end that feels like the whole point of the book: "Look at everything as though you were seeing it for the first time or the last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory." Not with money, not with success—with glory. It's a reminder that the good stuff is often hiding in plain sight.

Yes, it's long. And yes, it can feel slow if you're looking for action. But the power of this book is in the accumulation of tiny moments, the smell of coffee, the weight of a secret, the sound of a father singing. It's a book about what it actually feels like to be poor, to be a child, to be human. I haven't stopped thinking about it.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4rAb72E

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06/13/2026

Music discovery (because at the end of the day music is what I’m here for) 🩷🩷🩷

Mr. Mister's official music video for 'Kyrie'. Click to listen to M...

06/13/2026

Recovering, though, that is a choice. I had to make that choice over and over again, and I still do. Every. Day. It was and is a terrifying choice to make, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t backtrack more than a few times on the way to where I am today…

06/13/2026

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I read The Glass Castle for the first time in my early twenties, on a borrowed couch in a shared apartment, and I remember thinking: This cannot be real. No one actually lived like this.

Then I read it again at thirty. Then again at forty. Each time, a different book. Each time, a different Jeannette.

The first time, I was horrified by the parents. The second time, I started to see the love beneath the chaos. The third time, I stopped judging altogether and just sat in awe of the fact that any of them survived. That any of them survived. That all of them survived.

Jeannette Walls grew up poor. Not the romantic kind of poor, the "we're struggling but we have each other" kind. The real kind. The kind where you eat butter and sugar because there's nothing else. The kind where you wear the same dress to school until it falls apart. The kind where your father spends the grocery money on whiskey and your mother hides chocolate bars under her coat while you go hungry.

Her father, Rex, was a brilliant, charismatic alcoholic. He taught his children about physics and stars and how to face fear head-on. He also stole from them, lied to them, and once set their Christmas tree on fire.

Her mother, Rose Mary, was an artist who believed that conventional parenting was a trap. She didn't want to cook or clean or worry about school lunches. She wanted to paint and read and follow her own impulses. She called herself "excited by life." Her children called her something else.

The Walls children raised themselves. They fed themselves. They protected each other. And then, one by one, they escaped to New York. Their parents followed them—not to apologize, not to make amends, but to be homeless on the streets of the city where their children were becoming successful.

This is not a story about triumph over tragedy. It is not a story about forgiveness or closure or any of the neat packages we put around difficult lives. It is a story about the messiness of love. About how you can hate someone and still need them. About how you can leave a place and never really leave it. About how the family that broke you is still, somehow, the only family you have.

Here are lessons I have carried with me since that first reading.

1. Poverty is not character-building. It is poverty.
There is a temptation, when reading The Glass Castle, to romanticize the Walls children's resourcefulness. They learned to forage for food. They learned to patch their own clothes. They learned to navigate the country on their own, long before GPS or cell phones. It's easy to call that resilience. It's easy to call it grit.

Jeannette never does.

She shows you the hunger. The shame. The winter nights without heat. The way other kids looked at her in the lunchroom. She does not pretend that poverty made her stronger. She survived despite it, not because of it. And the scars are real. Resilience is not a gift poverty gives you. It is a muscle you develop because you have no other choice. And it comes at a cost.

2. You can love someone and still need to leave them.
This is the hardest lesson in the book. Maybe the hardest lesson in any memoir about a difficult family. Jeannette loved her father. Deeply. He was magnetic and brilliant and he made her feel like the most special person in the world when he was sober. He taught her to face her fears. He taught her to chase the stars. He also left her hungry, unprotected, and alone.

For years, she tried to save him. She believed that if she just loved him enough, just believed in him enough, he would stop drinking. He didn't. Leaving him was not an act of betrayal. It was an act of survival. And it broke her heart anyway.

3. Your parents' choices are not your fault. But their consequences are still yours to carry.
Rose Mary once watched her daughter eat a stick of butter straight from the fridge because there was nothing else. She did not get up. She did not make dinner. She kept reading. Jeannette does not spend the book blaming her mother. That is not her project. Her project is to tell the truth. The truth is that Rose Mary was a neglectful parent. The truth is also that Rose Mary was a person who had her own traumas, her own limitations, her own reasons.

Understanding those reasons does not excuse what happened. But it does something else: it releases Jeannette from the exhausting work of trying to change an unchangeable past. She cannot make her mother into someone different. She can only make peace with who her mother was. That peace is not forgiveness, exactly. It is something closer to acceptance. This is what I was given. Now what do I do with it?

I have read The Glass Castle three times now. Each time, I notice something new. The first time, I was furious at the parents. The second time, I wept for the children. The third time, I just sat with the complexity of it all, the way love and harm can live in the same body, the same house, the same heart.

Jeannette Walls does not give you neat answers. She does not tell you whether to forgive or to walk away. She just tells you what happened. And trusts that you are smart enough, human enough, to wrestle with it yourself.

That is the gift of this book. Not resolution. But company. Not answers. But the knowledge that someone else has been there too.

And if she made it out? Maybe you can too.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/49PXXsa

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06/13/2026

Many people are at risk of eating disorders, but much of the cultural conversation has focused on one demo: young women.

The triggers for midlife eating disorders look different than they do for younger women.

06/11/2026

“The way I see it, though? It’s just one part of me, but it was also instrumental in shaping me into a kinder, more loving, and accepting person.”