Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction[image error] by Sara Somers is the story of a long struggle to overcome food addiction. In a note to readers she says the aim of the book is “to help people who are compulsive eaters and food addicts, like me.”

Disclaimer: I received this book from Somers’s publicist who asked for an honest review. Although I had the usual teenage angst about weight and dabbled in some unhealthy eating practices back then, I am not a compulsive eater or food addict. Therefore I am not this book’s target audience, and so my review can only speculate on its achievement of its primary aim.

Having said that, I found Saving Sara to be well written and an interesting and compelling read. I appreciated its honesty and Somers’s willingness to take responsibility for her part in conflict and to recognise the suffering her behaviour caused those around her as well as herself. Somers sees her food disorder as a combination of an addictive tendency within her and the way she was grew up feeling invisible and unloved due to her parents poor parenting skills. In her mid-twenties, her father told her two stories from when she was a baby. One of those stories was about a time he was persuaded by friends into not picking her up when she was crying. The friends said it would spoil her. Her father said he’d never forgiven himself.

Somers writes that in telling these stories, it was as if her father said: “You are right, we weren’t good parents.” But while she felt grateful for this confirmation, at that age, she felt it was “too little, too late.” She wasn’t ready to forgive, and spent many more years blaming her parents for her problems. She says, “I tried to convince anyone who would listen just how horrible my parents were.”

Now, while she recognises her parents’ behaviour affected her, I don’t get the sense that she blames them, but that she sees her whole family as having been locked in a terrifying and destructive dance, saying, “My mother confessed to me many years later, well into my adulthood, that she found me intimidating. What an irony, I thought to myself. I was totally intimidated by her.”

Where this book excels is in its honest exploration of what life is like with multiple addictions, and Somers’s honesty and compassion for all involved is clear throughout. She describes many incidents from her colourful life and relationships, including her first foray into stealing to indulge her craving, au pairing in Europe, and travelling with other hippies she met in various places. Among all the chaos, the only constants were her battle with food and weight and low self-esteem. As I’ve already mentioned, Somers writes well, and the story of her life is absorbing to read, with all its risky behaviour, and spells of feeling in love, happy and temporarily free of her habits until the inevitable fallings-out brought the compulsions right back. Amazingly, while still in the depths of addiction, she went graduate school, obtained a masters in psychology and worked as a psychotherapist.

A few of the stand-out passages for me were those in which, like that moment with her father, life could have taken a different turn. For instance, between high school and college, she got an au pair job, going with a family to their summer home. She was, she says, terrible at the job. At the end of it, the children’s mother took Sara aside to evaluate her summer and explained Sara’s many failings. Somers writes: “She wasn’t being unkind, just straightforward––something I wasn’t used to.…I was crying when she told me what an au pair in a family does.”

Yet this painful experience was the first time Sara felt visible, and she felt cared for in spite of the negative feedback. But, she says, some people, “given constructive feedback…are able to start making behavioral changes to improve their lives. Addicts can’t do that. The disease is more powerful than the knowing.”

For several decades, Somers tried various treatment programs and Twelve-Step meetings, including Alcoholics Anonymous and Greysheeters Anonymous (an offshoot of Overeaters Anonymous, which in addition to meetings, gives participants a meal plan they must follow and which demands abstinence from specific food types.) She repeatedly found reasons to drop out. As she says, “Shame…taught me to be afraid of people who would actually help me and to trust people who would hurt me.…It taught me fear, and fear caused me to be wrong about most everything.

Of course, as the title Saving Sara suggests, Somers did eventually recover from her addictions, and the last part of the book addresses that. I was glad of that. No matter how well written, I was beginning to weary of reading about yet another argument with her mother or current lover leading to yet another binging episode. Fortunately, Somers was also beginning to weary of her life. After a drunken party, she’d had enough of drinking. Of the decision to seek help, she writes, “In my life, I’ve had a few moments like these––moments where the fog lifted and I knew the right thing to do to care for myself. Too often, I’ve let them pass me by. I’m not clear why I grabbed this moment, this precious moment, but I like to think that I found the divinity within me and finally paid attention.”

A few days later she returned to AA, but it would still be some years before she went back to Greysheeters Anonymous.

I found the fairly short section on recovery to be less strong than the rest of the memoir. Perhaps it’s not surprising that having been a therapist for many years, Somers seems more fluent when analysing what kept her addicted than she is at describing what set her free. Although she attributes her success to Greysheeters, I found it hard to grasp why having a meal plan and weighing everything she eats made such a huge difference, especially since the first time she tried she only lasted 5 months before binging and took another 22 years to return.

Somers says that in Greysheet meetings she was told she was addicted to sugar and other simple carbohydrates. There is scientific evidence that would agree sugars can produce cravings in some people, so I have no quarrel with her perspective that refined carbs are best avoided, and would go as far as to say that applies to all of us, not just those with eating disorder. But Somers writes that all her life she had been: “counting calories, talking about ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ foods” and I would have preferred a clearer explanation of why weighing food is different to counting calories and banning carbohydrates is different to listing illegal foods.

I also have some concern that someone with an eating disorder reading this book might feel Greysheeters Anon is the only program that works. While that was Somers’s experience, I know of people who have recovered through other methods. While programs with meal plans (such as Greysheeters) work for some people, for others this becomes another stick to beat themselves with. As with any addiction, no one program works for every person.

While I realise this is a memoir so by its nature a personal story, it might have been useful to see some exploration of more recent research into eating disorders that suggest the make-up of gut biome can play a part in sugar cravings––with probiotics and even fecal transfer being used to support people into balance. Throughout the book Somers frequently mentions that people didn’t understand that she had a physical addiction, and that she felt misunderstood and seen as simply greedy or lacking willpower. Some exploration of the physical causes might go some way to helping increase the understanding she longed for in those without eating disorders.

I appreciate that Somers’ relief at recovering from a lifelong food disorder must make her feel passionate about the program that supported that recovery. However, my feeling is this book would be good for helping compulsive eaters feel understood, but I’m not sure if it points to a clear way forward. In the end though, the path from addiction is each person’s individual journey to make and as I’ve already said, even for someone without an eating disorder, Saving Sara: A Memoir of Food Addiction[image error] is a compelling read in its own right.

Disclosure: Should you buy Saving Sara via the links in this post, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. If you do that, thank you in advance!