books book reviews

Personal memoirs

reviewed by T. Nelson

score+1

Avoid Boring People

by James Watson

Vintage 2007, 2010, 347 pages
Reviewed by T. Nelson

James Watson won the Nobel Prize in 1962 along with Francis Crick for discovering the double helix structure of DNA in 1953. In this autobiography he gives us his advice for running a lab and how to behave if you win the Nobel Prize. Here's a typical passage:

Behind our house was an alley that separated the homes on the west side of Luella Avenue from those on the east side of Paxton Avenue. The general absence of cars made it a safe place for games of kick-the-can or setting off firecrackers that could still be bought freely around the Fourth of July. When I finally began to grow past five feet, a backboard with a basketball hoop was put up above our garage doors, allowing me to practice my free throws after school. Scarce family funds also purchased a ping-pong table to liven up winter days.

That's from his early life, but the whole book is in this style. If you're interested in what a rather boring biology student who happened to make a big discovery did his whole life, this is the book for you.

One interesting point in this book is his depiction of X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin's work and where it touched on the DNA story. Her work contributed to our understanding of DNA, as did the work of many others.

Watson also gives us some “Remembered Lessons” including “Exaggerations do not void basic truths”, “Become the chairman,” and “Avoid boring people.” About the latter he says “Not boring others, of course, requires that you take pains not to become boring, as often happens when you begin to bore yourself.”

Hmm, I can see how that could happen.

There is no discussion of any philosophy of life, no discussion of his views on speaking honestly on controversial topics, and no mention of why he sold his prize to make money; just a recitation of how academia was sixty years ago. Thus, there's little here that generates either sympathy or antipathy. He says it was written mainly to benefit future biographers, but I suspect its real goal was to dissuade them.

apr 16, 2019; edited apr 18, 2019

score+5

The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting

by Evanna Lynch
Ballantine 2021, 463 pages

Reviewed by T. Nelson

You might ask what the world is coming to when we get life stories from people who are barely thirty years old. But Evanna Lynch is a terrific writer. Her story about how she overcame anorexia is full of interesting details about what goes on inside the head of a teenager with anorexia.

Anorexia nervosa facts
  • About 50–74% heritable
  • Affects females ten times as often as males
  • Patients often resist treatment
  • High rate of relapse
  • The deadliest psychiatric disorder, killing 5.6% of sufferers per decade
  • Often associated with depression, anxiety, and alexithymia, but causes and effects are unclear
  • Studies conflict on whether antidepressants are of benefit
  • Often thought to be induced by social norms of thinness
  • However, this can't explain the obsessiveness and the disturbance in body image, which can be highly delusional

After months of being anorexic, Evanna was near death from mal­nu­trition and was repeat­edly hospit­al­ized. When the book version of Order of the Phoenix came out, she identi­fied with the Luna character and wrote to J.K. Rowling. Rowling loves children, and the letters she wrote back helped. But what finally pulled her out of her death spiral was being committed to a ward in England for anorexics and self-harmers. In the ward, inmates were forced to eat food until they achieved a normal weight.

For some of those inmates, the obsession with avoiding food was so strong that they refused to lick stamps because the glue on each stamp contained 5.9 calories. Others were covered with scars caused by self-harming.

Why did she become anorexic? Her family in Ireland was intact and supportive; her parents didn't want her dead and never mistreated her in any way. Yet for some reason she decided she was not attractive enough and resolved to make herself thin. Beauty is how social status is allocated for females, and much of her dysphoria seemed to have arisen in anxiety about becoming a woman:

Women were front and centre, running the show, feeding everyone, doing several things at once. Women had opinions, and large bosoms, and they took up plenty of space with both. But even though everyone told me I'd grow into one, inevitably, soon, I didn't believe them . . . .

She got the role of Luna not just because she was a fanatical Potter fan, meaning she already had all her lines memorized, but also because she admired the character's serenity and imperturbability. When her past was discovered during shooting, it almost cost her the role.

She has strong opinions about food, being perhaps the only vegetarian on the planet who hates tomatoes:

Shall I tell you the origin of my intensely personal vendetta against tomatoes? Yes, I shall. I have never liked tomatoes; not in a sandwich, not on a pizza, and not mashed up deviously in tomato ketchup. Cold, slimy, evil bastards. I just didn't like them; it was a simple sensory fact. But after my first meal at Peaceful Pasture Clinic, my aversion to tomatoes became suddenly, and forevermore, an intensely personal affair.

She says anorexia is a mental condition and the weight loss is a side effect. This makes it sound like an autoimmune disorder: the patient has rejected fat cells, hates them, and is trying to eliminate them from their body, regardless of the consequences. She lost her creativity and abandoned her friendships, and boys stopped paying attention to her. She seems not to recognize how close she was to dying.

To treat anorexia, she says, you first have to treat the underlying psychiatric issues. She says one can never defeat it until one defeats the feeling of worthlessness:

My theory on this is that you can't ever actually beat anorexia, you can only abandon it. . . . I know that there'll be many moments in life where I confront the feeling of worthlessness, and that anorexia will still be there, positing an alternative, gently suggesting that this feeling would be more tolerable if I lost some weight. . . .

[T]he strong emotional reaction [the word 'anorexia'] produced in me was because my anorexia was dying, and it was terrified of oblivion.

From what she writes, it sounds more like fear of growing up. For an anorexic, being cruel to one's body through anorexia and being cruel to oneself by posting hateful comments about oneself on the Internet are coping mechanisms. That may be why they resist treatment. She wrote this book to help others with anorexia to under­stand their affliction. It will also be helpful to relatives of patients and to those of us who need to understand and treat these disorders.

It's an insightful story of a person overcoming a mysterious and deadly disorder, told without a trace of self-pity, and with a degree of honesty that is absolutely impressive.

nov 11 2021. updated nov 23 2021