The Life of a Real Girl

Suffering from insecurity caused by overly critical and insensitive parents, teenage Jo, a New Yorker, alternated between anorexia and obesity. She became dependent on the amphetamine diet pills prescribed in uncontrolled quantities by her doctor. After five years of lying and forging prescriptions to maintain her addiction, she was confined for two years in a mental hospital to help her identify and eradicate the roots of her eating dysfunction. As she notes in this candid and affecting account, relating to other patients and assuming responsibility were as important as therapy in restoring her self-reliance. Her new-found serenity was tested by the death of a lover for whom she grieved without recourse to drugs. She is now married and the mother of three. (June 30pTHE WAR AGAINST THE TERROR