Up For Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over - Hardcover

Alter, Cathy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743288408 ISBN 13: 9780743288408

Publisher: Atria Books, 2008

Synopsis

By age thirty-seven, Cathy Alter had made a mess of her life. With a failed marriage already under her belt, she was continuing down the path of poor decisions, one paved with a steady stream of junk food, unpaid bills, questionable friends, and highly inappropriate men. So she sat down and asked herself what she truly wanted. A decent guy. A nicer home. More protein. When she took a closer look at her wants, she noticed something that seemed very familiar -- with the addition of exclamation points, her list could easily be transformed into the cover lines on every women's magazine: Find the love you deserve! Paint to the rescue! Eggs-actly perfect meals!

So Cathy gave over her life to the glossies for the next twelve months, resolving to follow their advice without question. By the end of her subscriptions, she would get rid of upper-arm jiggle, crawl out of debt, host the perfect dinner party, run a mile without puking, engage in better bathtub booty, ask for a raise, and rehaul her apartment.

Well, at least that was the premise of her social experiment. What actually happened was much less about cosmetic change and much more about internal transformation. Singular in its voice and yet completely universal, Up for Renewal will appeal to all who have ever wondered if they could actually make their life over.

About this title

About the Author:

Cathy Alter is a Washington, D.C.-based writer whose articles and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Washingtonian, Self, Fitness, and McSweeney's. Her first book, Virgin Territory: Stories from the Road to Womanhood, was released in 2004.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

June

Do or Diet

Taking baby steps into a new life seemed like the most humane way to slap myself in the face. I was not mentally prepared to take on a month of money matters or transform anything with paint. My inaugural challenge should be familiar and manageable. Because personal experience showed that I had more control over what (and not who) I put in my mouth, my first foray into selfimprovement was to be food-related.

At five-eleven and a size 6, diet is a noun for me, not a verb. I didn't need to lose weight. I just needed to stop eating the insides of the vending machine for lunch. Plus, an official lunch would provide balance and structure to my routine, elements of a normal life that had been AWOL from mine.

If I didn't have a digestive system more fragile than most tropical fish, I would eat anything put in front of me. Here's a partial list of foods most deadly to me: shrimp, lobster, ice cream, tuna fish, yogurt, cheese, pumpkin seeds, black beans, white wine, Brazil nuts, soybeans, calcium-enriched orange juice, tiramisu, lamb, and anything from Fuddruckers. I also stopped eating red meat when I was poor and living on my own in New York City. Now that I'm more gainfully employed, I'd like to begin incorporating a bit of beef into my diet, but I'm convinced that first hamburger will send my body into seismic shock.

Because I suffered from so many food allergies, I defaulted to bread. And more bread. I kicked off my days with a jumbo cinnamon raisin bagel and often repeated the same breakfast for lunch when I couldn't think of anything else to eat. And if I wasn't eating popcorn for dinner, I was slapping together a peanut butter (protein!) and jelly sandwich or eating a Dunkin' Donuts corn muffin directly out of the bag.

I thought hard about bread and how much I was going to miss a nice crust. I didn't need to open up a single June issue to know that the only acceptable baguettes I'd find would come from Fendi, not France. What I didn't know was what directives were going to come down from the mountain of magazines that were currently piled on my coffee table -- and whether their instructions would result in anything suitable for eating. I imagined a month of shelling snow peas and discovering 10 Tricks for Tastier Tofu. I pictured myself the way I envisioned other healthy eaters -- clear-eyed and vibrating with sunshine -- and realized I was smiling.

Food has always been a vehicle of change for me, and June was always when the drive began. The moment school let out for summer, I was preparing for fall, when I'd reenter school a different person. Tanner, prettier, shorter (I was heads taller than most of the boys in my class), more confident, magically popular, and finally, FINALLY, kissed. Naturally, I thought the last three would happen only if the first three did.

My first attempt at self-improvement took place the summer between seventh and eighth grade, when my mother and I went on the Scarsdale diet. The food, or lack thereof, was practically prison fare: a scoop of cottage cheese, a piece of skinless chicken, cantaloupes ad nauseam. Breakfast, which consisted of a single slice of dry protein toast the size and consistency of a cocktail napkin washed down with a hellish glass of grapefruit juice, was a key hardship.

Sensing the historic significance of a first diet, I documented my regimen with tedious precision; my quilted Holly Hobbie diary soon took on the qualities of an actuarial spreadsheet. When I wasn't suffering through a dressing-free salad or immortalizing it with Dickensonian aplomb, I was breaststroking like crazy in our swimming pool.

I lasted a week, at which point Gail, my best friend since fifth grade, took me to the snack bar at her country club. I became a spectacle of nutritional noncompliance. I happily purchased a bag of Doritos and a cup of hot fudge (for dipping purposes), and we watched a gang of deeply tanned women play mah-jongg with the same gaping interest we normally reserved for the Matt Dillon classic Over the Edge. I had never seen mah-jongg before and assumed that the women, with their coral lips, python-print caftans, and numinous ivory tiles, were gypsies, despite the fact that we were deep in the suburbs of Farmington, Connecticut, at a private club that admitted only Jews.

Not that I should have been on a diet in the first place. I wasn't fat, in spite of my father pinching my "love handles" and nicknaming me Butterball. "Are your thighs still hungry?" he'd ask, whenever I reached for seconds or asked if I could order dessert.

Photos of me at this time show an immature face with full, smooth cheeks, my hipless torso and ribbon legs predicting the shape I would eventually own in adulthood. Yet, at twelve, I had neither the therapy nor the vocabulary to tell my father that he may have been projecting -- or getting even with me for every time I poked him in the stomach and asked him to laugh like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

My mother, a six-foot-tall glamazon with a closet pulled from her own clothing boutique, sent the most powerful message to me by way of her dinner plate. I took a nightly inventory of what she ate. "Why don't you want a baked potato?" I'd wonder. "Don't you like the Colonel's special biscuits?"

"I'm on a diet," she'd respond, without fail. To ensure she stuck to it, she'd only stock our cookie jar with Mallomars and our freezer with rainbow sherbet -- textures and flavors she found repellent and unworthy.

I grew up accepting the inevitability that once you became a woman, you were always on a diet. Being a woman equaled loss.

As I reached for a bright orange Cosmopolitan with an equally orange (-haired, -skinned, -dressed) Jessica Simpson on the cover, I wondered what was I about to give up -- and what I would eventually gain. Flashy and obvious, with page after page of bite-size true confessions about sex in predominantly public places, Cosmo was like diving into a big bag of penny candy. Before I knew it, I was in some sugar-induced euphoria, taking the Cosmo Quiz "Do You Make Men M-E-L-T?"

1. You're checking into a resort with friends when you notice a group of hot guys. You:
a. Pray your pals don't embarrass you
b. Say, "Hey boys, we're in room 508!"
c. Smile. If they start a convo, you'll say "Maybe we'll see you by the pool."

Can you believe that I really took the time to consider these lettered possibilities? Neither could I. But I chose C, the milquetoast of the trio, and moved on.

2. The guy you're casually dating excitedly asks if you've ever kissed a girl. You say:
a. "Wouldn't you like to know."
b. "Gross, never!"
c. "Sure! Wanna see me do it now?"

HILARIOUS! Had this quiz been written in irony? This was funny by design, right? I liked that I was in on the joke and circled A, because seriously, guys love when you toy with your sexuality.

3. You're chilling at the park next to a stud. What do you do to get his attention?
a. Some provocative yoga poses
b. Sunbathe in your bra
c. Pull out your romance novel

I knew a coked-out hairdresser in my neighborhood who would have selected A without a moment's hesitation. I once saw her pull her leg around her head at a dinner party, her crotch aimed directly toward the one straight man in the room.

It didn't take me long to determine the obvious. Cosmo had divided the female quiz-taking population into three groups: Sluts, prudes, and everyone else. Did this prevent me from immensely enjoying the discovery of the apparent? Did this stop me from inserting myself into the rest of the seven scenarios? No, it did not. After I decided the television character I most related to was Elliot from Scrubs and that I'd most likely wear cropped pants and a T-shirt to an outdoor party, I tallied my score and learned that I was a simmering seductress. I "project come-hither vibes that don't scream desperate."

Rather than being dismayed that I had turned to Cosmo to tell me who I really was, I felt oddly validated (as well as highly entertained) and congratulated myself for coming up with this genius idea. In the past, I had to speed-read my way through the latest installments of Glamour or InStyle in the poorly lit waiting room of my dentist's office. Now, I had an actual excuse, a job, a responsibility to read all these magazines every single month for the next year. I could hardly wait for my subscriptions to kick in.

Even though I was supposed to be limiting myself to healthy-eating articles, it was hard not to devour every magazine cover to cover, which took me approximately five hours (not counting the hour I spent online trying to locate the necklace Katie Holmes wore throughout her "Single in the City" photo spread in InStyle magazine).

Spending an afternoon with the ladies, I realized how much voyeuristic, diversionary amusement was available to me, like the article in Marie Claire about a woman who recruits a wingman to help her land a date. It was a different kind of pleasure, this sort of reading, compared to tackling a ten thousand-word profile on Gertrude Stein in the New Yorker, for example. I forgot how much dumb fun regular reading could be. I was both thrilled and horrified by the thought of filling my head with the latest developments in teeth whiteners and wondered what kind of parlor tricks I'd be performing for friends: Look, everyone! Watch how Lucy's jawline softens when I give her a deep side part!

Even if an article was wildly out of sync with my June mission, I tore out whatever I saw as having value for future months. O, The Oprah Magazine, for instance, had devoted the month to "religion," with her Ah, Men! special issue. Inside, there were all sorts of articles with captions like "How to Get Through to a Man," "Bald Is to Male as Fat Is to Female," and the highly educational, "Getting H...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0743288408
• ISBN 13: 9780743288408
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336