Toni Dockter: Filosophy with a Fuchsia Flair

I can’t remember how I originally heard about Geneen Roth, author of the best-seller and Oprah-approved book: Women, Food, and God. She lived in Santa Cruz for awhile (near where I live)—where she began her crusade to help food-obsessed women, along with herself.

Geneen now lives in Marin County—same as Anne Lamott, a friend (and mentor?). She mentions Anne a few times in the text of the book as well as thanking her in the Acknowledgments section for her help in “shaping the manuscript.” I can definitely see the Anne Lamott influence in this book.

When I read the flyer from Bookshop Santa Cruz that Geneen would be speaking there on March 23, 2010, I decided to attend. Not because I have overweight problems or nothing better to do. But because I know she’s popular in my area, her book is a bestseller, and I wanted to see why. I also hoped to get a good blog out of the whole thing.

But ever since I attended the book reading event and starting reading the book right after, I have procrastinated finishing the book and dreaded writing this blog.

Why? I didn’t like the book reading event, I don’t like the book, and I really don’t like to slam a fellow writer. So I’ll go easy!

First, the book reading event was jammed and the audience attentive (with the exception of a homeless woman who curled up next to a wall, put on eye muffs, and snoozed!). I found Geneen to be soft-spoken and frail looking. Call me hardened, but it was hard for me to buy in to what she was selling because she lacked a strong/confident presence.

Geneen started by telling her personal story of weight gain and weight loss and how the number of pounds she weighed dominated her life for decades. She said, “It’s never been true that the value of a person depends on the number on a scale.” Of course that’s true. Does anyone out there NOT know that?

She talked about for some women, food becomes synonymous with love, goodness, and fulfillment. People overeat because they are trying to fill a need. Again, nothing new.

What I did like in her talk was her assessment that dieting was a form of shaming oneself—that if you starve yourself, you can starve the badness out of yourself. Likewise, more nutty thinking: that if you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful relaxed human being.

Geneen talked about self loathing being the motivation to over eat. (Self loathing is a topic Anne Lamott has written about in her books.) Geneen said that how you eat is a reflection of how you feel about being alive.

The talk was somewhat disjointed and full of woo-woo stuff—which is exactly how the book is structured. In the book, there were not enough dots to be connected for it to make sense to me.

For instance, in the talk Geneen said, “How you eat is how you live and there is a fabulous doorway to a dazzling inner universe.” HUH? She also said stuff like “There’s a knock at your heart. You need to feel it.” HUH?

She asked, “What is enlightenment? It is following one thing all the way to the end.” HUH?

Geneen read a passage from the book. I thought it was the worst section she could have chosen. It was a story about her cat named Mookie. (Good name, crappy cat.) I didn’t see the relevance to the Eat/Women/God thing.

However, it did make Geneen look like a kook about this particular deranged and violent cat, whose “main purpose in life was to maim and murder…he swaggered, he destroyed, he roared…he also peed everywhere”—in her house constantly for three years (including on chairs, a couch, a bed, the carpet). Then Geneen would rightly get angry and then equally guilty for yelling at/hating/throwing the cat out the door. She blamed herself for Mookie’s bad behavior. Get a grip.

Here’s another goofy part about Geneen’s relationship with Mookie (page 94):

“…as my friend Annie said, he made life impossible by being so impossibly gorgeous. He’d bat his light blue eyes and I’d swoon from the beauty of him. He’d turn a corner, situate himself behind a crop of violet pansies and the perfection of him—his fluffy tail, his tiny gray ears, his long whiskers—would knock me out….So Mookie had his way with me because he was beautiful.”

Oh brother. My reaction: Geneen Honey, you need more than eating counseling! He’s a CAT for cryin’ out loud—not a PERSON like for instance the Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers (personal fave of mine–see below). And who has the time to clean up cat urine OVER AND OVER again? Who wants to deal with a violent cat over and over? (BTW, can you tell I am NOT a cat person.)

Here’s another example of a woo-woo stuff in the book that doesn’t make sense to me:

“As a student of the Diamond Approach, I learned a version of inquiry—a philosophical/scientific/psychological/spiritual process that has been around in various forms for thousands of years. The version I learned was body based and always began in the present moment, with my direct experience.”

HUH? There’s plenty more where that came from. The “I believe in love. I believe in beauty” speech on page 25:

“…if you start with the thing you find most beautiful and trace its perfume back to its essence, you will perceive an intangible presence, a swath of stillness that allows the thing you love to become visible like the openness of the sky reveals the presence of the moon.”

HUH? Holy moly but I smell me some snake oil! And I guess in Geneen’s case, that “beauty” would be her cat and the “perfume” would be Eau de Pussy Piss?

In the book Geneen talks A LOT about meditation, saying that she has meditated for years, and has used dozens of forms of meditations. She lists some: streaming light meditations, visualization meditations, multisyllabic mantra meditations, Sufi meditations, Tibetan, Buddhist, Taoist, etc. She also said she has been in therapy for years. In addition, she has taught at retreats for years, including a process she calls “Inquiry,” which is about finding out something you don’t know but want to. That’s a WHOLE LOT of self-analyzing.

Here’s why I really didn’t like the book reading event:

During the book event, Geneen NEVER mentioned God. A member of the audience asked why not, considering it was one third of the title and presumably one-third of the book. She brushed over the question and didn’t answer it. After reading the book I know why.

Geneen isn’t qualified to discuss theology/God as a Being as either she doesn’t get it or she doesn’t embrace it. She never defined what she meant by God, but I think what she really means by “God” is some kind of spirituality. She also says she “doesn’t believe in the God that most people call God.”

 

She doesn’t believe that there is an all-knowing God. From the Prologue and backcover: “What you want most: the demystification of weight loss and the luminous presence that so many of us call “’God.’”

Geneen doesn’t explain this luminous presence and what it can (or can’t) do for you. She doesn’t explain how you get from overeating to “the presence”. She says “when we welcome what we most want to avoid….we evoke divinity.” I don’t see that connection.

I don’t know why is GOD is quotes. It’s either God or it isn’t. And if God isn’t all knowing, how can God be all powerful? And if God isn’t all powerful, what’s the point of wanting a “luminous presence” that may or may not be able to help you?

However, when she used the word GOD (NOT in quotes) in her book title, I’m sure she was referring to the God most people think of. I find this sneaky and disingenuous. (The better to sell books with?)

Geneen says she uses “the word (God) in this book because it evokes a vast expanse that we cannot penetrate with our minds, although we can know it through silence or poetry or simply sensing what is always here.”

HUH? I’m sensing hogwash.

The scanty discussion spent on God throughout the book makes the ending superficial:

“…if you want to use your relationship with food as the unexpected path, you will discover that God has been there all along. In the sorrow of every ending, in the rapture of every beginning. In the noise and in the stillness, in the upheavals and in the rafts of peace. In each moment of kindness you lavish upon your breaking heart or the size of your thighs, with each breath you take—God has been there. She is you.”

What a bunch of hooey! And the God is a “she” thing—so Anne Lamott. So is the “thigh” thing. (Most women complain about their butts or their bellies. Anne chooses the thighs.) And so is the “life is messy” thing (she uses in the book) that also belongs to Anne Lamott.

I think Geneen is trying to channel Anne Lamott. Anne’s books are powerful because she reveals something new and profound. Anne has wisdom—like Maya Angelou.

Lastly, at the book reading, the last question from a woman in the audience was: “Where did your self-loathing come from?”

Geneen hesitated for a minute, then said, “I don’t know.”

I started laughing. Are you kidding me? (Cue John McEnroe: “You CANNOT be serious!!”)

Geneen Sweetie, after ALL your therapy, meditation, inquiry exercises, and expert teaching to other women with food issues, you know not from whence your psyche took a hit?

How about the stuff on page 22? How about your feelings about your ‘moonpie face, stringy hair, and chubby body?’ How about your internalizing your parent’s fighting? After all this time and all your books and your insight that “Overeating was my way to punish and shame myself” and you DON’T KNOW WHY?

How can someone counsel others to find out what’s really bugging them if she hasn’t figured it out for herself? As Dr. Phil says, “You gotta name it to claim it.”

This “I don’t know” comment was so INAUTHENTIC.

That answer made Geneen seem unintelligent, unenlightened, or dishonest. Or all three. That’s why I didn’t like the book reading event and I didn’t like the book.

I should have done what the homeless woman had done—slept through the whole thing!