After her mother’s death, Jennette wrote that she was glad she was so upset about food. “At least I feel thin and precious and my body is good,” she wrote, “my littleness.” But when he went out to dinner with friends later, he ate everything he ordered and drank a bottle of sake. Realizing later that he could just throw it all away, he remembers feeling “victory,” thinking it was “the start of something good.”
Drinking heavily to help her bulimia became a habit. While filming Sam and Cat in 2014, she began to think she had a bulimia-induced heart attack. “It’s hard to admit it,” he wrote, “but a part of me really wishes I had.
He realized he was bingeing and purging five to 10 times a day and drinking eight or nine shots of alcohol every night. Identifying red carpet anxiety as one of her triggers, her eating disorder therapist began accompanying Jennette to events—which briefly followed a pattern: Binge eating backstage and crying on car on the way home.
He eventually fired that therapist over text, still uncomfortably delving into his childhood trauma. The bulimia continued and Jennette’s teeth began to rot. Spitting out a molar in the bathroom on a flight to Sydney, Australia, to do press for Netflix—followed by an Uber driver playing Ariana’s “Focus on Me” upon arrival—was a wake-up call. – up call. Her next therapist reassured her that relapses are normal on the road to long-term recovery.