By Lisa Kotin: I will never understand how lovers can buy one another chocolate for Valentine’s Day. If I eat chocolate, the last thing I want to do is to get romantic. I just want to hole up in the bathroom with my box of sea salt caramels and my nuts and chews. Door locked. Lights off. So not even I can see myself going down on the goods. Read more →

A Q&A with Lisa Kotin

When I was in the food, in the sugar, I had little or no self-love/respect. It was a merry-go-round of bingeing, hitting (another) bottom, cleaning up my act, seeking out a man to try to fill me, feeling bad because the romance didn’t turn out to be what I fantasized it would be (how could it when my vision was so distorted by my self-destructive behavior?) then going back to the food/sugar. Because I had little or no love for myself (with my success contingent on artistic success or romantic attraction), because I would never be good enough, I attracted men who could not love/want me in the raw, in my imperfection. A man who wanted me wholly would have been a turn-off. Why would I want to be with someone who actually liked me for who I was? It wasn’t until I began to accept/respect myself that I could be attracted to someone whose love I could accept. Read more →