Daily Blague

It's my birthday, and I'll do what I want to. And here's what I want to. I want to share a story that Kathleen has told me not to tell. I think it's the biggest fakeout story of all time. Kathleen, not without justice, sees off-putting show-off elements. You decide.

At a low point in my Houston years, I paid weekly visits to Dr Hilde Bruch, a member of the Baylor College of Medicine faculty and considered by many to be the leading researcher in the field of anorexia nervosa, which hardly anybody had ever heard of in the early Seventies. Perhaps because she was a chum of my first mother-in-law (a member of the same faculty), or perhaps because, formidable German psychiatrist that she was, the appearance of dislike was part of therapy. She told me, for example, that since I hadn't published anything yet (I was 24), I probably never would. She berated me for not having appropriate insurance. And she insisted that I stop drifting my hand across her white walls as I talked. This inspired me to take the daring step of sitting in an armchair opposite her.

Treatment had reached the armchair phase when Dr Bruch sent me to a psychologist in River Oaks for a battery of intelligence tests. After two days of that, I put the matter out of my mind, because I was brought up to believe that the Soviets would convert to capitalism before any professional examiner would inform an intelligence-test subject of the results. Apparently, I was brought up wrong, because, two weeks later, Dr Bruch surprised me by announcing that the results were in, and that they placed me in the Nth percentile of Americans. I haven't made up my mind whether I'm going to tell you the value of N, but consider it less than ten. "This is not uncommon among college graduates," she said, in a remark that I have never been able to comprehend, unless she meant that it is not uncommon among European graduates; then she lowered the boom. "I'm telling you this because I think it is high time you stopped carrying yourself as though you belonged in the first percentile." All this in a redoubtable and well-preserved German accent (Dr Bruch had been in the United States for nearly forty years). How can I help you?

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Sometimes.