Before You Get A Dog,

Mastery Over The Body - Its Impulses, Its Needs, Its Size - Is Paramount; To Lose Control Is To Risk Beauty, And To Risk Beauty Is To Risk Desirability, And To Risk Desirability Is To Risk Entitlement To Sexuality And Love And Self-esteem.

When You're Starving Or Wrapped Up In A Cycle Of Binge-ing-and-purging, Or Sexually Obsessed With (someone), It Is Very Hard To Think About Anything Else, Very Hard To See The Larger Picture Of Options That Is Your Life, Very Hard To Consider What Else You Might Need Or Want Or Fear Were You Not So Intently Focused On One Crushing Passion. I Sat In My Room Every Night, With Rare Exceptions, For Three And A Half Years.

I Once Heard A Woman Who Had Lost Her Dog Say That She Felt As Though A Color Were Suddenly Missing From Her World: The Dog Had Introduced To Her Field Of Vision Some Previously Unavailable Hue And Without A Dog, That Color Was Gone. That Seemed To Capture The Experience Of Loving A Dog With Eminent Simplicity. I'd Amend It Only Slightly And Say That If We Are Open To What They Have To Give, Dogs Can Introduce Us To Several Colors With Names Like Wildness, Nurturance, Trust And Joy.

It Happened This Way: I Fell In Love And Then, Because The Love Was Ruining Everything I Cared About, I Had To Fall Out.

Love—the Desire To Love And Be Loved, To Hold And Be Held, To Give Love Even If Your Experience As A Recipient Has Been Compromised Or Incomplete—is The Constant On The Continuum Of Hunger, It's What Links The Anorexic To The Garden-variety Dieter, It's The Persistent Pulse Of Need And Yearning Behind The Reach For Food, For Sex, For Something.