This confessional self-help guide explores the complex emotional truth of what it’s like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. Activist author Marissa LaRocca’s revelatory tale includes her struggle with her secrets, including sexuality, and how she emerged as an outspoken advocate for gay rights and women’s health issues.

Many young women and girls struggle with the body image issues that engender eating disorders with elaborate rituals around food, binging, purging, and hiding it all while trying to maintain a face of normalcy to the world. Anorexia and bulimia have become major national health crises, with skyrocketing statistics indicating that between 3 and 5 percent of the population suffer anorexia nervosa alone. Sadly, many never attain the sense of being “normal” and deal with a lifetime of body image and self-esteem issues.

This intimate account of courage and the search for truth and meaning will have you rooting for Marissa LaRocca as she unravels the emotional layers of her own battle with food, body image, and sexuality. Readers of this riveting memoir will relate to the coming-of-age story of a young woman confronting some of life’s major issues while living, for a time, in two closets: one to hide her eating disorder and one to hide her sexuality and very identity. Echoes of Portia de Rossi’s Unbearable Lightness resound in LaRocca’s portrait of a life seemingly lived out in the open but, in truth, very much concealed. 

Through her inspiring triumphs and revelations, activist and author Marissa LaRocca invites readers to confront themselves. She asks, “What if, at the root of all ‘disorders’, is the refusal to acknowledge or permit certain feelings - feelings that, if witnessed, have the power to free their sufferers? To what extent are ‘disorders’ actually doorways to helping us understand the truth about our lives?”

In addition to her personal story, LaRocca takes a close look at society’s role in the development of eating disorders and other mental health challenges, establishing that the prevalence of such “illnesses” represent a collective yearning for connection, acceptance, and emotional nourishment among generations that are starving for so many things. Starving in Search of Me resolves with hope and an abundance of insights, tools, and resources to support eating disorder sufferers and members of the LGBTQ community alike. It’s a head-on journey toward total self-acceptance that will nourish the spirit and inspire readers to embrace their differences and nurture their authentic selves.