I am nearing the end of the novel, and I have finally made it to the part I, like another other reader, has been awaiting. The moment that Portia finally begins to take her life back into her control. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, and at times I did not even think that it would happen. After her mother and brother started to realize her weight loss and get worried about her health, I thought that this moment would come. I was disappointed that it didn’t, though I would not say that I was surprised. Portia promised that she would gain weight and that she was going to be okay, that she was in control. This took some time and some bargaining. She did not want to begin to gain weight until she had done the shoot for Angeleno Magazine, and attended the Australia Day Ball. This is when she would make an effort to begin to take her health back into her own hands.
Finally, a few months later, Portia began to gain weight back. She went from her lowest at 86 pounds, to 96 pounds. Although this made her feel self-conscious, she knew that this is what she needed to do to be able to survive and make her friends and family stop worrying.
It was the last day of filming the movie she was working on where her character was grieving the loss of her father, and she was required to cry. She mentions how she felt as though there were two difficult parts of this particular scene; the fact that she herself had lost her father at a young age, and the fact that she believed that in order to be able to cry, she first needed to feel as though she was pretty and put together. Nobody likes an ugly crier. Portia was successfully able to act out the scene perfectly and flawlessly, but it was what occurred afterwards that was challenging. The scene brought forward painful memories of her own father’s death and the resentment and trauma she still carries from this tragic event in her life. She had to be carried from the set into the make-up trailer and could not stop crying. For the first time, she allowed her flaws to be seen by the make-up artist as her make-up was taken off of her face. Before this day, she had never let the make-up artist take off her makeup for fear that everyone would see her bloodshot eyes, broken blood vessels in her face from throwing up, and everyone would know that she was not perfect, that she was ill. That she had an eating disorder.
Portia described this day as the end of her career. She was overly embarrassed and could not believe that she had allowed herself to become so vulnerable in front of all of her co-workers. How could she? Everyone now knew that she was a fake…or at least that is how she felt. All of this took such a great toll on Portia that she felt herself fading, fading into the air, as she realized that she was going to pass out. This was her turning point, her realization.
