Zosia Mamet, who plays actress Shoshanna Shapiro on the hit HBO series Girls has revealed her big secret: She’s been struggling with an eating disorder since childhood.
“Do you have a secret?” The The Last Keepers actress wrote in her column for Glamour magazine. “Is your secret something that could kill you, a silent gnawing feeling that’s slowly melting you away, little by little, something deadly that nobody else can see? Mine is.
“And it is this: I’ve struggled with an eating disorder since I was a child,” she continued. “This struggle has been mostly a private one, a war nobody knew was raging inside me. I tried to fight it alone for a long time. And I nearly died.”
However, even though Mamet sought help for her disorder, despite the support and intervention of her award-winning playwright and director father, David Mamet, her battle is not over yet.
“Here’s how I think of my eating disorder: I’m an addict in recovery. I was told I was fat for the first time when I was eight. I’m not fat; I’ve never been fat. But ever since then, there has been a monster in my brain that tells me I am — that convinces me my clothes don’t fit or that I’ve eaten too much,” she confessed.
“At times it has forced me to starve myself, to run extra miles, to abuse my body,” Mamet continued. “As a teenager I used to stand in front of the refrigerator late at night staring into that white fluorescent light, debilitated by the war raging inside me: Whether to give in to the pitted hunger in my stomach or close the door and go back to bed. I would stand there for hours, opening and closing the door, taking out a piece of food then putting it back in; taking it out, putting it in my mouth, and then spitting it into the garbage.”
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