I was
in the library on Friday picking out books and was about to go to check out
when I noticed "Cut Me Loose" sitting by itself at the end of a
half-empty shelf. I took it out and read it over the weekend. It was not what I
expected.
I had
some idea of what it was about, having read some reviews when it came out. I
knew that the book chronicled Leah Vincent's journey away from the religion of
her Yeshivish upbringing, and that part of that journey had included clashes
with her family and ill-advised sexual encounters. I was expecting a story
about how she had become disenchanted with her religious upbringing, had made
some mistakes learning to integrate with general society, and had ultimately
been successful in doing so. I was expecting to root for her against the forces
of religious fundamentalism that had wronged and alienated so many of us.
Instead, I found myself saddened by what Leah had experienced, but also
sympathetic to the people around her who were dealing with a clearly unstable
person.
The
book is well-written and engaging. I didn't want to put it down. The book is
published by Doubleday and seems intended for a general audience, but there
were many nuances that I think would be lost on someone who had never been a
part of the Yeshivish community. Not because one had to be a part of the
community to understand, but because these things weren't explained. Nor would
it have been difficult or cumbersome to include explanations. Here and there,
the author does explain. For instance, when she writes that her father was
often invited to speak at the Agudah conventions, she adds that Agudah is a
powerful Orthodox lobbying group. It's an addition of half a sentence that
gives the reader context. Yet in many other places that addition is missing.
For instance, she describes her brothers running up and down the stairs
shouting Hebrew words (which she transliterates), but neglects to mention that
they were singing a song (easily recognizable to anyone familiar with Jewish
music of the era), instead leaving the impression that the little boys in her
crazy religious family shouted Hebrew incantations while playing. In another
place she describes having day-dreamed about having Rabbi Matisyahu Solomon
officiate at her wedding, but neglects to explain his stature (easily done:
"dean of the largest graduate-level Jewish school in the United
States"), leaving a typical reader without any understanding of the daydream's
significance.
For
much of the first half of the book, I felt angry as her family over reacted to
her transgressions. She's banned from the post-high-school religious school of
her choice when it's discovered she's been corresponding with a boy. Her
parents cut off her allowance when she spends a month's worth of money on a
borderline-immodest sweater. Her sister, who she is staying with, hides letters
Leah's friend sends to her, and only pretends to mail the letters Leah writes.
When she moves to New York, she can barely afford necessities on her minimum-wage
income, and often goes without meals. When she calls her mother, desperate for
help, her mother tells her to stop being so dramatic, and sends her only twenty
dollars.
As the
book progresses, and she describes more and more of her dysfunctional behavior,
I began to suspect that rather than the victim of circumstance and religious
extremism her narrative implies, she was instead someone with a serious
clinical disorder. I'm not qualified to make a diagnosis, and even if I were,
you can't diagnose someone without having evaluated them in person, but what
she describes seems like a textbook case of Borderline Personality Disorder
(BPD). People who leave their religion are too often dismissed as unbalanced,
and I'm loathe to perpetuate the stereotype, but in this case I think it may be
accurate.
The
diagnostic criteria for BPD include: "A pervasive pattern of instability
of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity
beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of context."
Leah's
relationships with men, to which she devotes a lot of space, are highly
unstable and frequently end abruptly. She often makes impulsive decisions with
negative consequences, like blowing a month's worth of money on a sweater,
going to a club and allowing a man to have sex with her on the dance floor, or
suddenly deciding to stop eating.
"Frantic
efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment."
Leah's narrative is one of constant
abandonment, first by her family, then by her community, and then by the string
of men she throws herself at in a desperate attempt to find self-worth in her
sexuality.
"A
pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by
alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation."
This is
an accurate description of Leah's relationships with her family and especially
with her "boyfriends," each of whom is described as wonderful, life
changing, and the love of her life while she is dating him, but is reduced to
his basest traits as soon as they break up.
"Impulsivity
in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex,
Substance Abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)."
She
engages in impulsive, damaging sex on almost every page. Several times she describes
impulsively spending money she needed for food or other necessities on things
like the sweater mentioned above or high-priced cocktails at a bar. And
sprinkled though the book are accounts of binge-eating in an attempt to control
her emotions or fill an emotional emptiness.
"Recurrent
suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior."
Through
much of the second half of the book Leah regularly cuts herself to relieve her
psychological distress, and several times describes imagining killing herself,
including an incident where she actually swallows a bottle of painkillers and
another where she almost slashes her wrists, stopping only after she had
already made a cut deep enough to leave a scar.
"Chronic
feelings of emptiness."
Leah
describes such feelings after her estrangement from her family. These feelings
led her to constantly look for another man as each of her relationships failed,
and, as mentioned above, she sometimes attempted to fill the emptiness with
food.
Leah
recounts a childhood conversation with her mother in which her mother dismissed
mental disorders as a scam dreamt up by pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs.
Yet her father has claimed in a publicly published letter that Leah had been
under the care of a psychiatrist since she was thirteen. I don't know which is
the more accurate version of events, but if it is true that Leah has BPD, and
that she has been treated since she was a young teenager, it implies a story very
different than the one she is trying to tell.
When
her parents decide not to give her attention when she acts out, this is not an
indication that they are cruel and distant. It is the reasonable (if perhaps
mistaken) reaction of people who have for years been dealing with their
daughter's destructive outbursts. Her mother dismissing her plea for help when
she can't make ends meet isn't an indication that her mother is a callous and
uncaring woman. It is the reaction of someone who is used to dramatic
pronouncements and irresponsible behavior. Her description of her final
encounter with her father, and his refusal to engage when she tearfully asks
him why he cut her off and no longer expresses love is not an indication that
he has tossed his daughter aside for small infractions of religious law. It is
the reaction of a father who has long ago reached the end of his rope and is
refusing to be dragged yet again into the toxic quagmire that experience has
taught him engaging with his daughter inevitably leads to.
I don't
doubt that Leah's description of events is how she perceived them, and that she
experienced them that way makes me sad for her. I want to go back in time and
comfort the lonely, miserable girl she was. And yet, I can't help but think
that if I could, it would be the beginning of yet another toxic relationship
for her during which she would try to seduce me and build an ultimately
destructive relationship if she was successful, or berate herself as disgusting
undesirable garbage if she failed.
At the
end of the book, where in a few pages Leah describes how she finally turned her
life around, got into Harvard, got married, and had a child, she mentions that
her family still regards her as crazy and toxic. It's heavily implied that this
is because she's no longer religiously observant. Maybe. Or maybe they regard
her that way because, for most of her life, that's what she was.
