Love, Loss, and What We Ate Read online

  Fine, to hell with the old-fashioned way, what about in vitro fertilization? Even if we harvested my eggs, he said—after daily injections meant to pump my system into egg-laying overdrive before my ovaries officially threw in the towel—my chances were just 10 to 15 percent. By the time I hung up the phone, my scrambled eggs were cold. I picked up my breakfast and tried to take a bite. The toast, now damp, had lost its will under the pile of curds. The bread gave way, sending egg onto my sweatpants. The bits of curd looked like vomit, the hot sauce and egg and toast seeping their moisture into my sweatpants and the velvet couch. And vomiting was just what I felt like doing. I had squandered the best years of my life following Salman around the globe, going to amazing parties and grand literary dinners where he held court, but I had not tended to those parts of my womanhood that needed the most care. I knew something had been wrong and I had just pushed it away repeatedly while time marched on. I imagined my insides like those eggs; what I had once thought of as so healthy, full of vitality and life, now seemed to be a useless, deflated mess.

  My desire to be a mother had played a significant part in the excruciating decision to end my marriage. I couldn’t imagine introducing a child into our volatile relationship, so I had to end it and move on. Now I wondered: Had I left a man who, despite all his faults, truly loved me, just to chase a fantasy? Would I end up both childless and alone? The fact that I had two men in my life but had trouble fully committing to either one of them did not help matters. I had just come back from a Christmas trip to India with Adam and decided that while our holiday had been enjoyable, we didn’t have enough between us to sustain the relationship. I just wasn’t engaged enough mentally or emotionally.

  I called Seckin to tell him what the fertility specialist said. I began to choke on my own cursing words as big, fat, rolling drops of salty water tumbled down from my eyes. I felt so stupid for not getting to the bottom of what I knew was wrong all those years. I couldn’t help it. Had I not valued myself enough to investigate all of the signs month after month, year after year? Rage and self-pity swirled in my stomach at the thought of being barren.

  I thought about how, during my first surgery with Dr. Seckin in 2006, he had made the grim discovery that I was missing part of an ovary. It had been removed by a previous doctor who, I suppose, had decided to keep the news of the collateral damage to himself. When I had come to after my fourth (or was it my fifth?) surgery just that past May of 2008, Dr. Seckin told me gently that he’d had to remove my right fallopian tube. He had prepared me for this possibility. Still, it stung. I was thirty-seven, with half of my equipment gone. Had I found Seckin earlier, I could have saved my left ovary, I could have kept my right fallopian tube, and I may have even been able to salvage my marriage.

  Several weeks later, during a brutal New York winter, I walked to yet another doctor’s office, past leafless trees that sent their spindly branches toward the sky. This meeting was to set a plan in preparation for harvesting eggs once my body was primed. In the early spring, after three months of vitamin supplements, hormones injections, and blood tests, and many thousands of dollars in bills, the doctor harvested three eggs. Today, I still think about them, frozen, occupying space in Midtown Manhattan, in a room behind one of those thousands of windows you think nothing of as you walk past.

  I froze my eggs, something every woman who has the means to should do by thirty if she hasn’t had children and has the faintest interest in being a parent. Just as insurance. I wished someone had told me that a decade earlier. I got three little eggs. But a few years earlier I might have gotten much more with the same effort.

  My gratitude for finding Seckin remained, but I began to be angry that I hadn’t had treatment earlier. I was outraged that in spite of all the best health insurance and access to medical care on both U.S. coasts as well as in London, I had been undiagnosed and misdiagnosed until well into my mid-thirties. And now, with half my left ovary missing and a right fallopian tube gone, I started to confront the fact that all this could have been avoided. Neela’s daughter, my young cousin Akshara, always creative and articulate and brash, began to have problems with her periods. On trips to India, I saw her suffer, and her whole mood would change. I remembered being rushed to Mount Sinai and having gastric surgery to treat the symptoms when I should have been there to treat the cause. If I had known at eighteen, at twenty-two, or twenty-six, or even thirty, what was going on, I could have much more easily ensured my ability to have children; I could have had a hand in my own destiny, rather than expect it to miraculously be what the world told me it should. We take so much for granted, most of all ourselves.

  In my mother’s generation, if things got really bad, they’d just give you a hysterectomy. In fact, endometriosis is the number one reason women get hysterectomies. But now we have the technology and research to treat the illness. While there is no cure, there is ample treatment. And now that I was on the other side of that pain, I could see how much the disease had stained the very fabric of my life. I had missed a week out of every month because of pain that drove me to my bed, with painkillers and heating pads. I had effectively forfeited 25 percent of my life to this malaise! I was so angry that I would never get all that time back, all those missed opportunities, all the events of my life I had to sit out of, barred by my own body.

  I did not want the next generation of women to go through what I, and millions of women, went through every month. I could see how significantly my life would have been different if I had had treatment in my early twenties, instead of at thirty-six. I thought of Akshara and her sister just beginning their adult lives. I had not been saved from the dread of my period those twenty-three years, but perhaps if I warned these young girls, they could be saved from what I went through. If we could get the word out, maybe this generation of mothers would not tell their daughters what ours told us, what they had been told by their mothers. This is not our lot in life. It doesn’t have to be. There are so many things in this world that aren’t treatable, but this disease certainly is. Pain, after all, is your body’s way of telling you something is wrong.

  Seckin had been asking me intermittently to speak to a few young patients who were going through the same thing I had gone through. These women had been afraid to get the surgery, or just had been having a hard time for whatever reason because of endometriosis. It is a very isolating disease. He felt that if they could talk with a neutral person outside their family who had been through it, they would feel less alone. They could also see through my journey that there was hope and they could, perhaps, feel better.

  Once, a young girl stopped me in Seckin’s office as I walked out after an appointment. She was very excited, explaining what a die-hard fan of Top Chef she was. I could feel the remains of the K-Y Jelly from the vaginal sonogram I’d just had seeping into the crotch of my underwear. The girl quoted several of my quips from Judges’ Table and listed her favorite episodes, many of which I had trouble remembering at that very awkward moment. It was the only time I could think of that I wasn’t altogether pleased to accept a compliment on behalf of my show.

  Seckin called later that evening to ask if I would get in touch with the same young girl. She had initially been helped by the pill, he said, but now needed surgery and was reluctant to go through with it. She had what seemed like a rather tenuous relationship with her mother, at least from what the doctor could tell by their behavior in his office during visits. Seckin thought that she would respond to my reaching out because she was such a fan.

  He connected me with other patients a few times, informally and ad hoc, and it had proved therapeutic, helpful in some way. Seckin had already organized a small patients’ support group and I met some of his other ex-patients who helped out. There were lawyers, financial professionals, women from many walks of life all suffering from the same disease and giving one another support and listening when no one else would. Seckin saw the effects of our efforts and was seized by the idea that we should cofound a formal organiza
tion dedicated to endometriosis research and education.

  At first, I resisted. I didn’t know anything about running a foundation and from what I could tell, the doc was always busy and his practice was overflowing, so I wasn’t sure how we were going to pull it off. And, too, I felt that talking about endometriosis was frankly the most unsexy thing in the world, that it would seal the coffin on any appeal I had left in the world past forty. I was so conditioned into thinking, ever since those early modeling days in Spain, that if I drew the curtain back on such an uncomfortable and almost disgusting thing that had been happening to me all along, I would extinguish any interest or attraction the public had in me. It was embarrassing to even consider talking in print and onstage about my illness. And who would listen anyway? But I had seen how profoundly my life had changed since the surgeries: my pain, my discomfort, my moods, my ability to handle stress. My gratitude for Seckin’s treatment made me want to talk to each of those patients in his office. Seckin had alleviated so much pain and suffering for me that I couldn’t in good conscience say no to his foundation proposal. Still, he lobbied for a whole six months before I finally acquiesced.

  And so, in April 2009 we launched the Endometriosis Foundation of America, with funds cobbled together largely from Seckin, along with a lot of goodwill. We formed a board mainly out of the most active members of his patients’ group, and asked his wife to help out, too. He and I worked our Rolodexes to death and begged everyone we knew to help and buy tickets to a fund-raiser we were calling “the Blossom Ball,” which we threw together in sixty days. It felt good to channel my anger toward a cause and turn my pain into something positive. I had to learn how to speak about my illness publicly, and the practice I’d had in the minicounseling sessions with Seckin’s other patients was not enough. But I learned quickly. I had no choice. To try to get the word out, we all thought I needed to tell my story with candor to one big news organization to garner support and interest in our mission. We needed to raise awareness so other women wouldn’t have to go through what I had.

  I asked my publicist and friend Christina if she could help spread the word about our new foundation. This was much different from the usual press junkets of talk shows and magazine interviews she worked on for Top Chef, but she was happy to try. I started telling her all about it and she helped me hone my message and navigate how to tell a very personal and, quite frankly, squeamish story to strangers in a public forum. I practiced on the phone with her late into the night before our fund-raiser, and tried to subdue the considerable embarrassment I felt about, well . . . talking about my vagina.

  I agreed to an interview with Newsweek. I had already been on their cover and felt they would treat the interview fairly and respectfully. The first Blossom Ball was a success, mostly because we shanghaied our friends and colleagues into helping. Whoopi Goldberg, who, it turned out, was a sufferer, agreed to speak at the last minute and Fareed Zakaria agreed to MC. I was very nervous about speaking about such private things to a journalist. I had been burned so much, especially as it related to my private life, that I felt very shaky about the whole thing. But I kept thinking of my young cousin. I kept thinking of all the young girls I passed in the street, knowing that 10 percent of them were walking around feeling like I did every month for years and years. I thought of the women who lived in the public housing near my place downtown who probably didn’t have the health insurance I had, or the regular checkups, how they could afford even less than I could to miss all those days of work. I thought of my mother on her heating pad, how a doctor had removed her appendix. I thought of the rejection on my ex-husband’s face and his utter lack of understanding or empathy or even belief that I was actually in the pain I said I was in.

  After the Blossom Ball, I went off to film in Las Vegas. Teddy flew in weekly for overnight visits. I had abandoned the use of any birth control as unnecessary. I was in a very bad mood for most of the filming in Vegas that season. I’m sure the residual hormones used for harvesting my eggs had something to do with it. It was tiring and the arid and airless atmosphere of Vegas left me dry of any enthusiasm. I had also decided to quit smoking once and for all, galvanized by self-loathing for not tending to my own body. I was disgusted with all the habits of my past.

  Ironically, Las Vegas is the only place you can smoke everywhere and anywhere you want. I had had enough and the clouds of smoke I was forced to walk through on my way to my room only reminded me of my own tacit and slowly self-destructive past. It was surprisingly easy to quit. I had quit once before, when Salman and I were first living together, because of his asthma. Then when he was not around I picked it up again. I could worry about his health but somehow not about my own. We throw ourselves away a little each day.

  Dr. Seckin and I continued working diligently to set up the foundation after I completed filming the Las Vegas season. I was triumphant from quitting smoking and determined not to fall off the wagon again. Back in New York, my spirits lifted, I briefly saw both Adam and Teddy in the same week in June 2009. Overall, I felt a little like Wonder Woman. Invincible. It was a period of productivity and creativeness and also a newfound general optimism. I hadn’t felt like this for several years.

  That same spring, buoyed by the energy of helping to launch the EFA and finding my voice, I also managed to somehow launch an entirely new venture: a fine jewelry collection at Bergdorf Goodman. I had been designing jewelry for personal use for years, and was itching to do it more professionally. Many years earlier, as a favor to a friend, I had agreed to meet a young jewelry designer named Tara Famiglietti. A willowy slip of a girl, with fine blonde hair hanging loose around her high, prominent cheekbones, Tara has the biggest, bluest eyes I have ever seen. While she is staggeringly beautiful, at the time she had a sadness in her expression that moved me deeply. When she first showed up at my door with some of her samples, she looked cool and casually chic in that way that girls in Paris and London do. Soon after that first meeting, we became fast friends. I very quickly learned that her father, with whom she had been quite close, had just passed. She was also having a bit of man trouble. Tara and I found it very easy to confide in each other. I have always had very tight, long-lasting friendships with women, and often these women have been instrumental in my life. I sensed I could be that kind of friend for her at that time.

  I began commissioning custom jewelry from Tara, starting with pieces for my wedding—modern interpretations of traditional Indian jewelry. I would also come to wear many of her delicate creations on the red carpet. Later, when I started filming the next season of Top Chef, I realized that many pieces in my own jewelry collection weren’t right for what I was doing on TV. I wanted to design a capsule collection for personal use that would better fit my new role as host. I didn’t much like what I was finding in my closet or in the shops. I wanted pieces that adorned the body, highlighted the nape of the neck or the small of the back, pieces that had movement and light but didn’t upstage me, make too much noise at Judges’ Table, or look inappropriate in the kitchen. I knew Tara was the only person to translate my vision.

  My rapport with Tara is not only emotional or sisterly, it is also similar to the relationship many women in India have with trusted jewelers and artisans who come to the house to collaborate on family pieces. Whenever a member of our family had a jewel to be made or a stone to be set or reset (because someone had died and left the stone or there was an impending wedding and we needed to round out someone’s trousseau), we called our family jeweler, Mr. Mani, from Kerala Jewellers. He had a slight tremor in his hands, and dark chocolate skin the texture of time-worn leather. He wore his white hair back-combed and Brylcreemed, and was always dressed in plaid lungis (men’s sarongs). His magical toolbox fascinated me. Wooden with a complex hinge, it unfolded into a minidesk at which he sat on our veranda. His box was not unlike my grandparents’ Godrej, containing secrets and drawers I longed to pull open. I loved watching him work meticulously with all his tiny tools and files. He would first sk
etch a simple pencil drawing based on my grandmother’s descriptions of what she wanted a given piece to look like. Mr. Mani worked quietly and methodically, never flinching as my grandmother insisted he had misinterpreted her extremely precise directions. Jewelry signifies so much more than self-adornment in Indian culture. The pieces serve as personal talismans, and the women in my family take the subject as seriously as they do their cooking or how they fold their saris. I loved Tara’s hand, and the way she interpreted and executed what was in my head so deftly. It felt like she had the same intuition Mr. Mani had had. The pieces Tara created for me to wear on Top Chef looked nothing like what she designed for her own line, but were something new and different; something immediately mine. We had an amazing shorthand between us, and often we finished each other’s sentences.

  Frank Bruni of The New York Times had spent several column inches in the paper dissing my sartorial choices when reviewing my first season on Top Chef. It had seemed unnecessarily cruel to me at the time and it still stung several seasons later. I am sure his slight was part of the impetus for my calling on Tara to design my accessories with me. It frustrated me that, as a woman, I had so much more attention focused on how I looked than, say, Tom, our head judge, did. But in hindsight, perhaps Bruni did me a favor. Whatever the origin, I loved making jewelry.

  Bruni was not the first person to skewer me in the Times, though. No, Guy Trebay had that honor when he mused in the Style section on the reason for my appearances at the Bryant Park fashion shows, deriding me as a “brand-name goddess” and “semi-celebrated hustler,” and failing of course to mention what I had told him: that I was there for the same reason he was, to report on the clothes for Harper’s Bazaar in my style column. That article came out long before I started filming Top Chef, but it was from that point forward that I started to really struggle with developing a thick skin against media attention. Fortunately, as Top Chef progressed, most of the feedback from actual everyday viewers of the show was quite positive. Plus, real professionals in the food world seemed increasingly to enjoy and appreciate the show.