Jennette, after the death of her mother, wrote that Jennette felt relieved she didn’t have to worry about eating. Jennette wrote that she felt thin, valuable, and happy about her body. But when she went out to dinner with friends not long after, she ate everything she ordered and downed a bottle of sake. She realized later she couldn’t throw everything away and felt “victorious” thinking that it was the beginning of something better.
Drinking heavily to aid her bulimia became a habit. As filming on Sam & Cat She began to believe she would have a heart attack from bulimia after her weight dropped in 2014. It’s difficult to confess it,” she wrote. “But a part me wishes that I would. That way, I would not have to be here any more.”
She realized she was bingeing and purging five to 10 times a day and taking eight or nine shots of alcohol each night. Identifying red carpet anxiety as one of her triggers, her eating disorder therapist started accompanying Jennette to events—which for awhile followed a pattern: Binge food backstage and cry in the car on the way home.
She fired the therapist, but she was still reluctant to talk about her childhood trauma. Jennette started to lose her teeth and the bulimia recurred. Spitting out a molar in the bathroom on a flight to Sydney, Australia, to do press for Netflix—followed by the Uber driver playing Ariana’s “Focus on Me” in the car upon her arrival—was a wake-up call. Her next therapist assured her that relapses were normal en route to long-term recovery.