Skinnylust: Five Years On

An Afterward to ‘Leutogi’ by H.T. Boyd

It’s now been more than five years since I completed Leutogi, my first novel.

It was October 30th, 2018. I know because there’s a digital timestamp on the photo of me, grinning like an insane asylum escapee, with the first printed manuscript.

I was so proud of myself. Drunk on the vanity of it all. A lifetime loser, a lifetime moron, but I’d written a book, goddammit. A book. This was sweet vengeance on all those people who thought I was an idiot. Vengeance on that kindergarten teacher who told my mom I might be special needs. On all those people who called me ‘the r-word’ when I was a waiter and got a sandwich order wrong.

Here was my redemption in the Great American Novel— and, boy howdy, I did think it was great. Upon completion, I thought this book, Leutogi, my fucked-up tapeworm body horror story, was hot/fresh/genius—downright genre defining—and getting it into the hands of millions of people would be an easy feat.

See, back then I lived under this half-brained assumption that writing a book was some kind of rare or special occurrence. Something that very few people ever managed to achieve. It’s now entirely clear to me that thousands of people finish books every day—there’s really nothing all that remarkable about it—and— after looking at the self-published section of Amazon, I would actually suggest to you that most people who finish books are, in fact, deranged cretins—but, in 2018, I felt entitled and I felt brilliant. I thought a simple post online would have agents fighting to get my work published, I thought Leutogi was going to be a bestseller by the start of the next year and adapted into a lauded A24 movie before its first birthday. (Then, I had envisioned Jane Krakowski as Egret, now I prefer Sarah Snook).

Of course, Leutogi, then at least, was total and utter dogshit. No one needed to read the 2018 version. Every paragraph was a sewing needle to the eyes.

No, it’s not like the book simply waited in a drawer for the last half decade. I’ve rewritten the damn thing from the ground up no less than four times—and, believe me, did this book need heavy revisions. Revision not with a red ink pen, but with a flamethrower. 

I cringe when I think about the prose in the earliest text of this story; that real stinky young writer kind of language; ‘Egret peered languidly at a clear sky. There were no clouds today. Not a single cloud. Only an Endless lonely blue hue, Softly glowing in; shades of crystal azure. The air has an olfaction of pontificated emptiness that rezonates with hers own empty brain.’ That’s not an actual quote, mind you, more so a simulation of how it all felt. Repetitive. Unnatural. Reaching. Desperate. Cliche.

Oh, god and the typos!  Not mere misspellings, but these dreadful Frankenstein sentences, rewritten and re-tensed and repurposed until they had become a sort of roadkill soup freckled with thesaurus buckshot.

Some stuff couldn’t be fixed either. There are sins of the young writer woven so deep into the tapestry of the Leutogi that, even, in the most recent (and most drastic) rewrite, I found they could not be removed. Load bearing ‘Krusty The Clown’ posters, if you will. The junky science. Hudson’s jerky Wikipedia-driven educational dialogue. The casual theft of —and, allow me to invent a word here— Halloween-decorationification of both Aboriginal and Polynesian legend.

I could go on, but the best descriptor of Leutogi’s first edition would be Immature. It was a book written by someone who hadn’t honed any of the literary basics, who hadn’t studied the right way to do things and had rushed for the finish line because finishing a book was more important than making a quality book. 

Still— in spite of all these regrets, I’ve always liked Leutogi— and I can’t say that about all my earlier works.

No one wants to hear me polish my own prose, but I’ve always enjoyed the absolute, unhinged lunacy of this plot. The characters especially. I love Egret and Noah’s circular arguments. I love the mere idea of Alton Soriano as a 90’s public figure. Constance Sinclair; what a saucy bitch! Hudson Howdyshell; he’s so darling and his death always breaks my heart.

Even when the language was a loaded diaper, this is a universe I was always proud to have created, and that’s because it wasn’t just a book for books sake. It meant something to me.

The original concept for Leutogi was a joke. ‘Ripper’, was this story’s first title. The idea was a sort of Dean Koontz rip-off of Cujo, “Cujo but it’s Australia and it’s a rabid Kangaroo instead of a dog.” Yes. This was the ‘idea egg’ that ultimately hatched Leutogi. Nothing short of a back-of-a-napkin parody. Back then, that was what I intended to write. Something shallow and pulpy and half-asssed and ultimately meaningless. 

It was only when I actually sat down to justify this joke of a plot and just why this family was in Australia, I accidentally uncovered something lurking in my past and deep inside my own brain. A hurting that needed to get out.

It wasn’t the thesis I set out with, but the ultimate moral of Leutogi became that eating disorders and body dysmorphia can make us selfish, boring, empty people. Alone, just like every chapter opens for Egret. 

Of course, the point of this book is not that people with eating disorders are bad or amoral, no, rather, the moral here is that anorexia, and conditions like it, function much like alcoholism. Self-obsession, skinnylust, if you will, it creates a rare opportunity for one to devolve into a monster. 

—and Egret Covello is the monster in Leutogi, not Shelia the giant bat, not the worm, Egret, and she taught me an important lesson in writing; the horror genre should never be blood and guts for the mere sake of blood and guts. That’s a bargain bin way of thinking. True horror depends on undercurrent. On uncomfortable truths about the self, and, if Leutogi is nothing else, is a biopsy into my own past, regrets and neuroses, or perhaps more accurately, the weight and dieting focused neuroses of the Boyd family. 

I’ve long referred to Egret Covello as ‘the Boyd family demon’, she’s an amalgamation of all the eating disorders and diet bullshit my family went through in the early 2000s.

Something that all our families went through.

—But, we don’t need to relitigate my past because my past is your past. I’ve been Egret and you have been her too. We all grew up watching the insidious ‘Biggest Loser’ and ‘Supersize Me.’ We all watched with strange dissonance as the skinny Pamela Anderson and the emaciated Brittney Spears were roasted by popular culture as nasty fatties by cultural figureheads like Perez Hilton. We all played ‘The Sims’ and the ‘Wii Fit.’ We all had the plastic pedometers and the Snackwell Cookies drawer and that same crazy dream that, if we were good little boys and girls, we might one day buy a pair of pants from Hollister.

Sometime in the 90s, thinness transcended fashion and became a religion. A dogma. A promise of bliss and perfection, of forgiveness, of vengeance, if the score was right on the scale

Diet culture fucked us in our heads—and it’s Leutogi’s assessment that the damage goes a lot deeper than any of us realize. Skinnylust, as I called it earlier, has worked like a cancer and rooted its way into the American soul. It has robbed us of a certain amount of empathy and a connection with the natural world.

When Egret Covello swallows the Saltwater Famine Worm, she is going beyond a point of no return. She is selling her very soul; the monster that comes to claim it from her is now coming for all of us.

—

So. It’s October 2018. Halloween is near. Leutogi is finished and I make a point to find out how to bookbind so my novel can look like a thing you might purchase from a store. This is not an easy process. I had to get special software to print it a special way. I had to shell out cash to get it printed.  Exacto knife the pages to size. Bound it with a power drill and sewing threads. All of this so I could hold it like a real thing. A book. A book I wrote.

I don’t do this anymore; the printing and binding, it costs too much money— back then, though— a physical book in hand was everything to me. I remember it feeling so heavy, like you could almost beat someone to death with it.   

—But, here was my problem, how was I going to get people to read it? How did I plan on getting my name out there as the new turbo-brained genius on the literary scene? Was I going to self-publish? Vanity publish? Solicit a literary agency? Start a social media campaign?— No, my plan was to send my book to a famous person and, then, after he reads it and falls head over heels with my beautiful story, he was going to tell his fans to buy my book and all my future books.

I wish there was a term for this strategy, because this is a thought process that occurs bizarrely often in the brains of dumb, young writers. You could call it the Auteurs Fallacy or the Cranks Prophecy or maybe the Superfan’s Gambit— this idea that a well-established person in the industry will carve out time to read the work an amateur tosses at them in the street.

I did this with Leutogi. Not by email or Twitter DM, no. Like Mark David Chapman, I tracked a famous person down to look them in their eyes and put a physical copy of 2018’s Leutogi in their hands— and this story is about as embarrassing as you might expect.

My target was Ben Kissel, a former host of ‘The Last Podcast on The Left.’  

To the uninformed, The Last Podcast’ was/is a true crime chuckle fuck-fest. The typical episode consisted of one host detailing a report on a gruesome true crime while the other two hosts churn out funny little skits and bits and do lots of screaming. If you can’t read my subtext here, I’ve since, somewhat, outgrown the show— but back then, baby— I’d listen for nine hours straight. The commute to work. During work. The drive home. The post work jog. A new episode would drop and I’d play it three times back to back. No wonder I thought these people were my friends.

I was always fond of Ben. The third host. Chucklefuck number two. Gentle giant. Kind, jokey, noble Ben. (Ben has since been ‘canceled’ as we now call it and is off the show. It’s not my place to go rooting through his dirty laundry, but I really do hope he’s well and if he did something truly wicked, I hope he’s putting the work in to make things better.) I hold no ill will for Ben, I really don’t—but—the original inscription of Leutogi was ‘For Ben’. How lame. How desperate and sad and untrue.  

Way back. When Leutogi was almost finished, The Last Podcast on The Left announced they were doing a live show in my city and I perceived this to be the invisible hand of fate moving Ben, Leutogi and I together. I splurged money for the meet n’ greet tickets as soon as they were available. Aren’t those things just awful, podcast meet n’ greets? I didn’t know then, so I gladly paid an extra fifty bucks for a signed poster and a chance to meet the boys.

With the clock ticking, I, gracelessly, without forethought or spellcheck or appropriate consideration, rushed Leutogi’s final draft so I could get it printed and slapped together for an exchange with my podcast hero. I autographed the first copy in gold Sharpie. I also typed Ben an absolutely unhinged letter about how his commentary on diet culture and politics inspired me. I told him about all those lonely hours I spent pretending we were friends.

It was sometime in early November, 2018. I went to their live show and didn’t allow myself to enjoy one single second of it. I was too nervous. I was betting my future writing career on our post-show meeting instead of, you know, doing the regular promotional work a writer is supposed to do.

In my head, I had this whole vision for how it would all play out. After the show ended I was going to be called back to some amber lit green room, the podcast boys would be on a couch and, even before I showed them the book, they’d be so interested in me. They’d want to know about the places I’d been and the unique way I digested their show and how I loved them better than the normies.

I was going to show Ben the book, his book, inscribed to him and autographed, and it was going to mean something. The book was going to glow gold. It was going to ‘wow’ him; a most special fan has delivered a most special text. He would read it immediately and open the next episode telling the audience that an H.T. Boyd from Texas had done something special.

—When the live show ended some three hundred people were called to stand in a line for a photo and a fifteen second handshake.

One by one, goths and metalheads and bang-faced stoners were led onto a stage for a quick selfie.

After a half hour. Maybe more. My turn comes and there’s still one hundred oddballs behind me.

I met the other two hosts. The bookish one huffs a vape and nods his head at me. I tell the wild one ‘I can’t believe you’re real,’ and in response he performs a little head dance, ‘I’m all flesh and blood, baby!’

And then there’s Ben. Seven feet tall, refrigerator wide, redhead. Beer in hand. I remember looking up at him and, in that approximate moment, realizing how astoundingly stupid, vapid and self-centered I was.

David throwing a novel at Goliath for praise; this dogshit first edition too with a headscratcher typo in every paragraph.

I must have softly muttered, “I-I-I uh. I wrote you a book—”

He politely thanked me and he set Leutogi in a stack with the three dozen other novels he had received that night.

—

While the language has been overhauled again and again, Leutogi’s story arch has never really changed between editions. There are a few exceptions, though, and a few novelties on the cutting room floor.

One cut scene consisted of an additional flashback in which Egret has a panic attack and fails to plan a birthday party for young Noah, this scene is still referenced in Egret and Alton’s final confrontation. I think the idea here was to, sort of, give the audience a glimpse into the first time Egret prioritized herself over her son.

Another cut scene was a tasteless flashback-within-a flashback during the miscarriage incident in which the narrator recounts Egret’s childhood imaginary friend named Sasha— an origin point for her eating disorder, later she introduces herself with the name ‘Sasha’ at parties during her brief stint at college to feel more interesting. These reflections, and the birthday scene too, were cut because there were already too many flashbacks in the back half of the book.

Another scene I was sad to cut saw Hudson and Noah spending time away from Egret at the aquarium in Perth. The two talk about their dads as they watch sharks. It’s revealed that Hudson, much like Noah, lives in the shadow of a disappointed parent. There was also some flowery language around the whole ‘if a shark stops moving it dies’ thing only being an urban legend. Another Hudsonism. As nice as this segment was, it just didn’t fit in the momentum of the story and it spoiled some of Hudson’s mystery.

Perhaps most noteworthy is a scene which was removed for the second edition, re-added in the third, removed again for the fourth, and then added back in for the final release.

Albeit brief, this deeply uncomfortable scene is in the sixth chapter, in which Egret pounces on Miles, her personal trainer, in a sort of manic-horny-panic attack — in the cut versions, she simply runs away after throwing her membership card at his face.

I ultimately reincorporated this moment because it’s a revelation for how her relationship with Alton managed to function for so many years. This is what sex is to Egret. A need, not for connection, but approval.

Egret doesn’t respect herself enough to enjoy sex on any personal level. She’s not in tune with those feelings. Sex is a thing for the shiny, beautiful people. She does not truly want sex, she just wants to feel normal.

My reasoning for cutting this scene (twice) was because it stunk of a man writing a woman’s brain.

There is an entire subreddit dedicated to this kind of bad writing; the chauvinist failing to comprehend the female condition. The boy writing actions for a female character that no sane woman would ever perform. And, if we’re being honest, I think that’s still a valid argument against this scene—but hear me out on why I kept it in.

Like I’ve said, I’ve been Egret. You’ve been Egret too. While her leaping on Miles is a cartoonish exaggeration, Egret herself is a cartoonish exaggeration. This moment felt important because this is the turning point of the story. This is the call to action. It’s the final straw that forces Egret to decide she’s going to pursue the tapeworm and sell her soul.

Body dysmorphia, skinnylust, this condition disconnects our mind from our body. It makes us debase ourselves to feel normal. These moments of profound shame, of desperately pleading for validation through intimacy, these are the lowest moments Skinnylust drags us down to and they are not exclusive to gender.

Remember ‘Manorexia’? The Doctor Phil/Inside Edition sort of notion that anorexia needed a coat of camo paint because the male experience was supposed to be ‘oh so powerfully different’ from the female? A man can’t want to be skinny! A man can have a weight disorder, sure, but he wants to be big, and muscular! It was bullshit then and it’s bullshit now.

The male models on billboards and movie posters were airbrushed just like the women. Maybe the messaging was quieter, maybe the airbrushing was less drastic, but, I too wanted to blow my own head off in the Target dressing rooms when I didn’t look normal and the normal presented by my cultural upbringing was a state of hollow cheeked starvation.

Gender, we’ve been taught by movies and TV and, oh god, the commercials, is defined by a need for a specific silhouette. You don’t have to dive very deep into fatphobic text to find examples of the toxic notion that obesity washes away one's gender identity, and skinniness improves it.

Such ideas are in Leutogi, and definitely in Egret.

When I first set out to write a book about eating disorders it became essential for me to write from the female perspective, if only because the female anorexic experience is so much more accessible in American monoculture. –or maybe—writing as a man would have hit too close to home. I’m not sure. 

I believe this to be another one of Leutogi’s happy accidents. I was a twenty-six year old man writing the mind of a thirty-nine year old woman. This shouldn’t have work— moments like her jumping on Miles shouldn’t work –but I like to think these moments ultimately do work because of the disconnect anorexia drives into our perception of gender.

I apologize if this is all too ‘woke mind virus’ for you, but I believe Egret herself might very well feel like a woman written by a man. I’m not saying she’s transgender, no, but she’s so bogged down with society’s expectations and standards for a woman I’m sure it comes to a point where some of her feelings don’t feel like they are her own, but rather thoughts planted inside her by a chauvinistic marketing department. 

I know I’ve felt this way.

I was never given the operators manual for this body. As much as I’m at peace and doing my best to be grateful and active—I do not like the shell I inhabit and I likely never will. There are thoughts in me that were implanted and I cannot quiet them.

The expectation to be skinny has many of the same underpinnings as the expectations to be a man. For Egret, a woman. Sometimes, the failure to meet these expectations, the confusion on why we can’t meet them— it all feels like we are some plaything to a horror author.

—

I write to music. Wow! Aren’t I so quirky and unique? I’m not like the other authors!

I know this doesn’t make me special, but, while writing a book or short story I will associate certain scenes or characters with particular pieces of music, and then, listen to these pieces on repeat, sometimes for hours, especially while in the editing process. 

It’s all so bittersweet as this beautiful music almost seems to vanish when the story is out of my hands. There are musical pieces so deeply rooted in my work and the reader has no way to experience them with me. It’s not like I can include what you should be listening to on the footnotes.

As a longtime OST nerd, I have always associated Egret Covello with a piece titled ‘Memorial’ by Michael Nyman, composed for the film, ‘The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.’ If you haven’t heard it, ‘Memorial’ is a direct reinterpretation of a piece from the seventeenth century ‘The Cold Song’ from the opera, ‘King Arthur’ by Henry Purcell (sorry for putting you through all those college words, I promise it all stops after this paragraph.)

‘Memorial’ might have been composed for a film in 1985, but I feel, in my very soul, like this track’s proper title is Egret’s Theme. In simple terms; it’s high class. It’s loony. The violins bounce and grovel for the full eleven minutes in a perpetual anxiety. The raspy march of saxophones signal the repetitive thoughts of psycho-fantasy behind her eating disorder. In a powerful crescendo, a falsetto opera singer belts a triumphant, pained single note and when I hear it, I see the arrival of the thin lady at Noah’s funeral. I see the woman who let her only son die so she could weigh ninety pounds.

All this is to say, sometimes ‘Memorial’ comes on shuffle and I wonder how Egret Covello is doing. She’s real to me. Realer to me than most of my characters, and even if she sold her soul, I want to know what happens to her after the story of Leutogi ends.

There once was a sequel planned, believe it or not, albeit a loose one. ‘Handsome Hogs’. It never formally made it to paper, but the idea was Constance Sinclair loses all her money and becomes a black market dealer of tapeworms and eventually human hearts grown in genetically modified pigs— Egret would have been a passenger along for the ride.

Of course, this idea is much too silly.

The Hollywood thing to do would be a follow up focusing on that group of scientists raiding a cave full of giant bats in the Australian Outback. Maybe Egret tags along a ’la Ripley in Aliens. I could title it Leutogis— But I don’t think this isn’t what really happens either.

In reality, I think Egret’s future is a little more obvious. Strangely real and dull for how fantastical this story is.

Leutogi leaves Egret sometime in June, 2001, So, at least one aspect of her future is certain.

I have a lot of nasty words for the first edition, but one of the things it got right was its setting in Manhattan, the summer of 2001. That really was a homerun, young me. The looming threat of 9/11 casts heavy over the end on this strange body horror tale, and while the two things might feel profoundly unrelated, a lot of my memories most adjacent to the War on Terror have to do with diets.

There is something uniquely American (and uniquely Egret) about watching CNN for the days terror alert level as one calculates the macros of a fat-free Caesar salad, even if our Egret doesn’t have to mind such things (she’s more likely to be shoveling peanut butter in her mouth as the towers go down.)

I think, and I could be wrong, that in the shadow of 9/11, Egret rushes into a marriage with Isaac Neier, a wealthy workaholic who leaves her to her wacky lonesome, much like Alton had.

Post-9/11 xenophobia against middle easterners rots her brain, Katrina turns her racist, the housing crisis insulates her, somehow, further from the working class. Throughout this, as the final line of the epilogue implies, Egret never truly enjoys her tapeworm, it’s just one more thing to victimize her in a world of monsters, grief, self-loathing and, now, terrorists and poor people who don’t have the work drive they used to.

This might sound like I’m just venting about boomers— but I think this was predictable pattern a lot of people fell into. Dieting is closely tied with a rejection of the natural world. It is an embrace of the unnatural, corporate run, American nightmare where food comes from a plastic shell on a rack. Again, sorry for the woke mind virus, but I really do think that calorie counting and diet books and daytime TV ads for Keto gummies are closely intertwined with dropping bombs on the the third world. The hatred of our own natural form and it’s processes makes it easier for us to dehumanize the bodies of others.

The heart of Leutogi has always been that, eventually, diet culture corrupts our soul and we become its zealots, spreading our misery onto other people.

In my childhood (late nineties, early ‘aughts) we sympathized with fat people as redeemable tragedies who just needed to get over their childhood trauma. Back then, we, as a nation, seemed to go on fad diets together as a sort of 300 million man unit. While this wasn’t a great time for our culture, we now live in something much more confusing. Skinnylust has bloomed outward. The cancer has metastasized and I think it’s funny (sad! but funny) that both liberals and conservatives accuse the other of party of trying to poison the population.

Now, much like the politics machine has broken and fragmented, so has dieting. We now have wellness. The full and final religionification of diet. Every influencer/scammer is happy to tell you that all the food on planet earth is poison, but the right food, the right attitude around it, the right devices and nutritional cheat codes will not just make you a better person but they might just save the world.

Dieting has at long last become a crusade and political endeavor. Wellness, they tell you, is a righteous sword. We can simply eat a salad instead of housing the homeless or preventing a genocide.

In the year 2024, Egret is on Tik-Tok for eight hours a day, sharing videos about food dye, algae smoothies, and water purification tanks. Hashtag-Stand-With-Israel in her tags.

—

People often make the mistake of assigning Egret Covello as a caricature of my mother—but this simply isn’t the case. Egret’s agoraphobia, her fights with Noah and some of her self-help-book tendencies, these are loosely inspired by my mother—but they are so entirely superficial, and much more of Egret’s psychology is a direct copy of my father.

The brooding unhappiness rooted in an obsession with weight, the life ruining diets and the crash to deep-black depression after their failure. That was my dad, and it was something he gave to me and I struggled with, gravely, in my early twenties.

However, it’s worth noting, I didn’t write this book out of spite. Maybe sympathy. Maybe pity. I loved my father. I loved him incredibly. We were best friends and he was one of the first people who ever read Leutogi. After he finished it, he told me he would have, gladly swallowed the Saltwater Famine Worm. I reminded him that the moment Egret adopted the tapeworm was the moment she became unredeemable. It was a metaphor for selling her soul, Egret’s deal with the devil. Shelia the bat was a metaphor for anorexia incarnate, the way it stalks and takes and hungers.

He didn’t care. When he talked about traveling, he would often joke about going to Australia to get the Saltwater Famine Worm. Sometimes, when he would start a new diet, he would boast that he was going to ‘get skinny like Egret.’ Do with that what you will.

Maybe I don’t have the room to talk because I, nor he, were ever hospitalized for malnutrition or starved to skin and bone— but, with whatever limited authority I have, the greatest lesson I ever learned from my father, not directly, but from his suffering: is that eating disorders are a mountain with no peak.

I did my time up there, on that mountain, in its empty caves and howling, lonely wind. People, like myself, once, like my father until the day he died, they will brave this infinite, peak-less hill, and they will get stubborn about coming down and maybe I’m lost in the metaphor, but eventually one gets so high on this mountain that the oxygen starts running out and things stop making sense.

After decades of crash diets, my father died the same morning he reached his goal weight. Did an eating disorder kill him? It’s not my place to say. I do firmly believe the stress and the questionable effects of fad diets undoubtedly took years off his heart.

Regardless of any medical diagnosis, my father was a beautiful man and it pains me to think of how much of his happiness, his love, his time, was given away to Skinnylust. To its shame. To its starvation. To that horrible merry-go-round thinking of thin-vengeance and bad math.

I remembered something while writing this afterword; a buried memory. I must have been five. Maybe six. While my dad was at work, my mother gathered my sisters and I around a craft table to make our father a calendar. We cut ribbons and on them drew butterflies and poems for encouragement. This was a sixty day paper chain, literal, crayon scrawled shackles for a period in which he was going to attempt to forgo solid food.

Good God, what did the America you loved so much do to your brain, dad?

Our final ever conversation—me and my father—the last time I ever saw this man alive—we talked about his desire to purchase a fucking ketone breath analyzer. He then, promptly, passed away from a sudden heart attack and while I wrote an entirely different novella about that (see: Camarillo), I would like to close Leutogi off with one final story on my dad—the real Egret.

When he died, I was left to manage all of his stuff. The job came to me to organize his work documents. Sort the computer files. Go through his drawers.

This little chore became something of a religious experience. When a loved one is reduced to their stuff, you go looking for their ghost in it.

During this process, I found out that he left behind troves and troves of notebooks. Year’s worth. They were in his nightstand and work desk, his closet, his bookshelf. Various sizes. Various covers.

I read through these notebooks, every last one of them, hoping for a poem, or a note, even for a secret— I looked for something sweet or sad. Even if it was terrible, I didn’t care, I missed my dad and I wanted to hear something new from him, one last time.

I found nothing. All of these twenty odd notebooks were for logging his daily weigh-ins, calorie intake and body dimensions. Pages and pages of numbers. Of Skinnylust.

This is the legacy of Egret Covello.