It all started when she (former A+ list singer in a group) was a sophomore in high school.
She had a boyfriend she really liked and would do anything for him.
The couple had se.x several times.
Then, all of a sudden the guy dumped her. She had no clue as to why. She became convinced it was because she was too fat (she wasn’t) and did a water diet where she lost well over twenty pounds in a couple of weeks.
The guy still didn’t take her back. She didn’t understand.
Well, behind the scenes, a sibling had threatened to kill the boyfriend if he didn’t stop seeing the singer.
So, the boyfriend stopped.
It turns out the sibling needed the singer to focus on music.
He also needed her to be available to be passed around to record executives and other men who could do them favors.
The singer just assumed it was because of her weight and never let herself gain weight again.
Karen Carpenter
Richard Carpenter
The Carpenters
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Karen Carpenter was not her mother’s favorite and she knew it
Karen Carpenter was born in 1950 in New Haven, Connecticut. Her family moved to Downey, California when she was 13-years-old. By then it was clear that her older brother, Richard, was a piano prodigy. It was also clear that he was their mother’s favorite child. In this excerpt from Randy L. Schmidt’s biography, Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter, Schmidt suggests that Carpenter’s struggle with eating disorders — she was afflicted with bulimia as well as anorexia — was in part a direct response to knowing that her mother, Agnes, didn’t really love her. Not like she loved Richard, anyway. Carpenter couldn’t control her mother’s affections, but she could control her food intake.
As this piece in The Irish Independent makes clear, Agnes was more concerned with outward appearances than she was with Karen’s mental health. In a therapy session following Karen’s first hospitalization for anorexia, the therapist asked Karen’s family to tell her they loved her. Her father and brother did so readily. Agnes, on the other hand, dodged the request and chastised the therapist for referring to her by her first name, a habit she considered gauche.
In the CBS made-for-TV movie The Karen Carpenter Story, Agnes gets a redemptive moment. Karen is walking up the stairs, and, unbeknownst to everyone, is on the verge of death. Agnes finally tells her she loves her. Unfortunately, the line is pure fiction.
When Karen Carpenter developed anorexia, no one knew what it was
Karen Carpenter started dieting when she was a teenager. At 5’4″ and 145 pounds, she was often told she looked chubby. She began her efforts to lose weight with the Stillman water diet, so-called because it was the brainchild of Dr. Irwin Maxwell Stillman, and because adherents were told to drink eight glasses of water a day. She soon lost twenty pounds. As she became more and more obsessed with her food intake, she dropped down to an alarming 90 pounds.
According to this article in Time, most of the people in Carpenter’s support system thought she simply needed to consume more calories. No one understood that she was suffering from a very real disorder, anorexia nervosa — her bandmate, John Bettis, admitted that he didn’t even know how to pronounce “anorexia” until Carpenter had been suffering from it for five years — and that her issues with food came down not to weight but to control.
Carpenter grew up desperate for the affections of an indifferent mother, and her career as a singer was steered by her domineering older brother. Anorexia was a way, as Yahoo News points out, for her to exercise control over her own affairs, but, because both medical and mental health professionals didn’t know how eating disorders worked, it took longer than it should have for Carpenter to get the help she needed. By the time she did receive proper treatment, it was too late. – Source
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