Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi is without a doubt, one of the BEST memoirs I have read in a long time. Unflinchingly candid, raw and heartbreaking, it focuses on Portia’s battle to overcome anorexia and bulimia, a disease that had plagued her since childhood.

Portia is best known as Nelle Porter on Ally McBeal, and as the wife of Ellen DeGeneres, so when I picked up this book, I was a bit hesitant to say the least. I mistakenly assumed that she would be just another skinny blonde Hollywood girl, moaning about how her life is so horrible, when she’s making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That may be a little harsh, but these types of stories constantly bombard us in the media, and I was hoping for something a little more realistic. I was certainly not let down!

This book was so raw and candid that sometimes, I had to put it down to absorb what I had just read. In it, Portia reminisces about her days as a child model, and how she began "yo-yo" dieting at age twelve, a habit that would continue until her breaking point in 2002. While filming one of her first big movies, Who Is Cletis Tout, she collapsed on set and was then diagnosed with osteoporosis, lupus, and cirrhosis of the liver, among other things.

This quote from the book, accurately captures Portia’s struggle, and ultimately her overcoming of her eating disorder. "It is clear by the way my head is partially turned away, my face contorted in a grimace, that I hate myself. I pirouette again fast, to spin away from the image, too disturbing to look at any longer. But I keep spinning and gathering momentum, the centrifugal force won’t allow me to stop. I can’t stop. Now I can’t see anything. I am tumbling now. I have fallen off my axis. I’m spinning into the blackness. The spinning finally stops. I have escaped."

What could have been an unmoving story of anorexia, Unbearable Lightness was a breath of fresh air. Because de Rossi tells her story without self pity, the end is all the more refreshing, when she finds the strength to move past the insecurities about her body and ends up "happily ever after" with her wife Ellen DeGeneres. This was a fresh take on a normally taboo subject. In addition, it is a brave, brutally honest memoir about a woman coming to terms with her body and her sexuality.