- Evanna, thank you so much for joining us
to chat about your brand new book,
which is a memoir.
This book is beautifully written,
and I have no doubt that it was potentially
quite a lot to read out in the audiobook
in terms of the content.
- (laughs) Yeah.
- How did you find that in going through it
and having to vocalize all the things
you'd put down on the page?
- Yeah, well actually it was funny,
I don't know if other writers do this,
but I talk while I write.
I cannot go to a cafe or write with anyone
because I have to speak it aloud.
I don't always, because I'm an actor,
I don't know, but so I was very,
it helped to imagine reading it out,
doing the audiobook version,
and yeah, it was good.
It was, there were definitely bits were like,
that were emotional, like being admitted to hospital
and things where I knew I was rushing through
and I kept being told to slow down,
and it was like oh, I just want to get through this.
So yeah, that was hard, and also, it's,
like you're just in a booth with one other person,
and the guy who's doing it, he's very nice,
but I was like I don't think this is his type of book
he'd read, and it was like, I was there talking
about like menstruation and eating disorders
and everything, and I was a bit like,
this guy hates me, he hates me.
So for like five days to be sat there
and be like this guy never wants to see me again,
but it was like okay, I have to watch that thought.
I'm projecting, maybe he's fine,
maybe he's just thinking about his lunch probably,
but yeah, it was quite an intimate experience
to have with somebody you don't really know.
- You dedicate quite a lot of the book
to explaining what you went through
with your eating disorder and obviously your parents,
they feature heavily.
How were those relationships affected
by your eating disorder and how did they kind of change
or improve when you were able to sort of let that side
go and focus on the dreams?
- Like it was very challenged by the eating disorder.
My relationship with my family, more particularly my sisters
because you know, my siblings were around the same age
and they were going through their own problems
but because of my problems and how kind of bad it got,
that was like the more urgent thing
and all my parents' worries and all their money
was going into trying to help me,
and my sisters couldn't understand it.
They kind of felt like why can't you just eat,
why are you so selfish?
So that was challenging, and actually,
the book has been really great because I think I felt
too ashamed of that stuff to talk to them about it,
but then with the book, I mean I said
I have to get them to read it,
and that prompted conversation.
I was really close with my mother during that time
because she had her own experiences with it,
and there's something about I don't know,
I think specifically anorexia that there's always
some sort of conflict with the same-sex parent
and I think my mum, you know, she had that deep sense
of inferiority and this question
of what is her life work, and I think I sort of picked
that up from her, you know?
I say that in the book, I don't think you can catch
an eating disorder but I think you can pick up
on those things in your parents that you'll take it on,
and hopefully I've healed that,
I wanted not to take that forward to future generations,
but yeah, it was definitely very, very hard going
on the family but I think, my parents maybe weren't,
didn't really know what to do throughout recovery,
but they were amazing in the post-recovery period
when they fully like invested in helping me
pursue things like acting or dancing and all that,
because I don't, not everyone was so lucky
with their parents, of the people I met
in treatment that their parents didn't understand
that they needed to rebuild the person
rather than just obsessively focusing on food
and diet, so yeah, I think that helped a lot.
And then I think the book has helped,
'cause as I say, post-recovery, it was so much
like I wanted to move on, I didn't want to talk about it,
and then this book brought it back around
and they're really proud of the book,
which is, I mean, I could've ruined
some of our relationships, 'cause like I'm not,
I don't go easy on my parents, but I wanted to show
both sides, I wanted to show how it was challenging
for them but how people weren't really listening to me
at certain points, and weren't considering the person
beyond the illness, so yeah.
I'm just glad that they've been so supportive, yeah.
- Yeah, and do you think that if some medical professionals
dealt with it differently when there's the first signs
of an eating disorder, that some of the progressions
of eating disorders could be a bit different,
because there is that kind of focus
that you mentioned on food and the weight,
not always on the person.
- Yeah, I think for one thing, there has to be involvement
with the actual person.
I understand it gets so drastic to a point where,
you know, people are, their lives are threatened,
and then you do need to like intervene
and sometimes you have to be forceful.
But the problem with when I look back on my recovery
was like, it was all forced on me.
Nobody ever said, except Natasha, my therapist, she did.
There wasn't collaboration and it was all about
you have to recover, you have to recover,
but I needed to know why, why am I recovering?
Why do I want to live?
Because the eating disorder was a safe space,
it was this thing that made me feel secure
in the world and like this was the one thing
I was good at and I knew how to do it
and I could cope.
So for people to kind of rip that away
without kind of helping me build up something else,
it was very painful and very traumatic,
and I think it kind of left these open wounds
and I talk about it later in the book
that my way of coping was to fully disconnect
from my body, to just pretend it wasn't,
and I don't think that's healthy.
I think we, you know, we should learn to have
a positive relationship with our body
and yeah, I think the methods were far too forceful,
and I know a lot of people I've spoken to since,
they've struggled, like post, post-recovery,
years later, to be at one with their body
and their relationship with food,
and I also know a lot of young women
who've found that reconnection through dance
and movement as I did.
So yeah, absolutely, I think treatment and recovery
need to be reconsidered and in some places,
they are more evolved, but some places are still
just as brutal and I don't, I just don't think
it's a compassionate way to treat a person
and I don't think they're treating a person,
I think they're treating the illness.
- And what were those things that were the things
that you wanted to live for,
the things that took you away from that focus on anorexia?
- Yeah.
It was art, it was creativity, storytelling,
like books kind of were my bright spot
through that darkness.
I would read stories and I would feel relief,
I would feel like I got a momentary reprieve
from all the obsessive thoughts,
and it's funny, there were stories
that didn't go in the book, that came up
from conversations with my parents since then.
My mother reminded me of one time
when I was in hospital and they were threatening
to have stricter like conditions
that I was not going to have any visits from family
and all that, and she said, "You were having a meltdown."
She was like, "I thought you were actually
"about to go insane," and she was really worried.
She said she went home, was freaking out,
and she said she came back three hours later
and I'd picked up some fantasy book
and I was just yapping away about that.
And I don't remember that, 'cause it was weird.
I guess it was too upsetting, but I don't remember it.
But that was the thing, it was always stories
that pulled me out and made me feel like I love being alive,
I actually have something, I want to be part
of the stories, I want to contribute to storytelling.
So yeah, that but kind of creativity in many forms,
like dance, acting, film, all that, crafting.
It just, you know, beauty in the world
that made me happy to be alive.
- And all of those times when you were in hospital
was when the fifth "Harry Potter" book,
"The Order of the Phoenix" was releasing.
And you were able to get what turned out
to be a signed copy.
As one of the biggest "Harry Potter" fans,
what was that like for you in that absolutely shit time
to have that kind of wonderful moment?
- Gosh, it was just like a very tangible connection
to this dream, you know, and that,
like when you're young, those things,
those big dreams, they can feel very far off
and distant and so removed, and your way of believing
in them is seeing small kind of glimmers of humanity
and vulnerability through it,
and to have her signature and to be like
her hand touched this paper and that,
and the same hand kind of poured all this world onto paper,
it was this tangible physical connection
that kind of, I think it sparked something
of like, it's possible, oh it's possible
to meet that person, it's possible for her
to build this world with her imagination,
maybe it's possible for me to enter other worlds
with my imagination, and so yeah,
it was huge, and I still have that book,
and it's still treasured and I mean,
it wasn't a personalized signature,
it was just a sticker that they,
but it still felt, yeah, a connection to something
that seemed a world away.
- Is the copy of it dog-eared? - Tattered.
- Or did you manage to keep it perfect?
- Very yellow, yeah, yeah.
It's not, but I don't want them too perfect,
I want them to show signs of life, yeah.
- [Holly] Signs of love as well.
- Yeah, signs of love, that's nice.
- And when you encountered the character Luna Lovegood
in these books, what did you first think of her
as a character, what did you,
what did you fall in love with
about her as a character?
- I loved how she made me feel,
because she's totally nonjudgmental, you know?
She just, and I think it comes from her self-acceptance.
She fully accepts who she is
and that extends beyond her so that she can accept
every person, every animal, every situation as it is.
She's never looking at it, trying to gauge how you feel
or trying to gauge if she belongs,
if she's good enough, it's acceptance
of every moment, so she has that amazing presence
and being around people like that
makes me present and makes me able to appreciate others',
yeah, like diversity and their idiosyncrasies.
I think when I'm around like insecure people
or people who are very much in their ego,
it puts me in my ego, so,
and I don't want to be there,
I want to be curious and connected with the world.
And just her open-mindedness, yeah,
she has like a very artistic view of the world,
she believes in you know, impossible realities
and things that don't make logical sense,
and I love that way of thinking.
It's an artistic, creative way
of looking at the world, yeah.
- In your kind of creative space
and beyond the acting world,
you're known for your activism,
particularly around veganism and you've got
your podcast "Chickpeas."
So what was it that made you want to kind of spread
the experience and the joy that you found
in veganism to other people?
- Yeah, that's a nice way of putting it,
'cause I do find it such, I love this lifestyle.
To me it's very abundant and joyful,
but so I was vegetarian for many years,
but I, and I thought veganism was really restrictive,
and it was all about sacrifice and deprivation,
and I was very wary of it because of my past eating disorder
because that was like, I didn't want to go back
to the place of thinking too much about food
and having to check labels and all that,
but that is like a non-vegan way of looking at it.
It's like a meat eater's way,
the idea that veganism is what you don't eat.
No, veganism is, you have to switch your mindset
to what you do eat, it's just like a different culture
really or a different cuisine, you know,
and what a friend told me,
'cause I was struggling and 'cause I did it
the other way first, I just got rid
of all the animal products and I was eating nothing,
you know, not, I was eating just stuff
I didn't really like, like miserable kind of rabbit food.
And then my friend said, "No, no, no,
"don't give anything up,
"add in lots of plant-based variations,
"and then wait til you adjust.
"Your taste buds adjust to those things,
"and then the animal products
"will fall out of your diet and it won't feel
"like oh, I'm making this huge sacrifice."
'Cause it, you know, our relationship with food
is delicate and personal, and it should
feel joyful and nourishing.
It shouldn't feel like you're punishing yourself,
I really believe that.
But yeah, I just, I mean the more I talked
to people about veganism and animal rights,
people get it.
Nobody wants to be harming animals
and people, we have relationships with our dogs
and cats and we realize it's not that different
from farm animals, but we,
because we're so comfortable in our relationship with food,
we don't want to examine that,
'cause it's just like I don't want to feel
like a bad person so I'm just going to disassociate.
So I just feel like if we made it more accessible
and taught people how to make it feel joyful
and abundant, then it'd be easy.
So that's what I, and I believe in the good
in human nature, I believe people
are naturally compassionate innately,
so I always kind of try and speak to that.
- Yeah, well thank you so much,
it was such a pleasure and honestly,
you're such a beautiful writer.
- Thank you, thanks for reading it.
- Yeah, and I can't wait to see what's next.
- [Evanna] Thank you very much.
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