Quite the chipper sous chef: eating and growing in "Blair Waldorf Must Pie"
There is a girl with a pie and she’s sad. Is pie a happy food? Not now. Pie to me says diners and diners a site of sexy melancholy. Pie to me says holiday food and holiday food is voluminous, weighty. Is holiday food happy? Holiday food to me says a bountiful muchness and muchness and bounty are to be feared. Were to be feared. Once you know something one way a part of you knows it like that forever even when you’ve grown up or fallen out of love or cut your hair and moved away. There was and so there is and so we are. There is a girl with a pie and she’s sad.
I’m sorry if you weren’t in high school in 2007. There is no gentler way to say this: you really missed out. Sure, we were flat ironing our hair into woebegone oblivion while coated in a wet, reeking layer of Victoria’s Secret Love Spell (okay that’s a lie… I was always a White Citrus girl) and, yes, the state of the world has deteriorated economically, culturally, and spiritually again and again pretty reliably each year of our adult lives. We have less opportunity than our parents did and worse self-esteem than our children do, if we have children, which we mostly don’t. I don’t want to have children, but I also could not afford to if I did. The Earth may die in my lifetime and barring a strange and miraculous reversal of fortunes I will never own a house. I was—as a product of my time and place—insufficiently vigilant against and violent toward date rapists and friends who were only kidding and boyfriends who were sorry during my youngest and most sexually available years and the memories of interactions I endured and told myself to be grateful for wound me greatly to this day. Most skinny jeans are ugly. A lot of 2000s alt-rock is annoying. We came of age as the Obama era dawned and his gradual unmasking as a figure of most vile cynicism and loathsome disinterest in the project of true human progress damaged irreversibly a flame of possibility and hopefulness found in new, young hearts which is so crucial to the business of building a self and a life. So maybe we had the worst luck we could’ve, and everything is bad. But still. We had Gossip Girl.
“Blair Waldorf Must Pie” is the ninth episode of the first season of a television show that began airing about three months before I would turn sixteen. While the entire series has a certain candied pleasure on offer, that first season is something more than TV to me. It is a talisman of a terrible and special time I do not want back but like to look at now and then. There, see? That’s me with my long hair and red cheeks, legs akimbo in the amber that keeps me still and young still, trapped. I do not look back on high school fondly though I had a decent roster of friends and played sports middlingly and was not challenged in class. There are many dull reasons for my dismal remembrances. I fancied myself especially smart and interesting and felt stifled by my hometown. Groundbreaking. I was depressed and seeking the company of unpleasant boys. Can you believe?????????? Maybe, too, I am just a person who is better at and more comfortable with building up the complicated, technicolor world inside of myself than I am engaging in the one out here where my body live and all the rest of you are. This is a failing but a core building block of my person just the same. I’m better now at reaching my arm out through the fence built by my mind but I was worse then and it was hard and only occasionally in those years was I ever able to breach the distance and feel momentarily, feverishly close to someone. Mostly I was very, very bulimic and that filled up the bulk of my time. Not everything is about that but some things are and “Blair Waldorf Must Pie” is.
So I’m fifteen and my mother has in the last year discovered that I regularly make myself throw up. This amounts to the first significant conflict in our relationship and the end of our relationship to one another, I mean, we would go on and we would still love and we’d mend and continue to enjoy each other but it could ever be quite the same then once the bubble burst and I was my own person free to disappoint, and every conflict which followed would ring out a dizzyingly familiar note even if the exact details were new or changed. I had been very good and I had ruined it on purpose and now I’d better explain why. My mom loves me so much. My mother loved me so intensely and she pressed into me such support and kindness and play and joy and always the whole time of my growing up until then we were good pals and she wanted only that, I, this new person, this little lump of clay, would shape up nicely and be happy. I didn’t and I wasn’t and I made myself throw up what I ate and therein lies the core of every fight we have ever had.
It is urgently important to stress that I don’t blame my mom for my problems in general or for anything involving my eating disorder in particular because, for one, I deserve the credit for having made them myself and, anyway, two, they’re not her fault. My mother very emphatically did not do the things that mothers do to give eating disorders to their daughters and so it is only fair that she was shocked and betrayed to find that I’d gone and got one anyway. I mention her only to say that she was angry with me when she found out about the bulimia and she didn’t mean it, I know, but the shock of that anger hurt me deeply and for a very long time. Her disgust and distress and the way it manifested more as disappointment than concern helped me down a path of maladaptive thinking which maybe, even probably, I would have found all on my own. I don’t know. I can’t know. But when I was young and sick the person from whom I had really only ever known praise and careful watering and tending to the leaves and sprouts of my becoming was angry and I took this to mean the sickness was something I had done, a choice I had made to enact harm on myself and on others by association. And so, if it was a behavior I’d taken up willingly then it wasn’t anything that needed curing, no, but rather a lifestyle I could keep at with grim determination forever should I so choose and for more than a decade I did.
On the couches of therapists, I made no attempt to progress but in other spaces I was working diligently. I got sneakier. I became better at cleaning up after myself, of obscuring the acts I performed as if by religious calling. My sickness became a private hobby I nursed always in my mind while outwardly projecting, to the best of my ability and often quite badly, an image of wellness, a hand-crafted vision of healthy human womangirl. It was impossible to heal while also crediting myself with perfect, beatific control. And the myth was so easy to sink down into, so dangerously simple to believe. Being bulimic was something that I did on purpose, no? And something that took a huge fucking lot of work. Something which curtailed my social life, drained my energy, brutalized my throat and skin and gut and mind. Of course, then, it was all part of a careful plan. Of course, I was acting according to my own will and not that of a deadly disease.
There was no magic moment during which someone or something touched down into my sorry life and whisked away those stories to leave me brave and free. I simply got older and smarter and so much more tired and there came an afternoon in a bathroom at a mall with lips ringed wet from washing my mouth out when I looked up at the mirror and made eye contact with the scared animal standing there and I knew then that I didn’t want to waste any more time. To stop was beyond my wildest imaginations until suddenly I had done it. Imperfectly and with no small number of stumbles and lateral pivots to other disordered eating styles I did alone what I had failed to do for years under the guidance of doctors or bespectacled, turquoise jewelry wearing figures adjacent to such. I stopped and my life started.
Now, most of a decade removed from the truly heady years, I do not experience what the front-facing camera users on Instagram call “food freedom”. I am still known to enter a long gloom if I have a slightly overlarge lunch. But I am not sick and I can taste my food again. Even now, still, I will bite into something and be rushed back to childhood, and I will feel briefly sorry for myself but all the same start to laugh because I had for so long tricked myself into making boogeymen of donuts or French fries or candy canes. In those moments I feel stupid but also lucky. In the first stages of my recovery, I replaced the cycles of starving and bingeing and vomiting and starving and then bingeing and vomiting again with compulsive exercise and strange small meals. I ran and ran and ran and I did really like that but I was undereating slightly and overworking a lot and that’s not quite healing. My girlfriend who is more than my girlfriend who I treasure profoundly and plan to hang tight to forever, well, my girlfriend is an excellent cook and magnificent eater, orderer, restaurant-finder who likes food shows on TV and joining her in investing in the social dynamics of the various chef characters therein has moved me forward a comical amount in my comfort about eating for pleasure and eating with cheer. Maybe this has all been very boring to read. I doubt if anyone outside of my specific Very Special Sicko Girls demographic is interested at all in stories of wrestling bruised and bloodied with a problem as simple as fucking eating dinner and that’s tricky because it is that exact battle which makes up a huge chunk of my past and some of my present and it informs almost anything I could ever tell you about my time here being alive. So if you’re sitting on a train somewhere now looking at this on your phone next to a guy in a red parka which stinks a little and you’re thinking that it’s kinda pathetic to drone on and on about an ailment of the vain and unenlightened I would say you’re probably right and not to worry; we’re circling back to Gossip Girl.
Blair Waldorf, canonic bulimic, is only really clearly sick in one episode and of course that episode is about Thanksgiving. A day of festooned gluttony and wholesome indulgence, Thanksgiving is the number one bulimia holiday, and I, like Blair, have always loved it the most and when I was most ill it was extremely hard to get through and I loved it then, too. A whole day designed for maximum food obsessing. Talking about what food you’re going to eat and making the food and sharing the food and packing away the food and then taking out the food and having more food and the pie and there’s another pie and your aunt made brownies with Rolos in them and we are all here at the table with our plates piled high and crumbs on our undone corduroys. I can recall my teenaged Thanksgivings almost to the minute. I can see my dinner twice, items at first separate and broken up in forkfuls, then swirled to syrupy globs. I can see my painted toenails through sheer black tights and they buttress the toilet on either side. Downstairs later I would have pie, laughing. But there is hardly any bulimia media at all. A habit too gruesome and not pretty at all. The 2021 release of the Princess Diana Christmas binge-purge extravaganza Spencer doubled my collection. But there is this one episode of Gossip Girl, and I watch it every year.
Blair Waldorf, canonic bulimic, wears headbands and weathers betrayal by pretending poorly not to care whilst plotting revenge and she loves her gay father. “Blair Waldorf Must Pie” the Thanksgiving episode to beat all Thanksgiving episodes, the reason for the season, that light in the dark, tells a tale of two Thanksgiving Days, the year just gone and the one to follow in its wake. The Blair who is a year younger than when we met her makes pumpkin pie1 with her father, Harold, in the kitchen all giggles and merriment and her mother, celebrated fashion designer Eleanor, swans through asking him not to flirt with the male model who’s coming over for the meal. Reference is made to how good Blair is doing now. Mr. Waldorf pecks at Mrs. Waldorf insisting that she not worry, not count their daughter’s bites. The Blair of now (then) has lost her father to that model and to France and on Thanksgiving—having had sex for the first time two episodes prior and turning seventeen in the one after that, a busy autumn—she awaits his return in vain. It will be revealed that her mother asked him not to come, for fear that the pain of seeing the man who left her and their twenty-year partnership behind would be too much to stomach, and she did not tell Blair because she knew that giving her daughter a choice between parents would lead to a holiday alone. This deception in the end makes sense, however cruel. Poor, beautiful Blair2 with her glass heart and sharp edges and cold mother and the two of them unable to create the softness they need and once as a funny, fussy threesome with Harold had. I find all of this very compelling even though the Waldorfs have an elevator door that opens directly into their apartment and do not merit pity. But, oh, my Blair. Already that day she’s fought with her infuriating blonde best friend (Blake Lively, who imbues Serena with all the intrigue and glamour of a golden retriever and yet believably constantly fails up) and her beloved dad is out of the country and it’s Thanksgiving, yes, Thanksgiving and there’s pie.
She takes a pie. This is the point in the episode where we are offered an adorably heavy-handed little montage of Blair accepting a passed appetizer and going to the bathroom and Blair eating sushi and kneeling in front of the toilet and we don’t see or hear any retching but we watch her shovel sticky apple and soft, pale dough into her mouth at length while standing up in the kitchen and then she looks at her distorted reflection in a glass cabinet door and we understand what’s happening. But not to worry. “Blair Waldorf Must Pie” is an episode about befores and afters and being and having been and Blair is a year removed from the Blair who had been fine only “for months” and so she pukes up the pie and calls Serena and later eats a sandwich in Brooklyn, courageously, and, smiling, assures her friend she’ll call the doctor tomorrow. The stress of the day was able to fell, temporarily, her resolve to survive and cease the terror but this Blair wishes to be well and I have stayed alive long enough now to know what a difference just that makes. An optimistic bulimia holiday special???????? Thank you god and Josh Schwartz!
Vomit is not the only thing on the menu in this episode, I swear. All over New York the past beckons and the future tugs. We see the Dan Humphrey of one year ago drop his family’s pumpkin pie under the tires of a city cab in an effort to save a drunk girl who doesn’t know him only to be told off and deemed a likely sex pest by the friend that collects her. Of course, that drunk girl is Serena, the friend is Blair, and when we flash to Present Day 2007 Thanksgiving Serena is Dan’s girlfriend for reasons that never really manifest in a way one could call clear. But there they are. At the Humphrey home, edgy blonde mother Alison has come back to the nest after taking some untold period away from her husband and teenagers. This is mostly boring and then all at once and for reasons having little to do with the mother herself becomes very fun. Serena and Blair fight. Serena and Blair always fight because this is a TV show and also because Serena is a monster created in a lab to terrorize Blair. It’s not anyone’s fault that’s just the dynamic and it’s very good. Serena and Blair fight so Serena—and her perfect, sexy mother3 and her annoying, bottle blond brother—are disinvited from the Waldorf gathering and as such find themselves Thanksgiving-less. Dan intervenes. Against Lily’s better judgment, they’ll come to Brooklyn.
One of many inane and perfect pieces of Gossip Girl lore is that some unclear number of years ago—an amount, actually, that doesn’t really line-up right with the ages of their children, but who cares—Dan’s father and Serena’s mother, Rufus and Lily, were madly in love and banging like rabbits in the grunge scene when “she was a groupie and he was almost famous”. The kids don’t know this but we, the audience, do and, in fact, we watched them make out at party some handful of days before this very Thanksgiving when Rufus’ wife was still AWOL and the many times divorced Lily, as elegantly self-destructive as ever, was ready to embrace some foolish trouble. Her arrival at the Humphreys’ door sends the event into a tailspin and that tailspin includes a run of dinner table dialogue which continues to hit for me again and again as I am yet further removed from being the child target audience. Amongst the many benefits of passing a holiday with me is that when we watch this episode, I spend the entirety of the Humphrey dinner table scenes in screeching hysterics. The delicate balance of glacial superiority and sporting good humor that Kelly Rutherford’s Lily projects is mentally devastating to her ex-boyfriend’s wife and sexually devastating to me. Over mashed potatoes, it comes out that Alison has always believed a song Rufus wrote called “Rosewood” was named such because she wore perfume of rose and sandalwood but TRUTH BE TOLD Rosewood was the name of Lily’s horse!!!!!!! Incredible and impossible to come back from.
The Humphrey children are somehow so traumatized by the notion of their father—the lead singer of a semi successful band—having had sex with anyone but their mom ever in his life that they must flee to a diner to regroup, though not before Blair—rescued from the dangers of her palatial apartment by her knight in shining chestnut leather, Serena—gets her first glimpse at their (large, nice, and clearly only able to be owned by rich people) Brooklyn loft and notes, with world-shaking pathos and in tones of condescension which shall ring out for centuries, that Jenny and Dan have a garage door in the middle of their bedroom.
Meanwhile, back on the Upper East Side, it merits mentioning, that Nate is having by far the worst day of the whole gang and nobody including quite evidently the writing staff cares at all. The dude’s father maybe pretty much definitely tries to kill himself and those scenes have none of the weight afforded to the Humphreys playing a game of family football in the park that will clearly be their last or Blair and her mother calling a truce over mugs of tea together as evening falls.
“Blair Waldorf Must Pie” is about how this year is better than last year not because this year is so good but because we made it. We can look back at the people we were even a year ago and feel a sense of twisted pride and, yes, thankfulness, in our knowing what they could not know and making it this much further. This year Serena stays sober and helps her friend through a crisis. This year Dan and Jenny learn their family unit is not what they long believed it was. This year Blair mourns an old life torn apart but remains her biting, imperious self. Reaching into my memories of the old me, fondling the hems of shirts I’ve given away or used for rags, I can convince myself that I have evolved and whether that’s true or false it’s happening, isn’t it? Here we are now setting the table again and I am more grateful all of the time.
consider: “Hammer and Nail” by Indigo Girls, a song that doesn’t not kind of sound like it’s for children but the message of taking one’s life into your own hands and making what you can of it is something I can always use and am enormously cheered by. I’m leaning on it a lot of late and feeling better every time. And even my sweat smells clean!!! | Scent of Wood’s Plum in Cognac perfume which is not easy to love at first, but it gets there, and it does not leave. I think the deep, sweet booziness will serve me well during these dark and glittery last parts of the year. | I am pitching Crime Scene Kitchen again, a silly competition show which has been doing a lot of heavy lifting for my mental health and stability over the last month or two. I’m particularly obsessed with this almost too sweet to be true little Mormon couple who are so totally guileless and cartoonishly lovely that even host Joel McHale seems charmed (albeit also puzzled and disarmed) by them. | The magnificently horny and distressing erotic dyke horror extravaganza that is Feast While You Can by Mikaela Clements and Onjuli Datta. | Anyway happy Wickedator weekend to those who celebrate, and same about Thanksgiving, too, I guess. See you on the other side with a bowl of leftover stuffing.
Apparently, Harold stole his recipe from Bobby Flay and now that Megan has given me the opportunity, I sorely needed to become familiar with the wonderfully smug curmudgeon I desperately wish I could ask some follow up questions.
The goldish-beige or beige-ish gold little Marc by Marc Jacobs porcelain doll dress (and cape!!!) that Blair wears in this episode is such a perfect physical manifestation of her dark angel essence I almost can’t stand it.
During a weird, wine-fueled period in 2017 two friends and I decided to start a Gossip Girl recap podcast and one of the first things I did to prepare for it was to make create “hot4kellyrutherford at gmail dot com” as the email address where we were going to receive, I guess, our mountains of fan mail and though the project fizzled out almost immediately I stand by my choice. God! Lily!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thrilling looking woman with the most enchantingly indifferent air. I love her desperately.