"I offered free consultations to all the fat, hormonally imbalanced women I met in local health-food stores and sent “You need a health coach” emails to all my former Ivy League colleagues."
seriously. It seems at least a bit exploitative, and also brings to mind MLM schemes--the likes of Herbalife, belly wraps, and various homeopathic remedies.
Later in the "The Toast", we are brought to 2008, where Professor X (Sonya's clever disguise) is suffering from Lyme disease. It's six years before the story starts off, and we can see that she wasn't doing much better then either. She's behind on payments, being harassed by debt collectors, and her rent (which she probably doesn't have) is due the next day. And yet, we witness a phone conversation between her and a (supposed) nutritionist, who tells her that tap water gives people dementia due to the fluoride content, and is giving Sonya aluminum poisoning (a quick search on Google leads me to quite a few questionable sources). This nutritionist tells Sonya that she needs a good water filter (and heavy-metal chelation, which apparently is another big alternative medicine thing), and Sonya obliges, expenses be hanged. We can interpret this scene a bit more graciously, since we do see how sick Sonya is and how awful it must be to suffer from Lyme disease. We can understand her desperation to get better, and sympathize with her plight. And yet, something still seems a bit off, right?
If we go back to Sonya and her sister's childhood, we can see the abuse they went through and infer how much they had to endure (both emotional and physical). One interesting thing is that Sonya never really mentions what exactly she does in the household or what verbal abuse her mother throws her way. Leala is portrayed as the responsible one and the one taking the brunt of things, being the oldest child. Sonya, on the other hand, seems to not get a lot of that variety of abuse (though she is threatened with physical punishment). But this isn't to say that she isn't affected just as much. For example, having your Barbies rape other Barbies or have sex with horses can be pretty indicative of having a messed up childhood. I'm not saying that everyone who plays with toys with the intent of rape/bestiality had a shitty home life (obviously it'll depend on things like age and previous exposure to those sorts of concepts; and sometimes you can just attribute things to curiosity and not really getting the seriousness of such topics), but it is pretty dang suggestive of such experiences. Especially if you find other indicators, which we do. Sonya manipulates her older sister's attention and feelings pretty fluently, and manages to get what she wants every time (animal abuse is another great sign of childhood issues). Even the stories Sonya writes in the present don't seem very typical of someone that well-adjusted. The evil older sister trope can get pretty questionable, especially since Sonya does have an older sister (who honestly doesn't seem that bad!).
Right, so we take Sonya's issues seriously, but we also see her as sort of ridiculous. Maybe it'd be too strong of an act (plain mean, really) to call her pathetic, but something similar to that would probably fit (but we are sympathetic). Okay, now here's the kicker: Rebecca Curtis, the author of the story, in real life, is a holistic nutritionist. She had (has) Lyme disease. She has a sister who has a husband and two kids. She used to teach at Columbia. How much of "The Toast" is coming from personal experience, and how much of it is just because of how literary fiction works--"the need for drama, the use of distortion, and the distinction between fiction and reality"?
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