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Portia DeGeneres lets us in with “Unbearable Lightness”

She might be married to the most public lesbian of all time, but Portia Degeneres is still a mystery. She doesn’t give many interviews, and although you can see from paparazzi and red carpet photos just how happy she is with her wife, it’s hard to get a sense of who she is. In her memoir Unbearable Lightness, readers are able to delve into how Amanda Lee Rogers came to be Portia Degeneres.

Unbearable Lightness focuses on Portia’s early career, when she joined the cast of Ally McBeal in 1998, but with a lot of background information provided on her childhood in Australia, where she began modeling at age 12. Portia writes that she has always been a binge eater, sometimes purging after large meals but mostly going from eating everything in front of her to then restricting her diet to 700 calories a day. And though this has been going on since she was a pre-teen, 1998 was the beginning of when it took a serious turn. Playing the hot new cast member on a hit TV show with other beautiful, thin women as co-stars (Calista Flockhart and Courtney Thorne-Smith) caused Portia discomfort, but not only because she wanted to be thinner. She also felt a lot of added pressure because she knew she was gay.

Portia came out to her mother early on, but was asked to keep it from her grandmother, and everyone else. (“It’s nobody’s business,” is what her mom would tell her.) Keeping the secret from the world would prove more difficult for Portia after playing Nelle Porter, an ice queen lawyer who eventually bedded her boss at the firm. (And the sex scene proved difficult for Portia because she was made to wear nothing but a bra and panty set on screen. For weeks, she ate next to nothing in preparation for the scene and the anxiety she experienced over the situation further dulled her appetite.)

Though Portia was married to male actor Mel Metcalfe, she writes that she would frequently make out with her girl friends on the dance floors of clubs, and that her husband didn’t approve. He eventually left her for her brother’s wife, which Portia didn’t seem to find very distressing. Portia makes no mention of marrying him to obtain American citizenship, but the rumor has followed her throughout her career, especially since she came out as a lesbian.

Portia knew she was gay, and went to great lengths to hide it from the press. She talks about giving interviews and fielding the questions about her sexuality. Here’s an excerpt from the book, taken from an interview she gave to Rolling Stone Australia:

The rumor is that De Rossi was spotted in clubs around Melbourne recently cosying up to other girls. So does that mean she’s bisexual? A lesbian? a long delighted squeal comes down the telephone line. “Oooh, how fun! I love that question!” she says, shouting now. “Let’s just say every celebrity gets that rumour and now I feel like I’ve joined the club. Hooray!”

A few years later, she felt hopeless that she’d ever look like she should, but it led to a somewhat positive turn in terms of accepting her sexuality.

I had decided that I would very carefully make it known that I was gay to a few gay people around me. I figured that I had completely ruined my career by being fat, so I might as well be gay also. I figured that if I ever worked again, it would be as a “character” actress or playing the best friend to the lead female, so if my homosexuality was rumored around town, it wouldn’t really do any further damage to the image I’d already created for myself by being fat.

Portia writes that she finally got the nerve to go to a lesbian bar and approach a woman to dance. Her first relationship was made difficult because of her eating disorder.

While I enjoyed being in my first relationship with a woman, my bulimia intensfied … I hated that I had to lie and hide my secrets from my work and from my girlfriend. My paranoia and fear of being exposed – for having an eating disorder and for my sexuality – were excruciating.

The relationship only lasted four months, but it had caught the eye of a female paparazzo who waited for Portia in front of her building and followed her around, hoping to catch her doing something tabloid-worthy. She writes that the paranoia led to her relationship ending, because she was scared to be seen as gay and at her weight at the time. (“I didn’t want to be in a magazine for being a fat actress.”)

The paparazzo eventually got what she wanted when she caught Portia with her next girlfriend, Francesca Gregorini, in a passionate public quarrel. Portia writes fondly of Francesca, saying she met her through a mutual friend and they had a “serious and happy relationship that lasted three years.” It was right around 9/11, and Portia said the tragedy “jolted her” into living her life “more honestly and fully.” She moved in with Francesca and, around the same time, landed the role of Lindsey Bluth on Arrested Development. She told her producers and co-stars she was gay and no one cared at all.

So when the paparazzo published the photos of Portia and Francesca, Portia was “forced to come out” to her family in Australia. But instead of blaming or being upset with the woman, Portia is “eternally grateful,” writing:

She freed me from a prison in which I had held myself captive my whole life.

The relationship with Francesca, Portia writes, was good for her. “Living with Francesca forced me to deal with issues surrounding acceptance and of my sexuality, and it also forced me to deal with my relationship to food. I shared a kitchen – and a bathroom. I couldn’t binge and purge without a lengthy and embarrassing discussion.” She doesn’t say much about the break-up, but acknowledges Francesca was important in her life and getting over her disease.

She writes of how she and her future wife, Ellen DeGeneres, met at the Rock the Vote concert in 2001. Portia takes care to note that she had been at her heaviest at the time, but that later she found Ellen had been attracted to her instantly. In fact, Ellen had invited her over after the show, but Portia declined. (“I thought she was just inviting me to be polite, and I was too shy, too fat, and too insecure to go to her house with her friends.”)

If it seems like the tone of the book is self-deprecating, it is. The way Portia writes of her experiences is a heartbreakingly honest portrait of someone with serious body dysmorphia and issues with physical and mental health. Her secret sexuality factors in heavily with the issues, as she ties them together as having been caused by the disapproval she felt early on in life as not being pretty or good enough. And while the book’s major focus is on Portia’s severely scary history with food and excessive attempts to burn calories (she would often feel the need to go on a run, even while wearing jeans and platforms and sitting in traffic, or immediately after eating Christmas dinner), the more enjoyable parts of Unbearable Lightness unfold when Portia writes about being a lesbian.

I soon discovered that I had to figure out what kind of lesbian I was going to be. It was obvious to me almost immediately that I was very different from most other girls. I didn’t really fit into either role of “butch” or “femme.” I liked wearing makeup and dresses and heels, but I also liked to wear engineer’s boots and black tank tops.

She isn’t shy about disclosing her daydreams about her straight best friend, hoping they would fall in love on a vacation together. (They didn’t.) And while Portia kept her sexuality a secret, it was the fact that she had to hide it that made her miserable, not the fact that she had an interest in women. She asked a male friend pretend to be her boyfriend for a short while at public events, but she never tried to engage in relationships with men after divorcing her husband. Portia’s sexuality was something she hid from others, but not herself.

Another fascinating aspect of Unbearable Lightness is the insight you get from behind-the-scenes of Ally McBeal. Portia writes that she felt isolated, but it was how everyone seemed to be on set. She’s informed by Courtney Thorne-Smith that they don’t really eat lunch together, and socializing isn’t much more than someone inquiring how your days off set were. And when she first came on the show, Portia said she could feel her female co-stars wondering how her addition would affect their screen time, something that happened again when Lucy Liu joined the cast and Portia began getting less to work with and pushed more into the background.

It’s interesting, though, that no mention is made of the rumors that surrounded Ally star Calista Flockhart’s thinness. It’s likely that Portia didn’t have much interaction with her, but they were often linked in stories of “too thin” actresses at the time.

As a writer, Portia is able to keep readers engaged without pitying her or becoming enraged along with her family and friends that become so worried they begin to stage interventions until she promises she’ll stop dieting. Instead, you can be a spectator, knowing that eventually Portia will gain the strength to shut out the negativity flowing through her brain waves, not only accepting herself but fully understanding and loving herself too. She credits her horse and her loving relationship with Ellen as bringing her to the best place she’s ever been in her life, and that includes being out as a lesbian to everyone, including her grandma, who once shut off Ellen after saying she was “disgusting.” (She’s since come around and watches Ellen’s talk show every day.)

Portia is also able to write about being an actress in Hollywood who is unsure of how to be the public figure she’s expected to be. She worries about how to prepare for red carpets, being able to be a good spokeswoman for L’Oreal, and how to navigate a film career like her Ally McBeal co-stars. Instead of taking the smug route celebrities tend choose in their own autobiographies, Portia is candid about what was going through her head at every moment, and it’s the number one reason Unbearable Lightness is able to have something for everyone. Even if you haven’t battled an eating disorder or had to keep quiet about your sexual orientation, each of us has felt unsure of ourselves at one time or another; so insecure that we had to pretend to be something we’re not. But, like Portia, in the end, we all find it would have been so much better, easier and made us happier had we just been ourselves from the start.

Unbearable Lightness will be available Nov. 2.

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