In Their Own Words

Jack

Jack is a 55-year-old script coordinator who has worked for the last 21 years in California and who has had a desperate secret all that time.

This is the story of a man who for most of his life has lived in total isolation with his secret and who tells the story of his path to rescue himself, no longer alone and on the road to recovery.

Some 24 million people in the United States suffer from an eating disorder. Consider this fact: 10 to 15 percent of people with anorexia or bulimia are male. That fact would have passed the screen as a headline that might make us shake our heads and be thankful we are not part of the statistic.

Jack makes us see that headline as a person, as someone we can and will care for deeply.

The statistics and Jack, who eats almost always alone, make us think about our own relationship to food. Old family photos, weathered with all the times Jack has held them, -photos of his mother, father, brother when young at home and holding each other close-remind us that food and family and joy were once part of Jack's life, but no longer make his table.

We watch as the table's cloth is pulled but without the magic trick that leaves all the traditions in place. Jack's voice, broken with tears, gives us a hard and humane look into loss.

I say loss because while we watch we circle with Jack around a table that is empty the way grief empties us.

Through Jack's telling and our ability to watch him tell his first-person story with camera in hand, we see how difficult his secret life has been, how painful. He pulls no punches. He show us what he's eating, when he's eating, when he's purging seemingly involuntarily, he thinks, because of surgical procedures he's had done to limit the size of his stomach.

Easy to say, "Oh, not me." You may be able to do that about the particular affliction but you won't be able to do that about Jack's pain because all the ways that life betrays the living get wrapped up in Jack's candor.

Jack speaks out loud to the viewer from his loneliness. He made me think of Mother Teresa's words: "The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved."

He lets us hear his inner voice that questions, that tries to get him to stop eating, and asks him, "Why can't you stop?"

You might think from this telling that the show is hard to watch, but Jack is a compelling narrator, humanized because he makes no excuses. Instead he chronicles with bare-boned honesty.

When he says, "This is life or death," we hear him. We believe him and wish we could help.

We are helped to understand as news reports on eating disorders are shown, when we hear an expert from a treatment center discuss the nature of addictive behaviors, when we see on screen statistics we might never have known. In one clip, another male binge eater who has appeared on national TV describes the problem. These glimpses further deepen and layer Jack's story, universalizing its prevalence, let alone its pain.

We most believe Jack because he becomes real through the story of his life, through the bravery of the telling. He is no longer "other."

I, for one, wanted to reach a hand through the screen to let him know I would help him if I could.

Jack's choice to tell his secret is not only the choice to say out loud to two friends that he is a binge eater. It is the choice to connect.

To Jack's long-time friend Joe, he reveals that his battle is a life or death struggle. His addiction, its pain, its shame are heartrending. We hope that Joe's love might provide the comfort that food, that binge eating seemed to offer but could not provide. Joe, like the viewer, is helpless, but he, unlike the viewer, can offer without judgment-and that last phrase is key-the suggestion that Jack seek professional counseling.

Courageously, Jack makes the choice to see a counselor and we get to meet her, know her name. She's kind, never patronizing and goes to the heart of the matter: the self-loathing that she identifies as driving the addiction.

We must wonder: Isn't self-loathing part and parcel of any self-destructive behavior? And who among us is so perfect that we've not indulged to the point of personal danger inflicted by our own hand?

Jack has never found love and this admission adds to the heartbreak that brings Jack to Tracy. Jack has worked with Tracy for years and wanted to date her. They're close enough friends that Jack feels safe enough to bring her into the circle of the secret. Tracy responds to Jack's revelation with this key sentence: "The secret is out." In Jack's secret life now revealed lies the hope of love in his future and a table set before the two of them that may renew food to its place with tradition and family.

The viewer can no longer dismiss Jack as weird, disturbed or worse and more common, I suspect, disgusting. Instead we admire his courage and fear for his life: Mortality is at stake here.

And that is not the only strong stake that The Secret Lives of Americans has struck into the viewer's foundation, the viewer's being. Starkly at stake in the episode stands the question of our humanity, our ability or inability to be transformed by Jack's story, by the power of his narrative.

As the viewer's journey proceeds, the question implicitly posed is, Where will you stand on your judgment of Jack?

Where will you stand on the disorders bulimia and anorexia even as you learn that 50 percent of people with these disorders do get well?

More moving even than that hope-filled fact is this: The journey of Jack's decision to reveal on camera his secret provides discovery: You will find an ordinary and profound thread anew: The power of friendship to help, if not heal.

We see Jack driving and his camera focuses on the road that stretches out before him. We know that the road ahead will have bumps, that we, like Jack, who fight through life's trials, will be faced with the challenge to be strong, to bounce back again. We know by show's end that the hand that reaches out for help, that the hand that offers help is the hand of hope.

Ultimately, Secret Lives of Americans hits its mark because Jack, like Kenny who will follow in episode three and Scarly who scores our hearts in episode two, underscore the human and universal need for intimacy, for connection as each of us faces life's trials and its limits.

I like to say, "Love is the answer. Now what was the question?" Secret Lives of Americans asks and answers.

Tune in to Secret Lives of Americans this summer on Pivot TV. Fridays at 10:30p.m. ET/PT starting June 12.