Candid personal reflections on an icon gone too soon.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 40 years since the incomparable Karen Carpenter died on Feb. 4, 1983. The music superstar was only 32 when she succumbed to heart failure, a complication that resulted from her struggle with anorexia. Four decades on, her spectacular work still holds an important place in our culture — and her untimely passing still weighs heavily on those who loved her.
One of those people was our very own Katie Couric. She wrote candidly in her memoir Going There about how the stunning news of Carpenter’s death shook up the way she thought about her personal battle with bulimia. Below, read Katie’s moving recollections about this difficult loss and how she used it as motivation to change her life.
Bulimia had plagued me throughout college. I remember gorging on chocolate chip cookies in my dorm room, then throwing up in a paper bag and stealthily discarding it in a dumpster outside. Sometimes I’d do it three times a week, then months would go by when I wouldn’t succumb to the urge. But the cycle always started up again.
I shared an apartment in Atlanta with a cardiac rehab nurse. We weren’t especially close, but our quarters were. One night, after hearing me retch in the bathroom, she confronted me. “I’m worried about you,” she said. “I think you’ve got a problem.”
I felt exposed and ashamed. So I moved out. But the confrontation forced me to face what I was doing to my body. I learned that my eating disorder could wreak havoc on my teeth, my esophagus, my overall health. Then Karen Carpenter died.
She was a huge star when I was in middle school — I can still remember her distinctive low vibrato in hit after hit, like “Top of the World” and “Rainy Days and Mondays.” I’d say to my friends, “Listen, I sound just like Karen Carpenter,” and perform a few bars of “Close to You,” provoking eye-rolls. Thirteen years later, in 1983, her heart gave out, the result of anorexia. She was just 32 years old.
I studied Karen Carpenter’s gaunt face on the cover of People magazine at the supermarket checkout. To think this gifted, wildly successful person was so sick she couldn’t save herself and reverse what was happening to her.
That flipped a switch. Get over this while you still can, I thought. Which I did, and somehow managed to do it on my own. While body-image issues would dog me for years, the death of a childhood idol helped me escape the grip of an illness that, for far too long, had controlled my life.
