Interview by Allison Weissman

I first heard about fruitarianism—a diet consisting of fruit and fruit alone—back in 2019. I was a college sophomore at West Chester University, and as I walked through the latticed stone tunnel to Phillips Autograph Library, where Jacqueline Alnes was to give a reading, I didn’t know what to expect. I was a student in Jacqueline’s creative writing class—the first of four I’d go on to take with her—and it was my first reading on a college campus. The library was packed with students and faculty; from the polished paneled walls to the white sculpted ceilings, chatter filled the room like a chorus of cedar waxwings. It was clear: everyone was excited to hear what Alnes had to say.

She read from what would become “Edenburg,” the second chapter of The Fruit Cure, in which seventy-six-year-old Cornelius Valkenburg de Villiers Dreyer advises thirty-year-old Essie Honiball to eat only fruit as she recovers from tuberculosis in the 1950s. Through nuanced historical research, narrative nonfiction, and beautifully crafted memoir, Alnes’s debut offers a strong critique of the healthcare system and a deft inquiry into how harmful wellness culture offers false hope for people with mysterious symptoms, chronic illnesses, and other ailments. As a Division One runner, Alnes, too, found herself drawn to these cures when she started experiencing neurological symptoms that took her ability to walk and speak, cutting her college athletic career short. As Alnes struggled to get proper diagnosis and treatment—and grieved the sport that once defined her life story—she found herself turning to Leanne Freelee and Harley Durianrider’s Thirty Bananas a Day movement for answers. The online wellness community promised a kind of Eden—miracle cures for depression, eating disorders, and a plethora of other health problems—if only their followers adhered to a strict all-fruit diet. 

“For a person who is wracked with symptoms,” Alnes writes, “any kind of cure can seem like a mirage in a desert. If you are thirsty enough, sand can take the shape of water and apricots can seem like salvation. A distant promise of relief, even if it’s ephemeral, can be enough to keep moving forward one step at a time.” Although Alnes herself never ate thirty bananas a day, her obsession with the fruitarians led to complex questions about systems of power and how influencers position themselves in a place to dispense health advice, often alongside the idealization of thin, white, able bodies. I had the privilege of talking with Alnes about how her memoir resists the binary black-and-white rhetoric that too often permeates wellness culture. Alnes and I talked about the pitfalls of parasocial relationships, research in the creative writing practice, writing with empathy, and the importance of writing toward complexity and nuance. 

Allison Weissman

I was so excited to read The Fruit Cure. I remember I first heard about Essie Honiball at your reading back in 2019, when you first came on faculty at West Chester. The descriptions of Essie swimming laps so languidly, then fasting and eating fruit until she was just sixty-nine pounds have stayed with me for years. In your book, you describe Essie as your “foil,” as someone who represents “the example of another life [you] might have lived.” I was wondering, how did you first find out about Essie? And in what ways do you see yourself similar to and different from her?

Jacqueline Alnes

I found her because I started asking myself questions like, why was I obsessed with this random corner of the internet for almost a decade of my life even though I wasn’t even a part of it? Why did I continue to go to this website? It was a mystery to me. Then I started asking: Who was the first person to say just eat fruit? And why was everyone like, yes, that sounds like a great idea? Why would they do it? I also asked myself: Why had I turned to food as a form of answering my life’s questions when, in reality, it was an illusion the entire time? 

I found her book because I just started trolling around Wikipedia, to be honest. I started looking up “fruitarianism” and “history of fruitarianism,” and her book, I Live on Fruit, kept popping up. It was one of the first examples I could find of someone who had written about their personal experience prior to the era of YouTube. I remember reading the book and feeling a strange connection to her in the sense that I identified with the way she had been an athlete and then lost that part of herself—and also how she had been seemingly failed by medical systems when she tried to get help but then ended up feeling sicker than she had. That part of me, I saw in her. 

I also see in her the part of myself that still does exist but I have to keep quiet more often—which is my extreme urge for perfectionism and this idea of control. The part of me now that I try to make bigger is the part of me that’s willing to live in a gray area and fail and be messy. And so, when I see that she kept herself rigid for the entirety of her life, I see something really, really sad, but also, I have a lot of respect for her, just because that’s what she believed would keep her happy and okay, and that’s what she followed. Those are the gaps that started to come up for me.

Allison Weissman

Yeah, I thought it was so important how, overarchingly, the project underscored this need for nuance in what are often black-and-white demagogic wellness spaces—and how it was getting at this five years ago, too. Can you talk about how the project has changed and grown over time?

Jacqueline Alnes

Oh my gosh, so much. What’s been interesting about writing this book is how much of it was changed by going through the publishing process. Ideas start in a weird and private part of your mind, and you’re allowed to run with them in weird directions, and then, when it gets to creating a proposal or creating a product that then is a book, it starts to be shaped, and you have to have—I don’t want to say a coherent thesis—but it can’t just be a tangled mess of thoughts, which is how it operates in my brain. 

And so, I think it evolves, and I think it’s still hard to hold on to all of the different parts of it, which maybe is one of its flaws. But for me, I couldn’t think about Essie without thinking about the histories that had led to her doing what she did. I couldn’t think about YouTube without thinking about what Freelee and Durianrider were a symbol of, historically, and what ideas have been told and sold to all of us at one point or another. I couldn’t think about my story without connecting it to why these things existed.

As I went, it grew a lot, and it became a lot of threads that I tried to wrangle and keep track of and better understand. I was led by a lot of curiosity, and I had a lot of fun researching and writing it! Genuinely, I think that’s something I’ve taken away—the joy for me was in the process. When I think back to how alive I felt writing it, I’m really happy that I did, no matter what the actual book is.

Allison Weissman

It’s so great to hear that the process was something really joyful and generative, too! It seemed like there was so much research that went into it—it was astounding. You struck such a great balance of narrative nonfiction, historical research, and memoir. I was wondering, how did you decide how much of your personal experience to include versus how much research? And how did you go about striking that balance?

Jacqueline Alnes

It’s a hard question; it’s something I could probably tinker with for the rest of my life, if you let me—just figuring out what the balance looks like. There’s so much that I couldn’t say about my own sections in terms of my own health journey and my own experiences, just because I had to limit it for the sake of narrative structure to focus on food, purity, the body, and control. And so, there are some side tangents—like, I feel like I could write a whole essay on when my teammates were cruel to me. Where the hell did that come from? And what does that mean? (I’m also sorry I swore on your interview.)

But I feel like there are so many things I’m interested in—the nature of memory, for example, and what does it mean that I’m trying to write about things I don’t clearly remember? I’m interested in NCAA athletics, compliance, and the ways that my story is not singular at all. But I can’t take you on that many different trails. I kind of have to say, okay, we have to get to the part where I get to the bananas. So, a lot of that is streamlined—same with the historical research, for the most part. I was always trying to thread my way to where I was eventually going. I, of course, get off on some tangents, but I’m always thinking, What thing led to that thing, and How did this confluence of factors lead this one person to make this decision?

Something I was trying to do in the book with my story and with the historical stuff was never to call any one person or group out. I’m not interested in saying this school failed me, or this coach failed me, or this YouTuber is the worst. I’m interested in saying, How are these entities that caused harm a product of something so much bigger than themselves? And what can we take from that rather than just saying, “This thing hurt me”?

Allison Weissman

Getting at the larger systems in play—I think that’s really important. Because it’s almost never singular. There’s a long history of systems, as you said, that lead people to make these decisions.

Related to all the research you did for the project, from Freelee and Durianrider’s followers of the Thirty Bananas a Day movement to natural hygienist Douglas Graham, I felt like the interviews in The Fruit Cure do so much to give voice to people who get swept up in these wellness movements, but also to complicate the binary of “patient” and “doctor” in cultural spaces where those titles and responsibilities get murky. Was there any particular interview that surprised you?

Jacqueline Alnes

What was fascinating to me and what was kind of healing for my younger self was that I had been obsessed with these influencers—to the point where I was following their Snapchats in college and would see daily posts like, “I ate a mango for lunch.” I was following them on YouTube and Instagram, so they were parts of my daily life to the point where I felt like I knew them, which I write about in the book as a parasocial relationship. What was really nice about talking to them as a full-grown adult, where a decade for both parties had passed, was the way that they could reflect so candidly on how they were also living in an illusion that was not at all real for them, and they were dealing with deeply troubling health issues, mental health issues at a time when they were performing their most well selves on the Internet. I was really grateful to them for opening up in those ways.

Speaking with someone like Graham was also really fascinating. When you see someone online, or you see someone in the far reaches of wellness culture, I think it’s easy to make judgments on why someone might be that way, or why someone might market themselves in a certain way, and so I really valued the opportunity to get to hear from him in terms of who he is, what he believes, and how that translates into how he lives his life.

Then, you had to hear from the dieticians, too—I just enjoyed hearing from everyone I got to hear from because I feel like they brought such unique perspectives and things that I might not have thought of about why we are the way we are and what reality is versus what you see online, which is part of the point of the book.

Allison Weissman

I thought everyone—the dieticians, previous followers of the movement, and Graham—brought so much texture and experience to the book. It was amazing. I saw your interview on Electric Lit with Alexandra Middleton, too, and I loved that she asked if you would have had the chance to ask Freelee and Durianrider a question, what would it have been. I was wondering if you could say a little more about that—and also, what you would ask Cornelius?

Jacqueline Alnes

That’s a great question. Freelee and Durianrider—I wish so desperately I could have talked to them. I don’t know if this says anything, but I didn’t get a response from Freelee at all. I sent her half a dozen emails and Instagram DMs, and I contacted every single email address that’s associated with her on the internet and went through her contact page, and I didn’t hear from her. But what I did receive in my inbox one day was her newsletter—so now I’m subscribed. I thought that was the most fitting end to that saga—just seeing, always what I will receive is the most glossy, selling-me-something version of you, and that’s the way you want it to be, and I respect that.

Durianrider, to his credit, sent me an email like five minutes after I emailed him that said something like, “I’ll talk to you about anything.” And I was so excited. I sent him an email back, and I never heard from him again.

That was difficult for me because I want to keep them as complicated as possible. I believe truly that, at some point in their journey, they did believe that this was the thing that could help other people, and that was the part I really wanted to talk to them about. What stayed with them, and did that ever shift? Do they feel stuck at all now? I wonder sometimes if they feel stuck with this idea of themselves that they’ve created, and it’s like they’re trapped. Not to put so much empathy for people who are profiting off of other people, but I think that’s a complicated relationship with social media, with audience, with money, with identity, and wellness.

Cornelius? Oh my gosh, if I could ask him a question, I would ask him to tell me his life story from beginning to end, no pauses. And the reason is because I’ve read maybe two-hundred and fifty pages—however long his book is—of his health beliefs at one point in his life, and I have read a forty-page detective report of everything he did for a period of a few weeks. And all of those things tell me about the bloviating-preacher version of him, and what I really want to know is, Who are you? Where are you from? Even just thinking about him working at a bank, reading his brother’s medical textbooks, and longing for that is an interesting thing to think about. Who was that person? And who is that version of him? What did he believe when he was telling a thirty-year-old woman when he was seventy-six to eat fruit and saw her health failing and still said, “Keep going”? What was that? I just want to know the most basic question: Who are you as a person? Because I still feel like I don’t know, and I wish I did.

Allison Weissman

I think that’s great. Because even if Cornelius had an Instagram profile like Freelee and Durianrider, we’re never really going to know who he is.

Jacqueline Alnes

Cornelius would probably be one of those people who writes in all caps, something super clickbaity at the title of his Instagram, and you would scroll down, and it would be something about either cryptocurrency or something where he’s eating raw livers for breakfast and wants you to try it too, because he’s youthful and will never die. I feel like his book is almost straight up all caps and exclamations—nothing personal, just yelling at you, like, “HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO TO BE BETTER!” And then you’re like: wait, what? Where did you get this from? Who are you, and why?

Allison Weissman

When reading, I was also struck by the level of empathy you have—both for your past self but also for people like Leanne Freelee and Harley Duriander, who led a health movement that potentially caused a lot of harm. There was something complexly beautiful about the ways that you rendered Freelee and her calf Missy “chasing each other across the field and gently butting heads” and Durianrider sprinkling water across the countertops for a kitchen spider. How did you approach writing about others’ experiences with such care? And how do you go about teaching students to write with empathy?

Jacqueline Alnes

That’s a very high compliment, and thank you for reading it that way. I think that was one of my greatest fears in the book; I never wanted to replicate the kinds of rhetoric that they espouse, especially this attack-like mentality.

What helped me approach it with empathy was a really deep and genuine curiosity. Whenever someone flits across my Instagram even now, and I see something completely on-the-surface ridiculous where I’m like, this is so messed up, or this is the weirdest belief I’ve ever seen in terms of food or bodies, or this seems deeply harmful—my first reaction is to back away a little bit. But then, my second reaction is, Wait, that came from somewhere; where did that come from?

I think because I almost experienced that draw of this thing that’s on-the-surface ridiculous—that I was going to a website called 30bananasaday.com as a twenty-year-old who otherwise thought I was a rational, doubtful person—made me believe that I could also be doing that in a different life or in a different space or if I had just made slightly different choices. That gave me a level of wanting to know: what was it that held me back? And what was it that kept them going straight toward that goal with no ifs, ands, or buts about it? For me, it all goes back to that all-or-nothing mentality where, if you trap yourself into believing that this one thing is good, you can ignore everything else in your life, and ignore all the other parts of yourself, and ignore the messiness that makes life worth living, in my opinion. 

When I saw all the articles about Freelee and Durianrider online that were so sensational and either making fun of them openly or being like, “This is a stupid diet,” I felt this pang of, But wait, people actually follow it, and they follow it for a reason. Where’s that coming from? I wanted to answer that question, instead of just being another person to pile on like, Haha, isn’t this kind of funny?

What I teach and what I say in class is what I truly believe—nobody is all good or all bad, and nobody gets to where they are without a reason and without a story. And so, finding out at least part of what that story is as much as I can, and thinking about it through the lens of wanting to understand and wanting to relate rather than feeling like I want to distance myself as much as possible helps me feel like I can get closer to them in that way, in those moments at least.

Allison Weissman

I love that approach of curiosity and wanting to understand what circumstances or string of events brought them to where they are. Thinking about how this book might touch those who have been swept up in wellness movements, I was wondering: who would you say the book is for? And is there anything you want readers of the book to know?

Jacqueline Alnes

This sounds so self-centered, but what I’ve been thinking about a lot is, in some part of me, I wrote the book for me. Just because I think what illness does—and I think a lot of illness narratives highlight this—is kind of isolate you to the point where all you think about is your own body or your own experience of the world, or it can leave you feeling so alone that you start to feel hopeless in that space, and you just crave this sense that someone else has been there at some point, and someone else has found a way out of it. So, I think, in part, I wrote it for that version of myself who was wondering, How the hell do we get out of this, and do we ever get saved? Do things get better? And how? How can we make them better? Obviously, the book is about my missteps in that, how I turned to the wrong things first, and then finally realized: Oh yeah, you can’t really do it the easy way, you have to do it the hard way.

So I’d say, in part, my book is for people who might feel alone, in or with their bodies, and want a gentler or more complicated way of thinking about the world and themselves. And understanding that the way we sometimes feel shame in our own bodies doesn’t come from us. It comes from the narratives we’ve been told since the Bible, so it’s kind of natural that you might turn to shame as your first response. It’s not your fault. But knowing that you can undo that, if you at least know where it’s coming from, is really powerful, I think. 

In terms of what I want people to know—I guess that the book is probably a rabbit-holey journey that you’re taking with me; it’s a little adventure we’re going on together. Maybe it doesn’t come to easy answers or even answers at all, but instead just offers insight through history, through my own story, and through different people’s experiences of what it can mean to be in a body in the world. And I think whatever they take away from that is something I’d be interested to hear.