The Pepsi Cola Addict

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I found the book so unusual because it wasn't as unusual as I thought it was going to be. The Sister spends much of their life living life famously unconventional. Living in their silent world, a Kaspar Hauser-esque existence. I thought it was going to be written from a weird interpretation of life. To me, it was like it was written by any teenager, I was surprised she knew 'the john' was slang for toilet. It's strangely competent about what emotions people have when they didn’t share their emotions with the outside world. Created in collaboration with June-Alison Gibbons, this new edition makes her remarkable vision widely-available for the first time. I am a teenage anorexic. After a long day starving myself, I walk to the corner shop and reward myself with a bottle of Diet Coke. (My mum won’t buy it for the house any more, because of my addiction.) My low blood sugar makes the artificial sweetness taste euphoric.

Week three: a week without Diet Coke. I anticipate this like I do a cervical smear, only with less enthusiasm. On my first day, I feel like I am going to cry. I miss it. I miss Diet Coke. I saw their parents and then they took me upstairs, and they showed me in the bedroom lots of bean bags filled with writings – exercise books. And what I discovered was that while they had been in that room alone, they had been teaching themselves to write. And I put [the books] in the boot of the car and took them home. And I couldn’t believe this, that these girls, to the outside world, hadn’t spoken and had been dismissed as being zombies, had this rich imaginative life.” There are only apparently five copies in the world and they are therefore very rare and very valuable. I read it in the British LibraryDiet Coke was launched in 1982, seven years before I was born. I grew up watching the Diet Coke Break adverts, featuring a group of businesswomen ogling a topless hunk. The Coca-Cola Company already had a diet drink – Tab – but Diet Coke was marketed more smartly. “It has been a spectacular success since its launch,” says Prof Robert Crawford, a marketing expert at RMIT University in Melbourne and the co-editor of Decoding Coca-Cola. “It tapped into the zeitgeist of its time, which was professional women making their way in the workplace, looking good and feeling good. It also reflects the fitness craze of the period.”

My morning Diet Coke rapidly becomes the best part of my day – I crave it in an animalistic way and I eke it out in tiny sips to make the precious cola last as long as possible.

Success!

Don’t use soda as a reward. This can promote the high dopamine response to the drink that may trigger dependence. Retreating to their bedroom, June and Jennifer Gibbons spent their time playing with dolls and creating elaborate fantasies that they would sometimes record and share with their younger sister Rose — by this time, the only recipient of communication in the family. Interviewed for a New Yorker article in 2000, June said: Honestly all the stories and all the documentaries and YouTube videos that you’ve seen about the relationship between the Gibson sisters and my brothers is total fabrication. No one is ever asked us for our side of the story no. When asked why she and her sister had committed themselves to being silent for nearly 30 years of their lives, June simply replied, “We made a pact. We said we weren’t going to speak to anybody. We stopped talking altogether — only us two, in our bedroom upstairs.” Because brain chemistry is individual, some people may not get as large of a dopamine response from drinking soda as others, which may affect their susceptibility to soda dependency. Summary