Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown

Author:Harriet Brown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-05-30T07:00:00+00:00

Christy Henrich, died July 26, 1994, from anorexia. Number 2 gymnast in the USA in 1989.

Jane, died December 26, 1995, from anorexia and bulimia; she is survived by her husband, Andy, and their 14-month-old son.

This is in prayer to light a candle for Baby Angella Hope, born September 17, died December 2, 1996. She is the result of a practicing bulimic.

Heidi Guenther, age 22. Died of a sudden fatal heart attack on June 30, 1997, in California on her way to Disneyland.

Deborah Simone Fradin. Debbie died from anorexia nervosa after battling this disease with every fiber in her being for 18 years. The disease ravaged her body, but not her gentle soul.

Candle after candle. Name after name. Story after story. She struggled with this disease for a year, for five years, for twenty-five years. Bright shining girls who should be giggling with friends in the halls of high schools and colleges, studying Latin and microbiology and dance. Girls who should have been walking through fields of light and dark, who instead fell into shadow. They died of heart attacks in bathrooms, in beds, in hospital rooms. They died at home, at school, alone. They died with their parents crying over them, their friends confused. They died before they had a chance to live, because once the demon moves in they’re not really living. I know. Believe me, I know.

Tears stream down my face, tears I haven’t been able to shed for my own bright shining daughter because I haven’t been able to face the fact that she might have died this summer. She still might die. I hope she’s on the road to recovery, that she’ll have to walk this particular stretch only once. But the numbers are against her. The statistics say she’ll come back this way again and again, her body getting weaker and more adapted to starvation until it comes to feel natural and right to her, until her very cells learn the pattern and shape and feeling of constant gnawing hunger. Until that skull face in the mirror looks like her face. Until it is her face. Until it has obliterated her real face not only in her own eyes but in ours.

And that’s when my fury rises. Between our reality—where Kitty’s life hangs in the balance—and the theories about why she is sick and how to help her lies an enormous chasm. I have no idea how to get across it. I don’t even know if it’s possible. And all the research is no help. It exists only on paper, tidy and two-dimensional, disconnected from the messy, dangerous, three-dimensional world we’re trapped in.

Every paper I read, every doctor I talk to, seems to have a different explanation for and approach to anorexia. No wonder the field has such a lousy track record. A higher percentage of people with anorexia die than people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or depression or any other mental illness. Of those who survive, only half truly recover.

You’d think numbers like these would inspire a little more soul-searching among the professionals.

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