Small Acts of Disappearance

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Small Acts of Disappearance

Fiona Wright
Essays on Hunger

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First published in 2015
from the Writing & Society Research Centre
at the University of Western Sydney
by the Giramondo Publishing Company
PO Box 752
Artarmon NSW 1570 Australia
www.giramondopublishing.com

© Fiona Wright, 2015

Designed by Harry Williamson

Typeset by Andrew Davies
in 11.25/14 pt Garamond 3

Printed and bound by Ligare Book Printers

Distributed in Australia by NewSouth Books

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Wright, Fiona
Small acts of disappearance: essays in hunger

ISBN 978-1-922146-93-9 (pbk)

362.25092

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form
or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of
the publisher.

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For my sisters: by blood, in-law and in arms
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I speak of those years when I lived walled alive in myself, left with nothing
but the inward search for joy, for a word that would ruffle the plumage of
mind to reach its tenderest down; when consuming myself I endured, but
could not change.

GWEN HARWOOD ‘Past and Present’

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Contents

In Colombo
In Hospital
In Berlin
In Miniature
In Increments
In Books I
In Books II
In Group
In Passing
In Hindsight

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IN COLOMBO
 I’ll always remember the particular intensity that
malnutrition brings on, I know that I miss it still. That alertness of
sensation, where every minute cell in the body is awake and alive to the
smallest details of the outside world. I’ve been told this is instinctual, a
biological reaction to the threat that the hungry body perceives itself to be
under; that a malnourished animal is weaker, more vulnerable to predators,
and compensates by trying to pick up on danger early enough to still be able
to escape. The world glistens in this state of apprehension. Your skin
prickles. When I was travelling in this state, so many days felt strangely
brittle, saturated, super-real.
Even now, I find it hard to separate what I experienced in Sri Lanka from
what I experienced in my body, to figure out how much of my perception
was sharpened by my hunger, how much by the complicated novelty and
otherness that travel always involves. At that stage, it was three years since
I had fallen ill, but only eighteen months since the very rare and still-
untreatable cause of my persistent vomiting had been identified. But I’m
not sure if the ground hadn’t already shifted again then, if the physical
disease hadn’t taken on the disordered dimensions that I’m fighting to this
day.
I’ve also discovered, since my diagnosis, that even specialist opinion has
shifted as to the nature of that physical condition. Rumination is a muscular
tic of the upper stomach and its sphincter. Like any muscular tic it is
unconscious and uncontrollable, but at least in part psychosomatic. This
doesn’t make it any less bodily, any less real. When I was finally diagnosed,
the first thing the specialist said was ‘You’re not making this up and you’re
not going mad’; and eight years later the condition was added to the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM, which is
the standard classification manual for mental health used by psychiatrists
worldwide.
I travelled to Sri Lanka three years before I stepped for the first time
inside the office of a psychologist, five years before I fully realised that
there was more to my illness, to my hunger, than simple physicality. But I
sometimes think that it was here, in Colombo, that things changed, and my
illness grew more complicated. Even so, I never can tell to what degree
pathology stood between me and the country that I came to love, or if I ever
could have done things differently.

On my first day in Colombo, I wrote in my journal that the light seemed

golden, that I’d felt pure joy on seeing so many animals – monkeys and
lizards, crows and cows – wandering the red-earthed streets. On my second
day, unable to properly pronounce the name of the suburb in which I was
living, I got completely lost, riding in the backseat of a three-wheeler taxi,
until the driver tried to kiss me in an unmapped alley. I ended up walking in
the late-season rain, along streets that had no footpaths, to the low-roofed
house where I was billeted to a Sinhalese family, then standing, silent and
shaking, at my bedroom window, which overlooked a primary school, the
children in immaculate white uniforms running on the pressed dirt of its
playground. I already felt too small for the situation I’d placed myself in,
alone and as-yet untravelled, in a part of the world I knew almost nothing
about.
On my third day in Colombo, I started work. I arrived early at the offices
of the local English-language newspaper where I was interned, and my
section editor immediately assigned me to a story on the street children of
the city. I’m still not sure if she was deliberately trying to provoke me, fresh
off the plane as I was, to throw my complacent, sunburnt skin into a world
that I had little comprehension of. Anesha, a young and quiet colleague
with a thick wave of hair reaching right to her waist, accompanied me to
translate. We took a driver, and a van, my digital camera. I’d had half a
piece of strangely sweet toast with imported Marmite for breakfast. My
billet family had bought the Marmite for me from a small grocer near their
house; it was stocked alongside Diet Coke, pasta, and toilet paper on a shelf
labelled ‘Western Items’ near the back of the store.
 I never found out the names of the places we went to that day, I never
went through them again in my whole time in the city. We drove to a
rubbish tip beside a timber train station, untouched since the so-called
British era, the thick awnings corroded with insect bole, a round rust-
coloured clock unmoving above the entrance, looking for signs of hungry
children. Shredded pieces of black plastic flapped at our approach, and fat
crows stared us down, but otherwise there was stillness, just hot silence. At
high noon, we reached a string of kovils, the intricately sculpted, intensely-
coloured Hindu temples worshipped in by what remains of Colombo’s
Tamil population.
These too were built beside a garbage ground, dotted with small timber
stalls where women sold strings of marigolds and enormous platters of
tropical fruit, to leave as offerings inside the shadowed temples. Anesha
pointed out the separate kovil for the women, the ripe-looking goddesses
dancing along the length of each steeple, the pawpaws cut open and rotting
by the door, in petition for fertility. She bought one for me. I was twenty-
three, and had no babies. I also hadn’t bled for three whole years. Inside, I
watched a series of young women bash coconuts against their heads, then
bow before a painted goddess in an alcove.
Outside, Anesha was waiting, squatting on her heels beside a woman
with a small child in her lap. The child wore a faded polo-shirt, no pants,
and put his fingers to his mouth as I approached. What did I want to ask?
Anesha said. The sun was beating on my back, a small, black fly crawling
on my forearm, the red leather of my shoes constricting in the heat. The
child kept gesturing his fingers to his mouth. His mother said that he was
five years old, and wouldn’t allow him to be photographed in case his
school teachers and classmates found out that he was homeless.
At the other end of town, Anesha and the driver stopped for juice and
cutlets, little fried fish croquettes wrapped in old school worksheets which
soaked up the oil into transparent patches. I bought a bottle of water, alert
and strong.
We spoke to a girl that day who lived beneath tarpaulins on the outskirts
of De Soysa Circus, a sweeping boulevard near the centre of the city, which
once went by the name of Lipton Circus. She was pretending to play cricket
with her brothers as we approached, miming the actions of bowling and
batting at a non-existent ball. She was beautiful. The skin on her shins was
thick and grey and shiny. She told me that she liked to watch the women
going to Odel, Colombo’s large department store, just across the road, and
to pretend that she was going shopping too.

I never figured out how to cope with waste in a place like Colombo, in a
country where so many have so little so much of the time, where the
amount I could earn in one day of resented office work would house a
family for a week. How to understand hunger when it leapt so suddenly
from something abstract in the wider world, and a state suppressed within
myself, to something many-faced, insistent and ever-present. Where the
food that I threw out could get this child, in her undersized dress, out from
underneath her tarpaulin and to school. In my first days back home, in
suburban Sydney, I stood paralysed in the vegetable aisle of the
supermarket, unable to choose between the six different varieties of onion. I
bought cherries, in mid-winter. I didn’t eat them.
Hunger is only political, only poignant when it is abnormal, when it is
unusual and strange: in a place were hunger is so prevalent, one hungry
child with an imaginary cricket bat was just a colour piece in the weekend
section of a newspaper. But my hunger, singular and self-circling, was a
crisis in my hometown. It marked me out. I was wasteful, and I was
distasteful. A car with wound-down windows once shot past me on the
street, someone shouting from the backseat: ‘Eat a hamburger, you bitch!’

My newspaper’s office, such as it was, was just off the main street of the
busy suburb of Borella, the site of the 1983 riots that are generally
considered the start of Sri Lanka’s civil war, a war which didn’t end until
2009, three years after my first visit to the country. Here, in Borella, Tamil
civilians were pulled from buses and killed; here, houses and cars were
burned with whole families still inside. I was born in 1983. My colleagues,
my age and younger, had never lived in anything other than that war, knew
peace only as an abstract and alien thing. They hardly saw the soldiers on
the street corner, leaning and leering against their rifles, the razor wire hung
with drying washing, the concrete bollards. They lived in a city grown
stagnant, its infrastructure unchanged because of the protracted military
campaigns and clampdowns. There was a fervour the day I first brought my
laptop in to work, so small and sleek beside the ancient office PCs. A doll-
sized computer, my colleagues said, for a doll-sized human being. My
newspaper, without a trace of irony, was called The Nation.
In the damp-walled Nation offices, we were given cups of tea each
morning and early afternoon by one of the two tea-wallahs, employed
purely for this purpose. It took three weeks before I learnt exactly how to
ask for mine without the obligatory milk, the sugar thick enough to stand a
spoon in: plain tea. ‘Just leaves and water, miss?’ the younger one would
ask, wrinkling his high forehead in consternation. At lunchtime, one of the
copy boys would often whip out his guitar and play old pop songs, barefoot,
while others beat tricky percussion riffs on the edges of tables with their
hands.
I was using the country, and The Nation, to cut my teeth. I know now that
it’s a fairly common practice for young and ambitious media graduates to
take a placement at any one of the English-language newspapers that
operate across the developing world, catering mostly to ex-pats, business
people and the local Westernised elite. To come back with experience, a
competitive advantage in what was, even then, a tricky industry to get a foot
into. I wrote articles about animal charities, about fashion shows, about dog
grooming, and about Sri Lanka’s first writers’ festival, held in Galle, the
southernmost city of the island, which had been badly affected by the recent
tsunami. In the evenings, I went to beachside bars or Colombo’s only café
with other journalists, film-makers, investment bankers, all of whom had
been to university overseas, and very few of whom spoke either of Sri
Lanka’s native languages.
It’s awful and it’s dubious, of course, to use an entire country as a test
ground, in a kind of personal experiment. It’s the same unthinking privilege
that any kind of travel is predicated on for we children of the West. But I
also wanted to try to be someone else for a time – to be forcibly removed
from the people who knew me, from my habits, from my patterns of
behaviour, my routines and rules. I thought, perhaps, that distance could
defeat disease, that I could leave my home and somehow leave my self
behind as well.

Most of the journalists bought rice-and-curry lunch packets from a tiny

kitchen down the road; wrapped into a neat newspaper mound, there’d be a
tightly packed, square prism of white rice, a daub of different curries in
each corner, coconut and chilli sambal in the middle. We mixed it all
together with our fingers, the turmeric staining mine nicotine-yellow. The
varieties of curry changed each day, dependent on what had been harvested:
to not be able to choose was as terrifying as it was liberating.

The problem for me, in Sri Lanka, was that the country’s cuisine is based on
two ingredients that almost always triggered my vomiting – rice and the
coconut milk that binds the sauce in any curry. The first time I ate one of
these lunch packets with my colleagues, I had to sprint from the tea room to
the small garden at the side of the office building. I threw up onto a bed of
brightly-coloured tropical flowers and tried to shake off my workmates’
well-meaning concern and questions. But I know too that I told the mother
of my billeted family that I was a vegetarian, my new café-set friends that I
couldn’t eat gluten (and we all laughed that this was a Westerner’s disease)
– that I was limiting my options, even then, far beyond just what I knew my
stomach couldn’t handle.
I’d often wander further down beyond the kitchen instead, and buy a fist-
sized egg roll, a soft bun slit down the middle and filled with slices of
boiled egg and bright red sauce, as well as a tomato from a street stall. It
cost me the equivalent of twenty cents. I started buying two each day, and
handing one to the first beggar I encountered at the bus stop near the office.
One of the beggars had some kind of fluid swelling in his feet, his ankles as
round and wide as tree trunks. Another had a goitre that forced her head to
crick permanently sideways on her neck, like a perpetually shrugged
shoulder. At first, I’d eat the other roll, painfully slowly; I remember one
colleague asking me, perplexed, if that was all a typical Westerner would
eat for lunch. Eventually, I started working through the lunch break, a habit
that I stuck to in the worst years of my illness for the way that this working
pattern looks diligent and industrious, rather than insane.
There was a pharmacy too on the other side of the street, in the most
modern and starkly tidy building in the area. It was the place my colleagues
trooped to for the ‘Nescafé machine’, a contraption that squeezed wet and
weak instant coffee out of little plastic sachets, or for packets of prawn
crackers or tiny, salt-dried fish. It was here one afternoon that I was grabbed
at by a woman in a sky-blue linen suit, her fingers pressing into the thin
flesh of my upper arms. ‘I can see you, sad little lady,’ she whispered in my
ear. She stared at me, unashamedly, she asked me immediately about my
faith, about my marriage, both of which are non-existent. The woman
grasped my arm and held my hand against her chest. ‘I think that God has
put me in your life today for a reason. To bless you. To make you well.’ I
tried to move away; but she followed me, unable as I was to blend into the
background, the whole way back into the office, where the tea-wallah
hustled her away.

Each day I caught two buses into work, juddering and lumbering things,
occasionally riddled with holes in the floor that were plastered over with
gaffer tape or cardboard. They were crowded of a morning, fuggy and
sticky in the afternoon, and always full, and the crush was perfect for hiding
the wandering hands of commuting men. At first, I thought the frequent
brushes against my body were accidental, and very often, they were
carefully construed to leave plenty of room for doubt. One man might look
like he was nodding off, his hand relaxed and floppy against the backrest of
the seat, until it slowly started rubbing at my breasts. Another might hold a
satchel at waist-height and then repeatedly bump against my thighs. My
knees grew bruises.
Each day, I changed buses at Nugegoda Junction, where a white plaster
Buddha sat smiling at the smog beneath the heart-shaped leaves of a spindly
Bodhi tree. The ground was clayey and red there. Three weeks after I
returned to Australia, a bomb was detonated in the dress shop on the corner.

The Sri Lankan wolf-whistle is a kind of sucking noise, fish-like through

pursed lips. It took me some time to understand this, the strange sound that
pursued me through the street. I’d not known before what it means to be so
conspicuous, to be recognised and remembered. At a time when I was
slowly being pared back to my bones, when I was every day becoming
insubstantial, I’ve never felt so looked-at, so fully bodied.
What disturbed me most about this was how quickly I became
accustomed to being looked at, even touched. My body, in public, was
public. I lowered my gaze to the ground.
The women in my office nodded along when I complained. It happened
to them too – most of them found other ways to come to work, or always
travelled with their families. Shezny, a wide-smiled Tamil woman, said that
when she had to catch a bus alone, she’d wear an extra pin inside her sari,
to jab at anyone who touched her up. ‘That’s great,’ I laughed, ‘you take a
little prick all of your own!’
‘No, no,’ she said, bewildered. ‘A sari pin is very large.’

I never saw other women walking on the streets, save for an occasional pair
of white-robed nuns, holding hands and turning inward. I rarely saw other
women in public at all; there was no space for their bodies in the civil life
of this city. My female colleagues were unusual because they were
employed, all the more so because they worked in offices instead of
hospitals or schools – but even they all spoke to me about how much they
wanted to get married, to find a husband, to find love. Weeks in, I realised
that they were daughters until the day they became wives; they were
women before they were people. They could never move beyond their
bodies, never forget that their bodies were there. But here was I, living
beside them in a body that was slowly disappearing, despite its new
conspicuousness. They took me into their houses, taught me to cook
traditional meals that take hours to prepare, and I pushed the food around
on my plate, unsure whether it was more polite to not eat the meal they had
served me at all, or to eat it and then throw up immediately afterwards.
My collarbones grew angular enough to become individually sunburnt.

When I left Sri Lanka, at the end of my internship and far too sick to stay, I
was light-headed and felt almost absent as I walked the streets, as if
everything inside my skull had been untethered. I felt that time itself had
swollen in the pre-monsoon humidity and was moving in thick and syrupy
globs. I was wearing a child’s salwar kameez, the long shirt and baggy
pants worn by the country’s Muslim women, the fabric barely stretched
across my shrunken breasts. I’d chosen the salwar because it was a chaste
woman’s clothing, the throat, the knees, the shoulders covered by brightly-
coloured cloth; I had found that it deterred, at least a little, the groping
hands on buses. In my first days back in Sydney, I was shocked when I saw
a young woman in hotpants. The speed at which my body had taken
Colombo underneath its skin surprised me. Smaller, slower-paced, and
thicker-tongued, I no longer fitted neatly in the space I’d left behind.
 I became obsessed with automation, with the small mechanised tasks that
in Colombo had all been performed by quiet men in meticulous uniforms,
that had been physical and bodied, but now were strangely abstract. Within
a week I was back in my old job, driving in along the M5 through toll-gates
that opened automatically in response to the infra-red tag on my front
windscreen, swiping a card to open the office building’s doors, swiping
again to activate a lift. My computer automatically opened the schedule of
radio programs I was to monitor each day.
There was a modicum of safety, somehow, in the constant small human
interactions that were still in place in Colombo’s public spaces. Here, I
thought, it would be easy just to disappear.

For a long time, I couldn’t place exactly what it was, the thing that took so
long for me to reconcile. I came home feeling different, looking diminished,
and unable to tie together the two cities I now loved, and the very different
ways of being that each engendered. I think now that what I struggled with
was my own dreadful inconsistency, what it means to love a place and a
people in the way I did Colombo, and yet to have held it at such distance,
however unwittingly. In many ways, my hunger kept me separate, unable to
participate fully in those myriad rituals of society and sociability that circle
around food, unable to accept nourishment from the same places as the
people I was living with, or from the very people I was moving amongst.
Hunger forces a kind of refusal, a brutal, impenetrable independence, leaves
us quite literally unable to break bread and connect with the people in our
orbit; I realise now that this is how I’ve lived most of my adult life.
But more than this, in Colombo, my hunger was obscene. It was not
predicated on need, on poverty or parentlessness or war, corruption or
greed. It was something feeding on and off itself, something always leading
back into itself – the starving brain turned inwards to survive. My hunger
was not, and could not, be equated with the hunger that I saw around me.
Amongst so much need, my own denial was something as incomprehensible
to my local friends as the hunger they lived alongside was to me.
Something irreconcilable here made my world grow bigger and more
disparate, and all the while, I shrank. And I shrank away as well.

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IN HOSPITAL
 At my sickest, a lover once folded a blanket over
my shoulderblade before curling against my back to sleep. People visibly
recoiled when I passed, or looked back over their shoulders in a double take
that I could never help but notice. From the outside, nobody understands the
seemingly wilful hunger of those of us who waste away, nobody really
understands the hold that it can have, its awful power.
I know now that the impulse I have to starve comes from exactly the
same place as my impulse to write: hunger, like writing, is a mediator. It
stands between me and the world, between my self and the things that
might cause it harm. Hunger is addictive, and it is intensely sensual, pulling
the body between extremes of hyper-alertness and a foggy trance-like
dream state. And like writing, it lets me stand clear, separate and intact; it
lets me stand on the outside. I spent years determined to stay on the outside.
Because I wasn’t, I was sure, one of those women.

The problem, I realise now, was that I’d never met one of those women. I
never really did until my first admission to a hospital day program, five
years after my travel to Sri Lanka.
When I agreed to the admission, I still didn’t think that I belonged in an
eating disorder program, that my hunger was malicious. I knew that I was
noticeably underweight, and that I was still struggling to manage my
physical condition, to eat enough to fuel my body without throwing up in
the process. I’d scan every restaurant that I went to upon entering, to make
sure that I was seated close to the bathroom or the door; I had become adept
on picnics and at parties, ducking out, mid-conversation, and scampering
for the nearest plant or wheelie bin. (‘Fucking junkie’ a man once spat as he
walked past me, when I was doubled over behind a tree after an early café
breakfast with my best friend.)
By the time I was admitted, I’d spent two years visiting an outpatient
clinic, at first fortnightly, then monthly, walking past the locked psychiatric
ward and up three flights of stairs to its set of narrow corridors; at the height
of my illness, even this exertion left me dizzy and unsteady on my feet. I
still thought that my main problem was anxiety, that the stress and
exhausting worry that were constantly coursing through me were
exacerbating the vomiting that was the main symptom of my physical
illness. I never once thought that the way that I was eating might be
exacerbating the stress with which my body and my mind were both racked.
A psychologist had slowly encouraged me to attend the clinic, suggesting
only, carefully, that the doctors there would be experts at putting broken,
undernourished bodies like my own back together. I remember showing the
clinic’s dietician, during my first appointment, the food diaries I’d been
asked to keep over the preceding fortnight, and stating straight up, ‘I’m not
anorexic.’ I didn’t realise then that she must hear this all the time, and
barely registered her response, ‘You certainly eat as if you are.’
In these two years, I hardly progressed at all. I realise now this was
mostly because I could not recognise the complex nature of my hunger, and
so I couldn’t understand the help the doctors there were trying to extend to
me. I went alone to these appointments, waiting on one of the plastic
armchairs lined up in a row past the reception desk, always alongside other
thin and anxious women with flaking skin and darting eyes and knees that
were constantly jigging up and down, out of both nervousness and a desire
to burn more energy. I didn’t talk to them, tried to avoid their gaze.
I can’t remember, now, what I talked about with the psychiatrist in my
appointments, my memories of these visits are cloudy with a strange
combination of malnutrition, boredom, exhaustion and fear. But I do
remember the one day that my regular doctor was away; his substitute was
forthright, crisp and far less gentle in her manner than he had ever been.
She said, after closing my by now bulky file, ‘You know you’re not getting
anywhere here,’ and I had to concede that she was right.
I called the hospital from a café up the road from the clinic, feeling
somehow, and somewhat irrationally, that the decision to do so wasn’t
really mine to make, that my hand had finally been forced. I’m also not sure
that I would ever have gone ahead with the admission if I hadn’t thought
that I would write about it later. But even as I walked, on the first day of my
admission, through the building’s bright blue door, after a round of
meetings, measures, blood tests, heart checks and the reading of a rule book
as thick as my spindly wrist, I still remember thinking, even then, that I’d
have nothing in common at all with any of the other women I might meet
there.

Because I wasn’t, I thought, one of these women.

One woman hadn’t had a bath in seven years, and always showered in the
dark. Another would spend eight-hundred dollars every week on groceries,
and seven hours vomiting each night, the blood vessels beneath her eyes
bursting with the pressure. One had permanent callouses above the knuckles
on her right hand, where they crashed against the backsides of her teeth.
One woman walked circuits of a shopping centre so as to not be caught
exercising, another had to wear padding underneath her feet in order to be
able to walk at all. One woman stepped every hour, on the hour, onto her
bathroom scales, another chewed eighteen packets of sugar-free gum each
day. One would eat undercooked chicken once a month in the hope that
she’d get salmonella. One would eat brussels sprouts for breakfast.
In the hospital, I bore these women a strange kind of witness; a split kind
of witness, for weeks. Where I didn’t want to be involved, didn’t think
myself included, but couldn’t help but recognise myself reflected in the
stories that they told. We moved our bodies in similar ways, curling our feet
under the knobbled bases of our pelvises, bouncing our knees beneath the
dining table as our meals were served, biting at our cuticles and lips. So too,
the similarities between our secrets, the strange behaviour we tried to keep
hidden, the discomfort we felt within our skins, were almost physical. I felt
outside myself, borderless, I didn’t know where witnessing stopped, and I
began.
I kept a notebook in my first days in the hospital, but barely touched it.
As I listened to the other women talk, hesitantly, at times angrily, often in
tears, and I heard them voice so many of the things that I’d kept so long
silent in myself, I knew immediately that it could never be my place to
write about them, to speak for them, to use their stories to add colour to my
own. I realised that these women were some of the bravest but also most
vulnerable that I had ever met, and that to turn them into kooky characters
in my writing would not only violate the privacy that the hospital was so
careful to protect for us, but also do them violence. I realised, at last, that
this story was not about them, but about me – even as I’d been denying that
fact for years.

Under the hospital’s supervised schedule of meals, I was suddenly forced to

be without my hunger, and I walked out of the building every afternoon
feeling skinless, almost painfully permeable. I walked down Broadway, the
shuddering of trucks and passing buses vibrating through my bones, the
footpath crumbly and frayed. I sometimes caught my reflection in the dark
shop windows and was shocked by the glassiness of my own face. I’d buy a
cold drink at the Hot Devil Bakery, defiantly sugarfree and fizzy. I’d sit
quietly on the bus – I’d been forbidden to walk home, in case even this
small act of exercise was a compulsion – and press my fingers against the
stiff fibres of the seat, the cracked rubber seal of the window. These grubby,
communal surfaces were a kind of landing pad. I couldn’t change frequency
so easily.
Because inside the hospital we were contained. Inside, no one could find
what we said unimaginable. No one could think us stupid or indulgent or
precious. No one was horrified when we cried over our plates of ravioli,
limpid and almost visceral in its red sauce.

Our days, at least, had in-built structure. We arrived in time for morning tea
and left forty-five minutes after afternoon tea, with lunch at 12:30 sharp.
We were carefully watched during our meals: no breaking food up into little
pieces, no eating food in any set order, no dunking biscuits in tea, no over-
use of condiments, no counting chews, no reading labels, no tiny bites, no
one thing left on the plate at all. Our meals were time-limited, with
warnings given when we had ten, and then five minutes to go. One woman
ate so slowly and tearfully that she had to shovel in most of her meal in
overloaded forkfuls in those last minutes. Another tried to hide a whole
potato in her pocket. We all hugged our stomachs and were silent after
every meal. There was a grey box of tissues in the corner of the room.
We were weighed once a week, wearing pale-yellow paper gowns with
elasticised cuffs and open backs, facing away from the numbers on the
scale. We kept our gowns in a metal locker with ventilation gills, in zip-lock
bags designed for storing food, our names written in texta on the label on
the front: Contents: Fiona. Each afternoon, we picked up breakfast cereal,
canned fruit and longlife milk in a brown paper bag to have for breakfast
before we left home the next day. I turned the cereal into cookies and the
tinned pears into cinnamon muffins and fed them to my family and friends.
I didn’t want to eat them, and couldn’t bear to waste them, but the people I
would give them to, I knew, would never think them a burden.

Every week, once a week, we were escorted outside, to practise eating in

the world, where we knew our meals would not be correctly measured by a
dietitian, where we’d have to choose, and where we could not be contained.
Our first excursion was to a café on Glebe Point Road, we walked in the hot
and stagey light of mid-afternoon, unspeaking, and in a ragged single file. I
bit my lip, and felt it, full and sweet between my teeth. A dalmatian on a
leash was curled in the doorway, it sniffed at the air as we entered and I was
sure the café staff could smell fear on us too. We were given one minute
each to place an order for a piece of cake. No one ordered coffee because
we weren’t allowed skim milk.
We were the biggest group in the café that day, and we’d walked beneath
a building site to get there. A blond man in the scaffolding had wolf-
whistled, at this group of young and slender women walking by.
Our days, at least, had in-built structure, to take advantage of the changes
to our chronically starving brains, which had hardened, physiologically, into
obsessionality and rigid, repeating patterns of thought and action. My
hunger, and its rules, have been with me, always, for almost all of my adult
life. My days have for so long been structured around meals, a constant
accounting of what I have and haven’t eaten, what I can and can’t still eat,
what I need to do to still feel safe. I still don’t know who I am without my
hunger; without its structures that support me too, its scaffolding.

Sometimes we went grocery shopping together, with an occupational

therapist and a dietitan, and then cooked: we weighed out ingredients to the
gram. We trimmed the smallest streaks of visible fat from our meat. One
woman had no idea where to find butter in the supermarket aisles. Another
refused to buy feta from the deli because it had no nutritional information
panel. One had never before seen a leek. We wore blue latex gloves in the
tiny kitchen, scrupulous about hygiene, and either tried to control each
process as we cooked, or shrank back to avoid touching the ingredients
entirely.
I had to leave the kitchen on the day we cooked risotto. I sat on the carpet
in the next room, squeezing my temples with my knees. I already felt it
choking up in my throat, as glutinous as craft glue.
This is the crux of it: what cannot be imagined from the outside, the
breathless bodily panics, the unbrained terror, how I sweat and shake and
bite down on my nails. I know it’s inconceivable, outside, how the very idea
of a plate of rice can make my mind seize up and stutter, as if the grains
themselves were predatory. But this is how we lose our selves in this
disease. We’re instinctual in these moments, animal; and we’re eaten up in
each of these small acts of disappearance.

Inside the hospital building, a converted, two-storey house with high

ceilings and a vague dampness in the walls, we waited a lot. We could listen
to music, but not dance. We could stretch, but not walk around, we were
forbidden to step into the small courtyard, lined with plane trees, at the back
of the building. We weren’t allowed to talk about what we’d eaten or why
we were there, but it was impossible at times, not to mention the things that
were obvious to us all. We stayed in the one room, its walls painted sky
blue, its couches hard as lozenges, a whiteboard that was never really clean.
But what we found was solidarity, when none of us had felt solid,
somehow, for years. Our exterior lives often had very little in common – in
a discussion on exercise, for example, one woman added horse-riding and
sailing to my suggestions of yoga or riding a bike. But our interior lives
were as eerily congruent as project homes, though I’d spent at least eight
years, by this stage, denying that we shared anything at all.

This was because my illness started with a physical condition, still very rare
and very poorly understood. I was nineteen years old, and suddenly I was
vomiting without any volition after most of my meals. It took almost
eighteen months for my specialists to find a diagnosis, the weight dropping
off a body that rapidly came to alarm me. I was advised to cut out of my
diet the foods that I thought triggered the vomiting, and I did, by ever-
increasing increments, until the ground shifted somewhere, and hunger
became my safest state. Because my illness started with a physical
condition, because I recognised, and didn’t want and didn’t like my too-thin
body, because I didn’t purge by conscious choice, because I was still eating,
however limitedly, I thought that I was different. I realise now that this was
partly because of my own misconceptions about the nature of anorexia, and
the people who fall victim to it, but this is also the way the illness operates,
by deception, by a long series of constraints that tighten so slowly that
they’re barely noticeable at all.
I thought, for so long, that I didn’t have anything in common with these
women, and I sometimes think that’s the biggest tragedy of all. Because if
I’d only recognised this earlier, before eight entire years of illness had gone
by, I may have found the help I needed sooner. I may have been able to
stave off my hunger before it managed to establish itself so fully and firmly
in my life. I might, by now, be well.

One woman had slipped discs in her lower spine from vomiting, another
had chronic bladder infections and damaged kidneys. One had had
reconstructive surgery on her oesophagus because the juices of her stomach
had been leaking into her lungs. Three women in their mid-twenties –
myself included – had osteoporosis of the hips or spine.
One morning, about a month in, I realised that I’d been witness to the
slow display of a quietly unfolding beauty in these women. That each week
they grew more lovely. Some of this I’m sure was purely physical – the too-
thin amongst us became less angular, our faces fuller, skin and hair alike
lost their flakiness and pallor. So too our clothes looked better-tailored on
our bodies. But it was more than this. I’d watched them all uncurl their
tightened shoulders, unhang their heads, untuck their knees from
underneath their chins. One woman, whose every word had seemed, at first,
like it was being dragged out from her chest began to joke in a beautifully
acerbic way, her mouth unpinched and her whole face softened around it;
another had grown a laugh that shook the ceiling. This, I thought, is so
much like a second adolescence, each time seeing a woman, glorious and
gorgeous, emerge from somewhere underneath a brittle and anxious body. I
went to a book launch one evening, and was told that I looked like a cherub
with my newly-rounded cheeks.
 I still knew that I would write about it later, and kept a vocab list on the
back pages of my notebook. You’ve been deskilled, it says, do some down-
arrowing, take a helicopter view. And all of these rules you taught yourself.

Shortly before my discharge I spent a Sunday in Thirroul, driving the hour-

long coast road alone, a solitude I hadn’t had for weeks. I was visiting three
of my friends, all writers, who were staying in a barely-stable cottage on a
cliff for the weekend. I felt relaxed on the road, I shouted along to songs
with my windows wound down, and spent the afternoon sitting on the grass,
watching the ocean. We took photos at lunch in a local café. The two boys
went for a swim, and we two women talked about bodies, about illnesses,
and about transition, about how hard it is to change. My friend hugged me
when I left and I couldn’t stop thinking, the whole way home, of the lamb
sandwich sitting in my stomach, how we’d laughed at the waitress when
she’d cleared the plates and said Too much bread is too much bread, you
know?’

I didn’t know how I could bring what we did inside the hospital out into the
world. I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep visible the things we’d given
names to, the things we had made clear. With symptom reduction comes
space, I had written in my notebook, but I didn’t know if I could grow to fill
the space I was discovering, if I’d be able to stay vigilant each day. I still
don’t know. I still, sometimes, am left bereft.
But what I hadn’t expected was the heightened sensitivity when I came
out. An instructor at my gym, a space I was protectively easing myself back
into, equated the calories spent in one class with one small Easter bunny.
‘You just worked off the ears!’ she cried between songs, ‘Now for the
head!’ A waiter brought a brownie to my table with my coffee and called
me ‘naughty’. I got angry when my mother tried to share her birthday
chocolates, when my housemate had just honeyed toast for dinner, when a
friend bought a dress that didn’t fit because she was planning to lose weight
after the holidays. When my university sent me an email about the Low-Fat
Options Now Available on Campus.
I kept in contact with those women. About a month after the last of us was
discharged, we met for a drink in a fairly new bar, just around the corner
from the discreet, pebblecrete house where we had been confined. We all
ordered vodka with lime and soda; fresh lime, not cordial, we all ignored
the complimentary popcorn placed on a small tray before us. We sat on
zebra-print couches, away from the door, where the first cold air of the
season kept bursting through. One woman, the oldest among us, had
worked for nearly ten years before her admission for Jenny Craig. She had
needed to start fresh afterwards, and had found a job at a recruitment
agency. She’d lost weight since I’d last seen her.
She had been to Friday drinks a few weeks into her new position, and
after a few hours, a few beverages, one of her female colleagues had
approached her at the bar. ‘I’m onto you,’ the colleague had said. ‘You’re a
sister.’
‘Sorry?’ she stammered, ‘A sister?’
‘Were you AN or BN?’ she asked.
She denied that she knew what her colleague meant, but was holding her
wine glass before her, in that hand with the thick callouses raised above her
knuckles – these are called Russell’s Sign, after the doctor who first
identified bulimia nervosa, BN, as a condition in its own right. The
colleague laid her own knobbled fingers against them, and repeated:
‘You’re a sister.’
It’s a strange family to have found and to hold to, but even more
powerful to know, at last, that I can’t any longer stand clear.

OceanofPDF.com
IN BERLIN
 I felt smaller in Berlin than I ever had before: the
Northern Germans are, by and large, a big-boned people, the shanks of their
legs are particularly impressive. My language teacher had taken to calling
me ‘Fee-ona’, from the German word for fairy, or sprite; I couldn’t reach
any of the pots in the kitchen of my billet. And I was nervous, as I always
am at train stations, that evening, faced with the mechanised movement of
so many people, so many ways to get swept up and out and along. The
station was crawling with football fans headed to a screening of a European
Championship match somewhere near the Brandenburg Gate, I was lost and
I was late, and I knew, as it were, that the German trains would run on time.
I was wending my way west, I sat against a tinted window, the sinking of
the sun slow and languorous as it is in the height of summer at those
latitudes. It was dusk for almost all of my four-hour journey, only the last
few towns were finally sinking into the dark. As I travelled, the window
reflected, just off-centre, a glowing orange sun and the landscape passing
on the other side of the train. But the reflection blurred slightly, fuzzed
around the edges, the long sun tinted the whole scene the strange sepia-
orange of old polaroids. It was as if I was looking, suddenly, at the present
landscape through some strange, shadowy resemblance of the past, as if I
were filtering everything I saw through a photo album long gone grainy and
crackled. Berlin is a nostalgic city, its past still present, somehow, in its
mismatched buildings and large-scale public monuments scattered across its
suburbs, in pockets of people still talking about what it was like in the
broken-down, bohemian years just after reunification. I never could tell if
the city, at least, had found a way to come to terms with its own past, or this
remembering.
 I was travelling west after a month of intense language classes, and an
even more intense schedule of visits to museums and to makeshift bars with
ex-pat poets, who continued to delight in the ridiculously low prices and
large shots of hard spirits in Berlin, and taking a break from the writers’
fellowship that had brought me to that city, to revisit Münster. Münster
claims fame as the bicycle capital of Germany, and as the site of the gothic
Lambertikirche cathedral, its clock face supporting three huge, blackened
cages. These cages once held the corpses of the town’s most famous rebels,
who had promoted propertylessness and polygamy, and had controlled the
city for eleven months, sometime in the sixteenth century. I hadn’t been to
Münster for more than ten years, since a winter-long student exchange in
high school. My host family, in the first days of my visit, had borrowed a
neighbour’s child’s bike, a Lottorad, for me. As I rode into school each day,
at least one person would say Oh, I had one of those when I was small. I
had been well then.

My host parents, Hannelore and Christian, picked me up from the train with
their dog, a sleek, aloof and lanky thing, with a chest that swept
magnificently upwards. In the front hallway, the very same deer-skulls still
hung on the walls, the date they were hunted down written in black ink
across their foreheads. The same Warhol print in the living room. The same
tablecloth was in the kitchen, I’d remembered its pattern of culinary herbs
and their cursive names, which had soaked into me a marvellous
vocabulary: Basilikum, Thymian, Rosmarin, Salbei. In my attic bedroom
with the sloping roof, the one I’d slept in all those years ago, a bunch of
pale pink snapdragons, called Löwenmau in German, lions’ maws, were
resting on the bedside table. The relief I felt was physical, a sudden
heaviness of limb, an abandoning of the constant guardedness that Berlin
had pressed upon me. I remembered waking early in this room and
watching nuns cycle past the house on thin-framed bikes, trying to catch the
first snow of the season in my hands from the small window. On the green
writing desk was a ceramic dish filled with foil-wrapped marzipan. ‘You
must still love marzipan!’ Hannelore said.

In Berlin, I couldn’t help but realise, very early on, that so much of what we
know medically about hunger comes, however indirectly, from this land.
That the two most notorious – and most thorough – studies of hunger came
about because of the Second World War. The first of these is easier to talk
about, because it happened in a Minnesota university, with volunteers, in
preparation for an eventuality that no one really knew the scale of yet, an
academic hunger. It was 1944, and ethics boards were yet to be imagined
into being.
The Minnesota Experiment recruited a group of healthy young men,
mostly conscientious objectors, who had passed a rigorous series of
physical and psychological tests to prove that they were specimens in their
prime. These men were deliberately deprived of food over a period of nine
months, and the changes in their weight, behaviour, physical functioning
observed at a minute level, before a period of controlled re-feeding later on.
The researchers were creating, in a scientific way, a microcosm of what
whole populations were experiencing in Europe, trying to model what
rehabilitation might need to look like once the war was won. At this stage,
the scientists were thinking only of the civilian damage of war – the famine
caused by destruction of farmland, loss of manpower, disruption of
infrastructure. No one could imagine yet the scale of what was happening in
the camps.
The men ate boiled potatoes, swedes, macaroni, bread, the kinds of foods
that Europe’s population was relying so heavily on. They were given small
doses, occasionally and unpredictably, of sugar, butter or meat. They were
expected to walk twenty-two miles each day, and to lose twenty-five per
cent of their body weight in the first twelve weeks. One of the diagnostic
definitions of anorexia, in comparison, is a ten per cent bodyweight loss.
The lead investigator, Ancel Keys, became well known in the 1960s for his
books on ‘The Mediterranean Diet’, advocating olive oil, antipasto and red
wine. He also invented the Body Mass Index, the measure of relative height
and weight that’s still used to determine, however bluntly, any person’s
healthy weight.
Keys’ subjects, these perfectly healthy young men, soon exhibited much
of the behaviour that I had only ever seen, before I read about his
experiment, written up as the symptomology of any eating disorder. The
lists of things to watch for in your daughter, the tell-tale signs I’d been so
steadfastly ignoring in myself. The men grew rigid and controlling around
meal times and developed intricate rituals, eating slowly, guarding their
plates, asking for extra salt and extra spices. (My use of garlic had become
infamous within my family, my dishes inedible to everyone else.) They
chewed each mouthful many times, cut their potatoes into miniscule, even
proportions, sat at the same place, at the same table, every time.
Some men drank up to fifteen cups of coffee in one day, others chewed
gum endlessly, they chewed their hair and nails. They collected cookbooks,
and takeaway menus, became irritable, snappy, squabbly. They were
possessive. One man was caught riffling through the laboratory’s garbage,
eating food scraps straight from the bin. Most bought and hoarded food –
not to eat, just to own – and kept it in the wardrobes of their rooms. And
every single one of the thirty-six volunteers eventually stole from the grocer
in the town where they were staying.
I had been stealing food, by the time I read about the Minnesota
Experiment, for over two years, mostly from the oversized, overstocked
Coles on the first floor of the Broadway Centre, near my home. It wasn’t a
matter of need, I could afford the items I was dropping in to the bottom of
my bag – cheeses, sauces, the occasional tray of meat. I rarely ate them. I
know I felt, at times, resentful at the idea of paying for food that I’d go to
great lengths to avoid, that I only needed to feed to friends at dinner parties,
or to give my pantry shelves some appearance of normality. I know too that
it was only the items that I didn’t consider part of my accepted repertoire of
foods that I wouldn’t pay for – but it’s still not something that I really
understand. I’d said this out loud, inside the hospital, and there was only
silence.
And then the other women started talking. One of them had stolen ice-
cream, chocolates, in the large quantities she was embarrassed to run past
the check-out staff. One had been unable to pay for her binges, another for
the asparagus and brussels sprouts that she’d been buying out-of-season.
Two had been caught by store detectives, one was forced to go to court.
None of us had ever spoken of our thefts before. But part of each of us
had become rodent-like, gathering and squirrelling away the things we
needed to survive, hoarding outside ourselves the things we kept in such
dire shortage inside our bodies.
The men in the Minnesota Experiment grew apathetic, inattentive, sad.
They gave up on their studies, on their relationships, because they just
couldn’t be bothered any more. Their dreams, when they occurred, were
about food. I only recently realised that most people don’t eat in their
dreams.
The physical effects of starvation syndrome are much more familiar, more
obvious. The body grows thin, the organs – especially the heart and
stomach – slow, and shrink. Bones hollow, muscles waste as the body
begins to feed off itself. The skin grows dull, flaky and grey, it breaks
easily, and repairs itself with difficulty. It bruises. Hands and feet grow
cold, hair and nails became brittle. Hormone production shuts down
entirely. Keys described the process as a strange kind of accelerated ageing,
a trimming back, the body’s economising on anything that isn’t essential to
survival. The men fell more often, grew clumsier. But their senses stayed
alert, and their mental acuity did too. Starvation is a state of constant
sensual anxiety, even as the body powers down.
This is the metaphor: in the hospital, we were told that our bodies were
like cars, we have to fill them up with petrol or they stop running. I said I
was trying out solar power, and was sent from the room like a naughty
child.

The Minnesota Experiment was less successful around the question of

rehabilitation – it wasn’t until the sweeping crises across Africa in the
1980s and 90s that scientists finally got a handle on the delicate processes
of refeeding the starving body without causing it to shut down completely
in shock. The experiment had been designed to include two phases of
refeeding: in the first six weeks, a controlled and gradual stepping up,
where different groups of men were given different supplements, different
amounts of calories, but essentially the same meals, potatoes, swedes,
butterless bread. This was to be followed by a ‘free’ phase, where the men
were allowed to eat whatever they desired. But the men rebelled in the
controlled phase, angry and impatient, and began eating outside of the
program. They’d grown stubborn and rigid and controlling, tuned inwards,
into themselves.
But as the men slowly became better fed, almost all of their symptoms
reversed. With nutrition, the body healed itself, with energy, the brain
returned to full functionality. But behaviourally, psychologically, there were
traces that remained, tactics learnt that just wouldn’t go away. All of the
men ended the project weighing more than they had at the beginning, eating
more, and more quickly, lest the food be taken from them again. Many of
them battled with obesity for the rest of their lives, others claimed to have
never lost their distrustfulness. Three of them left their studies to become
chefs. I’ve met many former eating-disorder patients who’ve become
psychiatric nurses; others, in the throes of their illnesses, working in
restaurants or cafés.
The body never forgets starvation. I think of my grandfather, still keeping
old, but repairable watches, promotional DVDs from Sunday newspapers,
recycled pieces of string inside his cupboards, having come of age in the
Depression.

More and more I think that the body never forgets places, the spaces it has
moved through. I walked through the empty bedrooms on the top floor of
that house in Münster, where my host sisters, now studying in larger towns
across the country, had grown up. I remembered laughing with Marieke
over her English homework (‘I think Simon fancies you!’), playing card
games on the rolled-rag carpet, lighting candles with Daniele and
strategising about her painful crush on her hockey coach, Micha. The cold
tiles beneath my feet. I remembered Daniele convincing me that the pale
gratings on my soft-serve icecream, which the Germans call Spaghetti-Eis,
were parmesan cheese, ordering a pizza with Erbsen because I didn’t know
the word translated as green peas, how I started mimicking the way Daniele
would stab her teaspoon through the peeled-back paper lid of her emptied
yoghurt.
Downstairs the next morning, Hannelore and Christian were sitting at
opposite ends of their dark-wood table, the still points in a scattershot of
newspapers, pots of marmalade and jam and plates of bread, a silver coffee
service, squat peaches and crumbled eggshells. Hannelore leapt to her feet
and hugged me. ‘Fichen,’ she said, using the diminutive, ‘we take sweet
breakfast here, but I remember you like cheese!’ She bounded to the cellar
for another platter, more butter, they’d chosen regional specialties and a
smoky raclette, which I didn’t remember having tried before until I bit into
the wedge thrust on my plate. The body remembers.
One of my Australian friends now living in Berlin claims the trick to a
German-style breakfast is to empty your pantry onto the table.
I was talking to Christian about Berlin, how fascinated I had been by the
very visible layerings of history on the skin of the city, struggling to express
this in my clumsy, flat-tongued German. Christian had been born there, but
was evacuated as a small child to his relatives in the countryside near
Hanover in the early stages of the war, only ever able to return on short
visits after the division of the country. He loves the region that he lives in,
its potted history, the way its old monarchs came to rule over England. ‘You
see, Fichen,’ he said suddenly, ‘This is why we think of you, still, as our
Australian daughter! You were always interested, always keen to be
involved. You were always curious, yes?’ The German word for curious,
neugierig, means greedy for the new.
I stopped pushing the cheese around my plate, telescoped suddenly
outside of my self. I saw the image had stayed frozen there, in someone
else’s eyes, across the intervening years. I got a glimpse of my fuzzy
sixteen-year-old self, overseas for the first time, as yet uncomplicated by
disease.
Hannelore took me to the markets that morning, where eggs were sorted
into cartons according to the colour of their shell. She introduced me to
their greengrocer, a bow-armed, braided woman, and bought me a dried
fruit mix named ‘Sunshine’ because it made her think about my home. We
stopped in at a church on the way back where a group of women were
raising funds for the blind, by teaching passersby to type in Braille, using a
six-pronged machine. I stepped up to have a try, and the young woman in
charge immediately asked ‘Können Sie Deutscht?’
Hannelore visibly expanded in pride. ‘Fiona,’ she said, ‘is a Germanist.’
I’d never though of myself in that way before, either.
In Berlin, I was constantly being asked why I had learnt German, even by
the ex-pat writers I kept meeting, most of whom could only stumble
through a menu or a ticket purchase, regardless of how long they had been
living in the city. There were exceptions, of course: the students studying
Heidegger, Marx or Kant, those who’d learnt bedroom intimacies from
local girlfriends. No one ever believes me when I say I love the way the
language sounds, how full and fleshy it feels in the mouth, how chewy. But
it’s also a systematic language, bound by rules, by precise and careful
delineations. It may well be that this is what appeals to me, this structure,
this clarity. This regulation. This control.

It took me some weeks to adjust to the different rhythm of time in Berlin.

I’ve always been an early riser, but this city doesn’t shake itself awake, in
summer at least, until close to noon. Instead, I walked the streets in the
mornings, the furry blossoms of linden trees drifting in heaps around me,
the footpaths uneven and cracked by tree roots. In my first days, mapless, I
went searching for remnants of the Wall, traced instead the lines of metal
plates embedded in the street to mark its footprint. I was barely three
months out of hospital, that first, fraught admission and I wasn’t supposed
to be walking like this. But I was in Walter Benjamin’s city, a flâneur’s city,
and I was terrified by the ferocity of the cyclists to boot. I took to having
breakfast, once the shutters started rolling up, in a café called Suicide Sue,
each day a single slice of bread with tomato and soft cheese.
In those first days I’d felt stiff-tongued and dumb. It had been at least six
years since I’d last had cause to use my German, and my mouth had rusted
over. I could understand everything that was being said to me, eavesdrop on
conversations, but the words I wanted to use were always hovering
somewhere just out of my reach. I spent a lot of time nodding, smiling my
way through shop transactions, unable to participate properly in the small
social exchanges of the everyday. I was without words, somehow, and I felt
it all the more keenly, this slipping away of language, because I was in the
city to write.
Even as I started to remember, to refamiliarise, I realised I still had to
rely on simpler constructions, simpler approximations for the things I
wanted to say. In German, I was unsubtle, convoluted, and anything but
witty. In a foreign language I had a different personality and it was never
possible to see a person that I recognised reflected in my interactions with
other people. I had a massage one afternoon, and cried upon being touched.

Six months after my first stay in Münster, Daniele made her reciprocal visit
to Sydney. My family’s house is perched on the edge of bushland, at the
point where the valley that it covers becomes too steep to build on. Besides
her hockey, Daniele had always been a jogger, she was muscular and strong,
and once jokingly referred to her lycra-clad body as a Kampfwürstchen, a
little combat sausage. She was horrified by how few flat areas there were to
jog along near my house, but did it anyway, coming back with the prickles
we’ve always called stickybeaks clinging to her socks.
Daniele’s family didn’t have a computer – they still don’t – so when she
typed emails home to her father’s university address or to school friends,
she took close to an hour, staring at the keyboard and pressing each key
individually with her index finger. I helped her out a few times, typing from
her dictation, pausing occasionally to ask about unusual, beautiful words. In
one email to Daniele’s best friend, I’d typed her words: Mein Eßverhältnis,
Gott sei Dank, bleibt gut. ‘My eating behaviour, thank god, is still fine.’ I
didn’t question her at the time, pretended that I didn’t understand the folded
compound word. I didn’t know what lay ahead.

As a part of their support for foreign students, the Goethe Institut, where the
language course for my fellowship was held, offered a series of cultural
events: film screenings, walking tours, mini-golf. I loved the three-hour
walking tours, of course, but also signed up for a daytrip, on a Sunday,
catching the fast train northwards to Oranienberg and Sachsenhausen, the
first concentration camp built by the Nazi regime. I was sitting next to a
broad-shouldered Canadian, who’d taken a liking to me earlier that week,
when we’d surreptitiously, illicitly, held an English conversation in the
Institut’s courtyard. He’d rocked up to our meeting point barely able to
walk, clutching at a kebab and wearing lipstick on his cheekbone,
mumbling something about a club with a giant swing. I was furious at his
goofy, boozy grin, and deliberately lost him as soon as we disembarked.
There’s a long walkway leading up to the gates of the camp, with
wildflowers pressing up along its borders. I picked a small, orange poppy to
wear in my hair.
Sachsenhausen is a terrible place, a fraught place, stark and bare, its
triangular parade grounds open to the sky. It was a labour camp, filled at
first with writers, artists, activists, conscientious objectors, homosexuals,
criminals, before gypsies and Jews were added to Hitler’s list of
undesirables. Few buildings remain there now: the three watchtowers, one
of the barracks, the morgue. The central ground is dominated by a red-brick
monument, built by the GDR government in the 1960s, to commemorate
the early German socialists who were interned there – the Party always
claimed their state was founded by the people who had resisted fascism
right throughout Hitler’s reign.
Sachsenhausen was not initially an extermination camp, although it was
expanded later to include a series of gas chambers. It was the first labour
camp, allied with local industry. The inmates were made to walk endless
laps of the parade ground to test the durability of shoes. In this camp, it was
discovered that hungry inmates are less likely to have the energy to rebel.

Much of what we know about the physicality of starvation comes from

studies conducted by and with the starving population of the Warsaw
Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland. In the two years that the
studies ran, before the final liquidation of the Ghetto, almost thirty
malnourished Jewish doctors living within its limits studied growth rate,
weight, organ size, dermatology, immunology, circulation, fluid retention,
bone density, body temperature, vitamin retention, the functioning of the
senses, of hormones, of digestion. In two years, they conducted 3658
autopsies. Only seven of the doctors survived the war. One, a pathologist,
Theodosia Goliborska, emigrated to Australia in 1946, and continued to
practise at least until the 1980s, in this country that has never had to
understand such desperate, widespread hunger.
We learn about hunger through hardship, through war or famine, natural
disaster or political crisis. We learn through bodies forced to the edge,
bodies that have become sites of trauma, collateral damage in conflicts,
famines, persecution. It’s a terrible laboratory that our knowledge comes
from, and a horrific debt that I often feel I owe, because my body could not
have been nursed back towards health without these studies born of
suffering. I still have trouble, sometimes, recognising that I didn’t choose
my hunger. That no one ever does.

I arrived in Berlin at the height of Spargelzeit, the two or three weeks in late
spring when asparagus is ripe and super-abundant, and sold in bunches as
thick as my thigh, translucent white, or mottled green. The old-style
German restaurants and pubs all display blackboards near their geranium
beds, listing asparagus menus: asparagus quiche, asparagus soup, asparagus
gratin, asparagus hollandaise; they continue to serve giant wurst and pork
knuckles and schnitzels, peas and carrots out of cans. In a way, this was a
blessing: I’m comfortable eating asparagus, but still can’t even imagine
sitting down to eat a schnitzel that overspills a dinner plate. After
Spargelzeit comes strawberry season, and a stall sprouted suddenly outside
my communist-era apartment block, painted red with a green canvas roof,
manned by a beautiful, bored strawberry-blonde in denim shorts.
 Along with this celebration in Germany of the seasonality of food, I
realised too that Germans believe – the word is not too strong – in butter.
Only skim milk under sufferance. Consider cake part of their cultural
heritage. It was barely three months since I’d been discharged from the
hospital, but I could see how far I’d come, against this backdrop. Even
though I was struggling, slowly cutting back and skipping meals, if I had
been in Berlin before the hospital, I would have panicked every time my
bread was buttered, refused to drink my coffee if it wasn’t made on skim,
been unable to even taste the cakes my classmates bought in the breaks
between our lessons.

On my last day in Münster, Hannelore and Christian took me to visit the

ancestral home of the area’s most famous lyric poet, the eccentric, ardent
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. I walked through her low-roofed, top-floor
bedroom, running my fingers across her writing desk, her curiosity cabinet
filled with speckled-shelled blown eggs, pinned dragonflies. Her bed was
hard and thin and narrow.
Hannelore packed a dinner for my four-hour train trip back to Berlin: a
two-cheese sandwich with butter, an apple and a peach. A box of chocolate
biscuits, one box of pralines, a packet of Gummibärchen, a glass bottle of
mineral water. We had strawberry tart for afternoon tea, and Hannelore
asked me if I wanted cream beside it. She smiled when I declined. ‘I didn’t
think so,’ she said, ‘Daniele never takes cream either, you always had such
similar tastes. I remember when we had pancakes, you both would pat them
down with kitchen paper. Pat, pat, pat, with kitchen paper, before you ate
them.’
I didn’t know what to say. I had been well then, I didn’t know what lay
ahead.

OceanofPDF.com
IN MINIATURE
 It seems a strange place to start writing about the
miniature, but I want to begin on the internet, because I found there, for a
time, a thing I could hardly have conceived would have existed, a
community of illness, specifically for the kinds of illnesses that we often
keep silent and hidden within ourselves. I want to begin on the internet
because I found there a space for grim jokes about vomiting on a stranger’s
shoes or pretending to understand when others talk about fry-up hangover
breakfasts, for complaining about the poor quality of hospital food, or
ridiculous dietetic terms like ‘fun food’ for the kinds of things – like
chocolate and chips – that cause us the most distress. I never expected to
meet, in however disembodied a form, so many people whose bodies are
also bearing the brunt of a similar hunger to mine.
I want to begin on the internet too because of an image that circulates,
from time to time, within this community of illness – virally, as it were – an
‘affirmation card’ mercifully lacking in butterflies, sunsets, dolphins or
daisies; hand-drawn, it begins with a question that seems simple, but which
nagged at me for weeks when I first saw it: Exactly why do we want to be
smaller?
I’ve never been tall, I’ve never been large; and I’ve always been
distressed by the way my illness made me bony, made me tiny, made me
small. I know that this makes me unusual in this illness – that almost all of
the other people I’ve met in treatment can only see their bodies as huge, and
hideously so, even when they’re only able to fit in to childrens’ clothes.
And I don’t want to be any smaller, not at all. But the question stayed with
me, I realised, because I’ve gotten used to being small, and I know now that
there’s a part of me that can’t imagine being otherwise, that maybe even
doesn’t want those changes, however uncomfortable and unattractive they
may be, to reverse themselves. A part of me that’s terrifying, and that’s ugly
too, perhaps because it’s so irrational and seems like a desire to remain
unwell when I want so much, and give so much time and energy and
money, to become well. This smallness, or this awful desire to remain small
is, perhaps, one of the last strongholds of my illness. But smallness, the
miniature, has a profound and unsettling power of its own, and perhaps this
is its appeal. It is, after all, a power that is as complex and contradictory as
that of hunger itself.

From the first glance, miniature objects unsettle our perception: because of
their disparity in scale, because something is not real or right about them,
we’re forced to look again. Like any discrepancy, especially any unexpected
distortion of size, they stand out (like the proverbial, swollen sore thumb),
they ‘shock us into attention’ as the novelist Steven Millhauser writes, in
describing his own fascination with miniature things. They force us to
double take: too-small things arrest the everyday with their incongruity,
they upset our regular worlds, those landscapes and objects that we almost
stop seeing the more comfortable we become within and beside them, the
more often we move through them. Tiny things can bring us back to
wonder, to surprise, to a more completely attentive engagement with the
world.
But to actually be miniature, to be a smaller model of a naturally-existing
thing is to fall under this kind of attention, this arrested gaze. It is to become
something unusual, somehow out of place, something not quite right. To be
miniature is to be the strange source of this shock and wonder in others, of
fascination and unease at once, because as much as our shrunken, tiny
bodies alarm the people who love us – as well as those we simply walk past
– as much as they recoil from our sharpened shoulderblades and protruding
joints, there’s also a morbid kind of fascination that’s always there as well.
I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve told me that they simply
don’t know how I do it. I’d just get too hungry or I just love food too much,
they say.
I’ll never forget that visible flinch, the whipped-around heads, even as I
know now that I do it – flinch, stare, look backwards – too. My own
attention to too-small bodies, though, is tinged with a terrible sadness, and
also a shameful but profound envy: things were simpler then, when I was
underweight and hungry, my body seems to say. I didn’t have to think or
feel at all.
Miniatures, too-small things, are always scale models; they do not exist
except as a representation of something else, or more precisely, as an
exemplar of something bigger and less carefully-crafted, less constructed.
They are not real, that is, not in and of themselves. A friend once referred to
me, at my sickest, as a shadow of my former self, a thing less real because
smaller, and ghosted by the larger object that my miniature self had been
modelled from. (I sometimes think that, in this sense, I’ve become hyper-
real, because the original referent, my healthy, larger body, has been lost for
so long now; even I no longer remember how it looked or felt or moved.)
To be miniature, then, is to occupy space differently, and especially,
pointedly, to have a different occupation of public space. We disturb it with
our discrepancy, even as our smallness means we that we occupy less of it. I
think sometimes that the drive to hunger, the drive towards smallness, is
about precisely this: we feel so uncertain, so anxious about our rightful
space within the world, that we try to take up as little of it as possible. It is a
drive to disappear that can only ever succeed in making us more prominent,
more visible because it makes us as different and offensive on the outside as
we so often feel we are at heart.

But the strangest thing about miniature objects is, I think, the idea of their
craftedness, or careful construction, an unreality or unnaturalness that’s
utterly unsettling because it has to be so detailed and precise. There’s real
skill, exceptional care and time involved in making miniatures.
It was at the end of the nineteenth century, in the early years of the
photograph, the beginning of the age of mechanical reproduction, that
miniatures as objects first became popular. The poet and essayist Susan
Stewart points out that some of the earliest miniatures were books,
specifically Bibles, and that these were first produced almost as elaborate
business cards, as evidence of the bookbinder’s skill. Unlike a full-sized
and functional, mechanically-produced object, a miniature must be
fastidiously and individually made, and the smaller the object is, the more
precision is required in its construction, because any tiny errors or faults in
a miniature object take on a far larger scale. I know this preoccupies so
many of the men and women I have met in hospitals and clinics, who feel
that the smaller their bodies become, the more closely they approach
precision and perfection.
The early nineteenth century was also the era of the first jewellery
lockets, and of eye-portraits, tiny commissioned paintings of a loved one’s
eye worn on a brooch hidden within the folds of the lover’s clothes. These
were miniatures created as tokens of memory or desire, worn close to the
body, the scaled-down likeness of a lover capable of being secretly
contained and carried, kept metaphorically close at all times. By the
Victorian era, barely three decades later, the first dollhouses were becoming
wildly fashionable, with sets of miniature furniture, minute but fully-
functional sash windows, four-poster beds with cushions and curtains,
wardrobes that opened onto tiny lace dresses for the scaled-down human
figures that might occupy the rooms.
Victorian dollhouses, importantly, were usually made to order, as
accurate representations of the true-sized houses that they would finally be
installed in; they were an eerily realistic set stage or portrait of the
possessions, environment and accoutrements (‘Honey, I shrunk the kids!’)
of the people who commissioned them. There’s a strange kind of vanity at
play here, but also an accountability: because they are so small, all of the
objects can be seen at once, ordered and in place; because the parts are
miniature, the whole can be perceived complete. This too is a by-product of
craftedness: it is discernibly and assuredly finite. We perceive miniature
objects, always, in their entirety, no detail is invisible or able to surprise us,
there’s no part of them that’s hidden, or beyond our range or reach. We
know their whole. We hold their mystery, complete.

Perhaps what miniature objects offer us, then, are borders, those very things
that it can be so hard to comprehend for our own selves, and our own lives.
These are borders that are impermeable in a way that people aren’t, or can’t
be, operating within the social world, and in public: almost every critic of
the miniature is quick to point out that Lilliput, Swift’s exemplary miniature
world, is an island – as indeed no man can be. Smallness preserves, then, an
interior, inviolable and precise, a private world that is steady and safe,
however limited and constricted it may also be. Like hunger, it marks out
something that we can control and own. The miniature is never messy – it is
neat, it is trim and it is dear.
It’s just these borders, this ability to perceive things whole, that Gaston
Bachelard refers to when he writes, ‘the better I am at miniaturising the
world, the better I possess it,’ a sentence that stopped me in my tracks when
I first read it. This too is my experience of hunger – because it narrows the
world so minutely and completely, because it causes such an intensity of
focus within the malnourished brain, the world seems to shrink, just as the
body does, and by doing so, it seems to come back under our command. It
becomes small enough, narrow enough, for us to handle; it can’t hurt us any
more. Even our dreams are dreams of food. Of course, this is a false and
contradictory kind of command: the more control we try to exert over our
eating and our food, the more our illness asserts itself and the less able we
are to operate autonomously, to make actual choices, uninformed by anxiety
or terror, uninfluenced by the noise the illness makes inside our heads. We
possess the world, perhaps, but in the process we are dispossessed of our
own selves.
And yet this narrowing of focus, this ‘detail-orientated thinking’, as the
psychological term has it, has been the one by-product of hunger that I have
struggled most with, as I’ve tried to re-find and redefine my self and my life
without it. Because detail has for so long been the stuff and substance of my
poetry, my craft: the accrual of small, odd things, contradictory things, the
things that undercut or illuminate the social world. It has always been detail
that I’ve thought makes the worlds we write specific, poignant and, in
essence, poetic. And it’s hard even to contemplate that my writing, the thing
I feel has kept me sane, may very well have been based on nothing more
than cognitive pathology.
In hospital, this change to our brains was explained to us with handouts:
Being good at focusing on details can be considered a strength and there
are jobs which will particularly require this skill, for example, proofreading
a document. In hospital, I read this and I was relieved. Because I’m a
terrible proof-reader, and was worst when I was at my sickest, I thought at
the time, this ‘detail-focused thinking’ must not be a problem for me.
Because one small detail didn’t fit, that is, I rejected the entire concept –
although I didn’t realise this at the time.
But afterwards, for months, I was sure that if I lost this aspect of my
hunger, I would lose my writing too, and I couldn’t contemplate how adrift
I’d be without both anchors. I already felt like an unmoulded jelly, exposed
to the air and barely holding together. Bachelard again: ‘To have
experienced a miniature sincerely detaches me from the surrounding world,
and helps me resist the dissolution of the surrounding landscape.’
The scale of the surrounding world, even the scale of a single human life,
is nothing short of terrifying. Our worlds, our lives, are far too big to see the
outline of, too big to find a shape for, too big to map or name or know. We
can’t conceive or perceive the world, much less our place within it; we can’t
contain its contradictions and variations, its overwhelming possibilities and
changeability. But we can plan and re-plan our meals and the exact time that
we will eat them. We can measure out portions of rice in teaspoons, divide
apples into sixteen even pieces, we can count every chew before we
swallow. With a dollhouse-sized world, a narrowed-down, miniature world,
all of this changes.
So too, perhaps, with our bodies: if they are small enough, or fraught
enough to see or feel in their entirety, we can be sure that they exist and we
can be certain of their borders – and by extension, we can know the selves
that they carry with certainty. We’re no longer porous, no longer soluble, no
longer undefined and contaminable; we are safe, at last.

Yet maintaining our own borders, our inviolability is also one of the
tragedies of anorexia. People who are impermeable cannot open themselves
to love, can’t bear the vulnerability that is necessary for any real intimacy to
take place. I was thirty years old, and well into my third hospital program,
before I entered into my first relationship (my previous dating record had
been six weeks); even then, I’d stiffen, sometimes, when my boyfriend
wound his arm around me when we walked along the streets near where he
lived, on footpaths lined with flowering cherries and art deco apartment
blocks. One afternoon, early on, he said, ‘I thought at first you didn’t like
me doing this, but it’s just that you’re not used to it, right?’ and I couldn’t
tell him that I wasn’t, that even this simple gesture was one I’d never
received before. I was conscious of the people walking past us, thinking
that they could see, could tell, we were together, whatever that might mean,
and it made me feel exposed and somehow examined. One of his friends,
too, warned him that he’d noticed it was never me who touched him first,
and he thought it meant I wasn’t really interested. It took months for me to
learn to say sweet nothings, rather than just leave them bursting in my
chest; instead, I texted photos of poems that might say them for me – the
first of which was titled ‘What She Could Not Tell Him’. I remember
hesitating, still, because the sentiment felt too revealing, as if even other
peoples’ words might show too much. It feels too risky, sometimes still, to
give up borders, because without them I’m not sure that I won’t just
dissolve.
But really possessing the miniature, I think, means more than just fully
perceiving it, even more than being it, or feeling its borders, however
powerful these experiences may be. We can hold miniatures in our hands.
We can move and manipulate them; unlike their true-sized counterparts, we
can physically, as well as metaphorically, grasp them, just like the
Victorians did with their lockets and love tokens. Millhauser writes about
this power of the miniature as representing ‘the universe in graspable
form…a desire to possess the world more completely, to banish the
unknown and the unseen’; another critic, Melinda Alliker-Rabb, calls it a
‘renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible
dimensions’. A miniature world is at our mercy, we are no longer at the
mercy of the world. ‘We are teased out of the world of terror and death,’
writes Millhauser, ‘and under the enchantment of the miniature we are
invited to become God.’

But being small in itself is not being God; being miniaturised is being
seated at the opposite end of this equation. I am the cause of the
enchantment, rather than falling under its spell. I forget, sometimes, that
I’m not the same size as most of the people around me, that the perception
that I’ve normalised within my self is so irregular. I’m often shocked when
I catch my reflection in a dark window or see a photo of myself within a
crowd and am reminded, suddenly, of my own disparity. Yet even this
perspective has a strange and almost perverse power, this too has an allure.
Even as hunger is a striving for control, for mastery over the world, for
agency, our miniaturised bodies become things that can be grasped and
moved and repositioned, little things that can be held and controlled. I have
friends who always raise me off my feet when they hug me, who cart me
around, piggybacked, when they’re horsing about or less than sober, I have
had lovers (albeit few and often far between) who’ve delighted in lifting me
up and carrying my small body; most of them were also short themselves.
It’s a kind of surrender, a very sensual one at that, and such surrender, such
giving up or in or over can be an incredible relief.
I still want, sometimes, someone or something to take from me the
burden of being myself, this burden that I could perhaps only bear, for so
many years, through hunger. But by being small I can enact this physically.
I can be, quite literally, transported.
I’ve wondered, too, what might have driven my suitors to pursue me,
what could possibly have been attractive to them in the way I looked then.
When I was physically at my sickest, I had no interest in sex – much of this,
of course, is biological: the last thing any starving animal should do is
reproduce, especially if that animal is female; and as the body cuts back on
unnecessary functions in order to keep itself alive, hormone and fluid
production are amongst the first things sacrificed, and the ovaries – just like
the heart and stomach – shrink. I didn’t seek out relationships, because I
had neither the energy nor the bodily imperative to do so, but I still
responded, however inexpertly, when others showed interest in me.
One of these encounters I remember most: it was winter, and I was
wearing two layers of long-sleeved thermal shirts beneath my blouse, two
jumpers, an overcoat, and stockings underneath my jeans. He’d joked that
undressing me was like playing pass-the-parcel but grew gradually more
quiet as the parcel of my body grew smaller and sharper before his eyes;
this was the man who, before we slept, folded a blanket up against the
scythe of my shoulderblade, which had been digging into his chest. I was
untouchable, and never truly naked; my borders were still intact.

But to move away from ‘terror and death’, to be teased out of their world:
isn’t that the kind of consolation we all want? Miniature objects don’t just
resist death because their visible boundaries and finite details make them
knowable and graspable, but because their self-containment makes them
somehow still and out of time: the miniature’s stillness ‘emphasises the
activity that is outside its borders,’ writes Susan Stewart, ‘the miniature is a
world of arrested time.’ And this stillness, this timelessness is two-fold:
miniature objects are functionless objects, they are decorations, displayed,
but not used. And they focus our attention – like hunger – because we have
to narrow in, to concentrate on their small form, their even-smaller details,
in order to see them, and because this concentration, at its most intense,
makes the rest of the world fall away. Time thickens. So too when we are
hungry: not only does time slow when the starving body is anticipating the
next meal, but our illnesses hold us still and almost static within our own
lives. We can’t be touched or hurt, but we also cannot love, take risks, or
change or learn.

So the miniature is a different, perhaps more complete, occupation of time,

as much as it is a different, because more tenuous, occupation of space.
Time becomes thicker, heavier, when we’re faced with the miniature.
Stewart also writes about a University of Tennessee study, where
participants were asked to look at miniature houses at different scales, to
imagine themselves moving within them, and then to indicate, by ringing a
bell, when they thought thirty minutes had passed. The smaller the house
they were concentrating on, attending to, the more slowly the participants
perceived time to have passed; more incredibly, the ratio of this time as they
experienced it, compared to real time, corresponded almost exactly to the
scale of the miniature house.
A hummingbird’s heart beats at up to 1200 beats per minute, they rarely
live for over a year. A mouse, with a heart rate almost half as fast, lives for
twenty-four months, twice as long. An elephant has a lifespan of about
eighty years, a heart rate of twenty-eight beats each minute. It is because of
how much longer, denser time becomes in miniature that it might move us
away from, forestall, somehow, that very terror and death.

This desire to move away from death is another of the perversities of

hunger, another of the strange contradictions that seem to be the mode in
which anorexia always operates. It is a disease of fear, or bodily terror at
times, yet it is the very things we fear that it brings closer: we fear that
we’re invisible, but our disease makes us smaller; we fear that we are
powerless, yet our illness changes our ability to make rational decisions and
moves so many activities and opportunities – eating in restaurants, travel,
maintaining relationships, even holding down a job – out of our reach. We
fear failure, yet our hunger makes it impossible to concentrate for long
enough to achieve; we fear that we’re unlovable, and our disease makes us
selfish, manipulative, flighty and unreasonable, makes us avoid social
occasions or attend them only anxiously and disembodiedly. We fear death,
and yet we let our bodies slowly destroy themselves, our hunger turn us into
skeletons, with loose teeth and failing organs, bodies that are shutting down,
but somehow still walking around.

It’s a strange thing to remember now, but I’ve always loved tiny things. As
a child, I had a collection of miniature bears, none larger than 7.5 cm high –
and I remember that measurement precisely – all of them fully-jointed and
most of them handmade, picked up in various craft shops in which my
mother, a patchwork quilter, would spend what felt like hours (but how
much thicker time is too when we are children). Years later, I bought home
a tiny, china tea-set, even the teapot was smaller than my pinkie finger, and
a perfect, cast-metal Buddha less than three centimetres tall, from an
overseas holiday in Thailand. I’ve collected buttons, thimbles, tiny
seashells, none of these things useful, none of them valuable or important.
This fascination with the miniature has been with me always, I realise now,
and for a long time before I could count my own body as one such treasure.
I don’t want to be a treasure, or a token or a doll, but haven’t yet discovered
how I might live a full-sized life instead.

OceanofPDF.com
IN INCREMENTS
 I’ll never know the point where my physical
illness gave way to something different, something more complex, but more
and more I think now that hunger was always with me, always gnawing
away somewhere in me, and my illness just allowed this hunger to assert
itself in the only way that could possibly have been acceptable to me. I
couldn’t see myself as one of those women – I thought that eating disorders
only happen to women who are vain and selfish, shallow and somehow
stupid; it took me years to realise that the very opposite is true, that these
diseases affect people, men and women both, who think too much and feel
too keenly, who give too much of themselves to other people. I knew I
wasn’t vain, I wasn’t selfish; but I have always felt vaguely, indeterminately
sad, too vulnerable to being hurt, too empathic and too open, too demanding
and determined in the standards that I set for myself and my life. This was
always the case, although my disorder has certainly sharpened these traits.
Sometimes I think that my physical illness, together with my personality,
the length of time it took for the doctor to find a diagnosis while my body
and brain adapted to malnutrition, were all together a perfect storm that
broke, at some point in time that I’ll never quite pinpoint, and left this
devastation in its wake.
I’ll never know, that is, where and when the ground shifted, and yet I can
pin down the moment I first realised that I needed to be well. In the
preceding months, a summer I remember as so brightly lit that my pale skin
almost fluoresced, now that I was finally freed from feeling cold to my
bones and had exposed my limbs at last to the warm air, a friend repeatedly
told me stories about an anorexic girl she’d been to school with, who’d
eaten sushi from a garbage bin and whose heart had given way. I’d
pretended I didn’t know why she was telling me this. Two of my scruffy
scientist friends, who worked at the university near my house, had visited
me in their lunch break on a day when I was working from home and tried
to take me to a medical centre where they’d pre-emptively made an
appointment. I’d refused, insisted everything was fine, had drunk a sugar-
free soft drink even though I had no physical reason to avoid the regular
variety, and delayed my meagre lunch until they left. In the preceding
months, my housemates had asked me to put them into contact with my
parents, insisting as we sat together on the steep wooden stairs of our
terrace. I’d agreed, but I never followed through. I had received a long-
distance phone call from a friend living in China who’d been shocked by
my recent photos on Facebook, and I told him that I was just working too
hard. I said that I was stressed, that I was tired, that I had a lot to do, but
everything otherwise was fine. I kept busy, ceaselessly busy, going out
almost every night to drink with friends and watch on when they ordered
dinner, telling stories and talking constantly as they ate, but never taking my
eyes off their utensils. I hardly slept, and often walked, almost
unconsciously, to the fridge at night, stealing the vegetables from my
housemate’s boxed-up leftovers and drinking litres of tastelessly dilute
cordial straight from the bottle, trying to stave off my hunger with liquid.
In the preceding months I’d been heartbroken, time and again, by all of
this concern that I was sure was misdirected. I felt so sorry for my friends,
that they should be so worried for what I truly felt was no good reason. I
was sad for their distress, that is, but never once felt my own.
On the evening that I first realised that I needed to be well, I was stopped
at a red light on Fairfield Road, it was late and there were no other cars in
sight. I was heading east, back home to the inner west, after visiting my
family for a dinner where I’d been unable to sit still, where I’d steamed
myself some vegetables rather than share their barbecue, where I’d felt I
watched the whole evening as if from the wings of a stage, everything
disconnected, too flattened and foreshortened, to feel real. The evening had
crawled past – hunger stretches time; in this, it is like any kind of waiting. I
was exhausted. I was sobbing in the front seat of my idling car and I knew
that I couldn’t go on, not like this. It still feels strange to me that my tipping
point, the moment it all became unbearable, was so mundane.
But more and more now I think that these things work by a slow
accretion. In the same way that my hunger crept up, inch by inch, on me,
each tiny change so unexceptional and unremarkable that it could go almost
unnoticed until I’d cut all but a handful of ingredients from my diet, so too
did it slowly become intolerable. So is the process of recovering, of change,
so piecemeal and fragmented that it’s sometimes hard to recognise that it is
happening at all.
After this evening, I asked a friend for the phone number of the
psychologist who had helped her with her own anxiety. I perched on the
very edge of the hard brown couch in the appointment and talked about
feeling frantic, but kept zoning out to watch a leathery man in a stretched
grey singlet prune back the flowering vines on the balcony of the next
building. It was a month before I told my family about these appointments
(my mother almost cried with relief), several more before the psychologist
convinced me to attend the eating disorders clinic in the psychiatric ward of
my local hospital. It was more than two years before I recognised my
condition as anorexia.
In this time too, I barely noticed the small changes that were unfolding,
the firmly held beliefs about who I was, how I felt and how I ate, slowly
shaking loose within my mind. Each victory was so tiny, often so partial or
unabsolute, so easily lost against the background of how many more things
needed to shift, that it was impossible to track them or to ever pin them
down.
The horrible irony is that eating disorders only happen to people who like
definition and delineation, who like clarity and knowing where they stand,
so part of the process of moving past the illness is to learn that recovering
can only ever be undefined, slow and without schedule, and riddled with
mistakes and mess and temporary measures. We have to stop trying to
recover perfectly, that is, in order to recover at all.

These are the metaphors that were repeated in the hospital. It’s like learning
to drive a car. It’s like breaking up with an abusive partner. Like any kind of
drug addiction. Like a path you’ve worn into the grass. Paddling a canoe
against the current. Think of visitors to a house. It’s ripping off a band-aid.
Living with a broken leg. It’s background noise. A CD jammed on a track.
A frog in a pot. A cork in a bottle. A secret world. A safety net. A parasite,
a function, a friend.
More frequently I think now that our minds aren’t any different from our
bodies, in the ways that they replace themselves and change: something like
sixty billion of our cells die off each day, and like this our entire physical
selves are replaced every seven years. In between, we never know which
parts are new and fresh, which are decaying, which will be the next to die.
Our minds shift like this too, and it’s hard to write, to map, what happened
and is still happening, to chart the things I did and said and felt when I’m
still not sure what any of it means. Or if I ever will, or should even try to,
find that certainty.
Because this isn’t a narrative of sudden healing, of epiphany or of
discovery, not for me, or for any of the other unwell women and men I met
through hospitals, or friends-of-friends, or advocacy, we’ll all be sorting
through it for a long time yet. I’m not sure that there can be a narrative
about potentiality, provisionality, for what it means to try to change.

One of my friends from hospital, a bubbly and huge-hearted woman a few

years older than me, tells me that she’s treating her recovery as an
experiment: if she decides later on that her bulimia was better than
whatever the other side holds she can always go back, but she’s giving it her
all in the meantime. Another, an acerbic but nervy trainee nurse, says she
chooses which battles to fight on any given day, which days it’s better to
just hold on. One woman, who was in her first year of a media degree when
we met in my second admission, and reminded me then so much of my own
nineteen-year-old self, has regular Fear Food Fridays, where she ate
something that terrified her while watching a horror movie on her couch.
She had bought herself stamped metal cutlery that read ‘Calories don’t
count on this spoon’ and ‘Knife in shining armour’.
I know that at first, at least, I was braver when I was with these women,
that when we ate together in hospital it seemed easier, sometimes, because
we all knew that we all found it difficult and horribly strange. I still watch
undiseased eaters having dinner and wonder at their thoughtlessness, their
ease. Another of these women has a vegetarian boyfriend who eats a steak
whenever she tries something challenging and new.
My doctors never tire of telling me that we’re the unlucky ones. That in
almost every other mental illness, treating the symptoms makes the patient
feel better, even if only in increments. That depression lifts a little, the
anxious find moments of calm. But for us, when we start to eat again, doing
something that distresses us six times a day, each and every day, something
that our every instinct still screams against, all of the smaller hungers that
our one great physical hunger has damped down, for all those years, rear
up. We feel worse, far worse, when we don’t have our hunger to protect us.
I never thought that I would feel as much – sweeping sadness, flashes of
embarrassment that make me nauseous, unbridled fury, even something I
didn’t recognise, at first, as loneliness – and to feel as often as I do now that
I’m without my hunger. Hunger suppresses the emotions – and this is often
part of its appeal – because it is impossible to get riled up about anything
when your body is diverting all the energy it can muster on simply trying to
stay alive.

Shortly after my first hospital admission, I started reading medical books

and cultural histories of hunger. I was trying to understand this deeper, more
complicated side of my illness that I’d been unable, for so long, to
recognise within myself, to know its face and shape as if that alone could
pull me clear. I learned that when ‘hysterical anorexia’, as the condition was
originally named, was first described medically, it was considered a
perversion of the will, and treatment was commensurately harsh. Patients
were forcibly removed from their families – in what was known, rather
wonderfully, as a ‘parentectomy’ – usually to a convent or farm. Force-
feeding was both common and primitive, often resulting in broken teeth and
torn oesophaguses; and many patients were bound to their beds. Even in the
early twentieth century, anorexia was considered a neurotic denial of
adulthood and sexuality, and treatment involved taking frequent vaginal
swabs to assess the ‘vitality’ of its fluids, alongside injections of stimulating
sex hormones, at a time when the patients’ higher cognitive functions were
compromised by malnutrition, and they were surrounded almost exclusively
by male physicians and psychiatrists. In the fifties and sixties, patients were
kept heavily sedated, often for years. In Australia, at the moment, no state
has more than about eight public hospital beds for adult eating disorder
patients; these beds are all in locked psychiatric wards, the waiting lists are
often up to thirty-six weeks long and only available to the critically
underweight and medically imperiled. I had to fight, and fight hard, to get
the treatment that I needed, and I had to learn as I went, by trial and
sometimes damaging error, precisely what that treatment might be. My
physical condition complicates the usual treatments for anorexia: often,
when I’ve tried to eat a food that I’m afraid of as an exercise in exposure,
I’ve been unable to keep it down and become even more fearful as a result.
I physically struggle, too, with the full-sized meals that are a part of any
prescribed meal plan. And yet I know I’m not unlucky, in comparison with
what has gone before.

Modern medicine still doesn’t understand the pathology of anorexia, what

causes any one person to turn their hunger inward while another remains
untouched. Genetics plays a role, and personality; power plays a role, and
so do sexuality and family and a whole range of emotions and emotional
responses. So too can trauma, and striving, belonging, acceptance,
acceptability and self-esteem. All of these smaller, unbearable hungers that
are starved away or diminished, when the body is kept unfed.
But however similar we become as we shrink away from ourselves and
from the world, the specificity of these diseases confounds me still. In the
hospital, I met a springy-haired woman who was studying medicine and
found that she focussed better on the slightly manic energy that comes with
mild starvation. Another, dimpled and defiant, had grown up in foster care,
and learnt that if she stopped eating in a house she didn’t like, she would
have to be moved elsewhere. Her best friend from university, who had
started with a celebrity diet and liked the results a bit too much: this woman
was terrified by the idea of eating a banana, but would happily have a
chocolate bar, whereas another thought dairy foods were all unnecessary
and unnatural. Some of us were horrified by carbohydrates, others by sugar,
others by adding oil to a pan – often depending on which nutritional craze
had been most prominent when we each first became ill. Other fears were
harder to determine in their origin, but equally irrational: red meat but not
chicken, muffins but not cakes, rice except in sushi. One woman, who’d
told her workplace she was in Fiji and not in hospital, considered
pineapples too high in energy to eat. I’ve been terrified, by turns, of apples,
eggplant, tofu, melted cheese. There’s a specificity to these symptoms, to
these fears, against which all of the theorising and rationalising, all of the
thinking and writing that I do falls down entirely.
Yet in the early weeks of my first hospital admission – which took place
almost three years after that evening of sobbing over my steering wheel – I
realised that the first thing that we were being given was a language. In
some ways it is a jargon, that kind of language that speaks only to the
initiated, that carries with it its own definition of inclusion: there are terms
and phrases like ‘safe food,’ ‘self-compassion’, ‘replacing’; even ‘recovery’
that only a patient, former or otherwise, will use. We learnt to speak about
‘symptoms’ and ‘behaviours’, rather than about the things we’d done and
the mistakes we’d made. About ‘urges’ and ‘distress’ as if they were
distanced and defined things, specific and somehow separable from our
interior lives. We were told to speak about ‘energy density’; about ‘normal’
rather than full-cream milk, ‘fun food’ rather than junk. I was expected to
learn not to undercut the things I said by making jokes at the end.
We learnt a language, that is, that had our selves removed from it, a
language for all of the things we’d spent years keeping unspoken and
hidden away. It gave us a direct way of addressing our disease, and a
distanced stance away from it; a way to stand outside of it, and stare at it,
and make it other. A language to cut ourselves clear. But I still don’t know
how to write about what it means to get better. Even with a language,
provisional as it is, I’m not sure that there can ever be a form that might
contain so slippery and fragmentary a process.

My first admission, in a day program, was not physically easy. I struggled

terribly – as did the doctors – with the physical symptoms of my disease: I
threw up most of the prescribed meals directly onto the table (the
bathrooms were, of course, locked). The woman who sat opposite me at
meal times took to leaping backwards in her seat whenever I moved
suddenly. I skipped breakfasts at home because I knew how much I’d have
to eat at the hospital throughout the day. I was so unused to eating snacks
that I thought two strawberries would be sufficient to count as morning tea.
I had horrible headaches, my stomach distended, my breasts and legs ached,
and I’ve never felt so tired in my life. I lost weight, even though the whole
program was geared towards what we were told to call ‘weight restoration’
rather than ‘weight gain’.
In the first weeks, I tried to chat at the meal table, telling stories with
accompanying wild hand gestures because the silence was unsettling and
painfully artificial. I introduced myself over-brightly on the first morning,
even though no one there was able to respond in kind. I was bewildered;
and I kept trying to normalise the very strange circumstances we’d found
ourselves in, to thicken my skin where it threatened to break. I lost weight
again – two hundred grams, I later found out – and was forced to leave the
program for a week.
I was terrified. I was being questioned by the doctors about the way I
spoke, the way I laughed, the clothes I wore, rather than the only thing that
I’d seen as being problematic, the way I ate. The stories that I’d told myself
about who I was, what my condition meant, how I really thought and felt,
were being pulled apart or dismissed outright; I wanted so much to get
better but was so terribly afraid, still unable to let go of the foundation that
my hunger gave me. I lost my own belief in the face I’d always shown the
world; I still think, sometimes, that I haven’t yet got it back.

In the week that I was forced out of the program, I ate cake every day,
determined to gain weight by any means. A chocolate lemon meringue that
my mother had made from her new cookbook, a pear and Callebaut
chocolate tart from Black Star Pastry, a brandied prune and vanilla torte
from Bourke St Bakery, a brownie from the café near my house in which I
did most of my writing. A baked ricotta cheesecake from Papa’s Patisserie
in Haberfield, the sticky date pudding I’m famous for amongst my friends. I
would stop and ask to take the rest away as soon as I felt my stomach
muscles flensing. I cried a lot. ‘You’re living my dream,’ the dietician said.
I smiled, though I wanted to slap her, and hard.
I was put on supplements, small bottles of almost viscous milk with a
chalky aftertaste barely disguised by their purported flavours. Each bottle
contained the equivalent energy of a small meal, and I was able to keep
them down; I was drinking, most days, four of these each day, on top of the
regimented three meals, three snacks, three hours apart, that I’m still
following, even now. And my body did recover, but I left the hospital, that
first time, feeling like my mind had been left far behind.
On the day I was discharged, I spent the morning group session sobbing
on the couch, because I so desperately wanted to stay, I was so uncertain of
myself and my ability to hold steady on my own. I gathered, that night, a
group of friends at a Newtown bar, knowing they’d all insist on buying me
celebration drinks. I wore a new dress that I’d bought because its plunging
neckline showed off the area where most of my new weight had settled.
Nobody wanted to order dinner, because the place I’d chosen wasn’t cheap,
and I didn’t want to do it on my own, so I sat there, and chewed on the
limes in my drink, and I swore, over and over, that I’d never go back to
hospital again.
I started in a new job. A new housemate moved in. I bought new clothes,
and realised that the things I instinctively picked off the shelves – full skirts,
shift dresses, pleated embellishments – were things that had suited my
underweight frame, but looked strange and lumpish on me now. I went to
yoga classes, and couldn’t bend and reach in the way I was used to. I kept
trying to eat new things but I kept making small concessions too, and within
months, I was living off steamed vegetables again. But this time I knew the
face of my disease, this time I knew that what I was doing was madness,
was destruction, was obscene, this time I was pushing, and pushing hard,
towards annihilation. I never thought that I would feel so much and so often
without my hunger, and I didn’t know how else to cope.

By the time I went back to the hospital for a second admission, almost all of
the other women who had been contained there with me had already been
back, and one had been admitted as an in-patient to an expensive private
clinic, often the only option for people whom the underfunded public
system can’t accept or accommodate. I’d completed an online follow-up
survey of psychometric measures and been startled by my poor results, then
gone straight to a bar with some friends, sucking back cocktails and
swearing that I’d never go back, that I couldn’t. But by the time I went back
to the hospital I had spent six weeks trying to prove myself to the program
directors, keeping meticulous food and exercise diaries, having blood tests
and being weighed weekly. I’d stopped working and I’d spent another
birthday unable to eat a slice of my own cake.
I thought I’d be unshockable in my second admission, because I knew
what was going to be demanded of me and I knew I wouldn’t like it, but at
least I’d be prepared. I felt a deep sadness every time I finished a meal,
rather than a blinding panic when I sat down at the table. I swallowed my
own vomit under threat of being forced to leave the program and sat for
hours with the taste in the back of my throat. I learnt that if I spoke harshly,
self-punitively about my slip-ups and ‘behaviours’, the psychologists
wouldn’t reprimand me and I could all but get away with skipping meals, or
parts of meals, or choosing only options that didn’t cause me fear. I ran
baths every evening and watched my body breathing, softening under the
warm water, and I cried in great shuddering sighs while my housemates
watched TV in the next room.
In my second admission to the hospital, we went on an outing to a
chocolate café that I’d visited several times, over the years, with the same
group of friends, stirring saccharine into my coffee while they’d eaten
doughnuts dipped in chocolate sauce or brownies that slowly puddled up
their ice-cream. I stared down at my cake and couldn’t stop thinking about
everything that may always have been possible, when I’d been so deeply
convinced otherwise, everything I’d been too scared to do. Everything I’d
lost over the decade of my disease.
I’ve been admitted elsewhere since then, worked individually with
psychologists and dietitians of my own, sometimes having appointments on
four days in the week, still with no end in sight. I never can know how long
I’ll need this kind of support, which things will shift or stick or change, and
when; only that the important changes are always things I do not recognise
when they occur.

More and more I can’t believe that I thought I ever would be able to
understand exactly what it was that I had been through, ever be able to find
a way to pin the experience down when what I think about it changes every
time I hold it up to scrutiny. Because the brain physically changes, too, with
hunger; like the body, it narrows and sharpens and grows harder, shuts
down all the areas that aren’t essential for survival. So too as the body
recovers does it reshape itself: the brain is physically repatterned as we
change the ways we act and eat.
I’ve been obsessed, lately, with reading about the brain, and the ways in
which it hungers. In the first hospital, one of the psychologists was
researching ways of mapping and re-mediating the starving brain, using
functional MRI scans to chart which areas become active when eating-
disordered patients are shown images of food, or asked to read out lists of
words, when every now and then these words are interspersed with
something non-benign: a word like ice-cream, restaurant, sugar, kilojoule,
oil. In America, psychologists have used the same techniques to try to
understand how a hungry brain reacts to the act of eating itself, and have
found that while a healthy brain responds to food with activity along a
circuit that registers pleasure, then safety and contentment – it tastes good,
it is good, I am good – an anorectic brain doesn’t register pleasure when
eating at all, so the entire circuit is confused. The brain cannot decide if the
food is good or dangerous, if the body is safe or at some uncertain kind of
risk. There’s no release of the reward chemicals, dopamine and serotonin,
no cognitive reward for eating at all.
Other researchers have found that anorectic brains have stronger
mechanisms for impulse control and for working memory, but poorly-
functioning circuits for body awareness, for the recognition of physical pain
– including pangs of hunger. I recognise all of this. I can remember making
my way, in the first weeks of my second admission, to a lazily-late weekend
breakfast with friends, with a strange feeling in my stomach, not quite
nauseous, not quite anxious, but somehow close to both, and that it took me
several minutes to realise I was hungry. I still lose interest in my meals long
before I’ve eaten an appropriate amount, they still don’t give me pleasure,
by and large. On the other hand, my working memory for food is acute: I
can still account for every single thing I’ve eaten over the last few days, the
number of chips I may have grabbed at a party, the pieces of cheese I’ve
picked from a platter.
But all of this understanding falls down in the face of the specifics of my
disease: it cannot help me when I’m sitting at a restaurant table surrounded
by the serving plates of a shared banquet, it cannot help me when I’m
desperately trying to breathe through the spasming of my oesophageal
sphincter, when I’m reading a café menu and can’t trust my own instincts or
lack of desire.
I can’t write easily about recovering because I vacillate, each day,
between knowing that it’s possible, and thinking that I’m not up to the task,
or that my physical condition will always hold me back. I’ve lived for so
long with my hunger, through my hunger, that my imagination fails
sometimes, when I try to think of how things might be different.

When I first started writing this essay, almost six months after my second
admission, I found myself driving back home after another extended dinner
with my family – which now includes an additional two nieces, and my
sister’s partner – along the same roads, almost empty and lined with sleepy
fibro houses, spilling coloured light from their TVs onto their front lawns.
I’d pulled the roast chicken meat off the bones and shredded it, flipped it
underneath the leafy vegetables I’d left on my plate; and I had been relieved
when my sister-in-law brought along six ramekins of dessert, even though
we were seven adults there. I found myself sobbing again at the traffic
lights, gulping in air, and I thought, again, that I couldn’t go on like this,
even as I knew that I had no choice. This happens often, these moments of
exhaustion and despair, and to all of the other patients I have spoken to.
There’s no room in any narrative of recovery I’ve ever seen for this terrible
sadness, this unreasonable fear, and these unmeasurable movements,
backwards and forwards and sideways, towards, away from and around
whatever a return to health might mean.

One of the most profound changes in an anorectic brain is a rigidity in

thinking, an inability to adapt cognitively to sudden changes, to let go of
small details that don’t matter; and it’s certainly evident in the way that we
eat, or think about eating. At my sickest I used to sit at the same place at my
dining table for every meal, at the same times every day, using the same
single set of cutlery, to know by rote the quantities before me, ten beans,
three slices of tomato. I’d plan my meals hours in advance, prepare them
carefully and slowly, and I still miss this focus sometimes. I miss its
simplicity, how the physical world becomes heavier, almost, and everything
else falls away; how the immediacy of that physical hunger, the continual
tiny distractions it enforces on the body and the brain, subsumes and
consumes everything greater: sadness, disappointment, uncertainty, fear.
Now I think that it’s the little things, the details, that will bring me
through and cut me clear. The way I haven’t felt the burn of chilblains on
my toes this winter. The way the saltiness of butter can bite through the
thick, sharp sweetness of a piece of good fruit toast. The ability to read a
book over one full day and not be made to lose focus by my anxious body.
To be able to feel time just slip away, rather than congeal into long minutes
of waiting for the next meal. The single days, the single meals, the tiny
victories that are all the increments of change.
In recent months, I’ve met, for the first time, three women who are able to
talk about their hunger in the past tense. I’ve been stunned, each time, by
how normal, how unmarked they each seemed. They are all vivacious and
delightfully quirky women, a writer, a designer and a lawyer, respectively.
One has a healthy adolescent daughter of her own; she ordered toast when
we met in a café, so that I wouldn’t have to eat my morning tea alone, but
this was the only hint I had, a hint only visible to the initiated, that she had
ever been unwell. One of my friends from hospital refers to these people,
fully recovered, as ‘unicorns’, because they seem like mythical beasts, so
often talked about, even if few – if any – of us have ever seen them.
Directly or indirectly, I’ve asked each of them how they were able to pull
themselves clear. None of them knew; years later, the processes are
unfathomable even to them. They still can’t name exactly what it was that
changed. Perhaps it is this that might give me hope. That something might
be happening, in increments, that is outside my knowledge, outside
narrative or explanation, even outside any language I might use to try and
pin it down.

OceanofPDF.com
IN BOOKS I
 The year that I first became ill, when my physical
condition first developed, was the first year that I studied Australian
Literature. I was in my second year of university, and was actually studying
a lot of literature, as a kind of salve to the media subjects that I’d enrolled
in, thinking at the time that I might like to be a journalist. (I now think of
this as a bullet dodged.) One of my literature subjects was a course on
nineteenth-century German prose, riddled with novels about hysterical
women, sanatoria and destructive unconsciousnesses. Yet it wasn’t here but
in my Australian Literature lectures that I learnt about the shock of
recognition; the German lecturers were more concerned with accusative
declension and pluperfect tense.
The year that I first became ill, when I started vomiting without volition,
no one could figure out what was happening to my body. I had
gastroscopies, barium swallows, I kept food diaries. I threw up a pH
monitor that had been inserted into my stomach through my nose with my
first post-procedural meal and then spent several hours in Emergency,
waiting for a nurse to remove it, coiled up in the back of my mouth. I lost
count of the number of times doctors asked if I might be pregnant, or how I
felt about my body. A specialist asked my mother, while I was present in
the room, if she knew ‘why I was doing this’. But the ground hadn’t shifted
then, at least as far as I can tell.
In the year that I first became ill I remember climbing the concrete stairs
at Mortdale station and concentrating on each protesting muscle, feeling as
though my legs were moving by telekinesis alone; and the almost physical
longing I felt on the way through Redfern when I saw a sign on the gate of a
sharehouse: If you lived here, you’d be home by now, and then in smaller
letters Housemate wanted.
That year I read, for the first time, Christina Stead’s For Love Alone. I was
nineteen, and it was a set text. I remember that I disliked the male
protagonist Jonathan Crowe for his selfobsession and coldness, a coldness
that I thought extended to the book as a whole. I found the novel old-
fashioned and too rigidly structured, the dialogue too ornate and stagey to
feel poignant, to feel real. But even then, there was one section that stopped
me dead, and that remained for years as my overriding memory of the book.
Teresa, the intelligent and passionate heroine – she who suffers for love
alone – is working in a factory in Redfern and relentlessly saving all of her
money in order to buy a passage to London. Rather than pay for trams
between the ferry terminal and the factory, Teresa walks. From Circular
Quay to Redfern, and back, every day. She saves money; she goes hungry
rather than pay for lunch, and she walks, both ways, each day. Stead’s
description of Teresa’s physical exhaustion, of the ravages of hunger on her
body, cut me to my ever-more prominent bones.
Early on, when Teresa begins to feel ‘the resistance of the body’ that
she’s pushing to its limits, just as I was mine, she divides her route into
defined stretches. From the ferry to the Law School to the courts to a
primary school to Hyde Park, to Tooth’s Brewery, Mark Foy’s, a barber, a
park, a station, a street in Surry Hills, a war museum, another park, a
chapel, a bridge. This is something I too had been doing, on those late and
suddenly biting-cold autumn afternoons, when the walk from the lecture
hall in the university’s Woolley Building to the steep concrete steps at
Redfern station, where an upswept draught was always and inexplicably
howling, seemed unimaginably long, the idea of it alone exhausting. I found
I could will myself through small stages, landmark to landmark, until I
reached the dirty peach tiles of the station and sat down, propped against a
pillar.

So too did the progression of Teresa’s disintegration resonate with me.

Teresa spends more than three years walking, being spare with her energy
and money, hungering for the start of her new life. These three years are all
but elided in the book, as if no real living, no real memory-making occurs
within in them. All there is, is Teresa’s walking, Teresa’s hunger:

When she had less than a year to go, she became very weak…She became indifferent to everyone…
She was beginning to notice the noise in the streets, which increased her fatigue; the smell of brewing
was getting stronger and sickened her. She avoided food shops and lemonade stands. She had found
the kind of step that cost her the least fatigue, a firm lope, though it might not have looked as easy as
a drag and slouch…and even when she was half-fainting, she never forgot to walk with this peculiar,
life-saving step which cost the least energy…She dreamed; she saw fewer people on the crowded
streets but she bumped into no one…She recognised no faces and never in all these years, though she
had been bred and brought up in the city, saw a person she knew on the street. She recognised noises
and smells, however, things that guided her when her eyes became milky or dark as they did
occasionally…She developed the acuity of a savage, in sound and in smell.

These things I remember from that period: constantly arguing with my

sister in our shared car about the volume of her music, which made my
brain feel foggy but which she insisted she could barely hear. Introducing
myself to people who I’d already met, often several times, at picnics or
parties, but was unable to recognise because I’d been almost half-conscious,
ghosted by hunger when we’d conversed; on the other hand, even now,
being able to recall in detail exactly which foods were served at particular
gatherings: the three different cheeses and cherry tomatoes at last year’s
Christmas picnic, the chicken wings, potato bake and four varieties of salad
at my niece’s christening, the veal and pumpkin stir-fry my mother made on
my twenty-first birthday. How awful I found the smell of bacon, how I’d
phase in and out of conversations held around me, unable to concentrate on
anything more than the bare bones of a story. I feel, sometimes, that my
higher functioning has been milky and dark for years; that hunger has made
me savage, as it savaged me, instead.
Teresa begins to look compulsively in shop windows selling jams, cakes,
juices, fruits. This I did too. I shopped every day, I stole food. I watched
other people eat almost mesmerically. I would hang around in the kitchen
whenever my housemates cooked. Teresa’s hunger, Stead writes, constantly
‘blow[s] through her like a draught.’ Mine did too.

In the year that I first became ill, I recognised the physicality of Teresa’s
hunger, but only this aspect of her story, and I carried it with me for years,
although the rest of For Love Alone didn’t stir me – I was nineteen, and
probably too callow, too cold and self-obsessed to understand it fully. But in
recent years, I started hearing so many writers talk again about Christina
Stead. Several of her books, and her biography, were reissued with new
introductions by writers as unlikely as Jonathan Franzen, or as important to
me as Drusilla Modjeska. Stead died in the year that I was born. I
discovered that we went to the same high school.
I re-read For Love Alone a few years ago, just weeks after I’d started
negotiating with the hospital to permit me a second admission, and days
after the National Young Writers’ Festival, a four-day weekend during
which I’d eaten just two meals, tearing around Newcastle full of coffee,
vodka and sugar-free gum. I was still ill, very much so, but at least I knew
by then the shape and face of my disease. And this time, as I read the novel,
I was stunned.

Teresa, I realised this time, has all of the character traits, from the very
beginning of the book, that are said to make a person vulnerable to
disordered eating. She is passionate, but stymied by her domineering
family; intelligent, but always striving for something more: for honour, for
meaning, for love. She is austere because she holds herself accountable, she
demands standards and sacrifices of herself, she thinks and feels too deeply,
and far too much. She sees herself as separate somehow from, and
frustrated by, the life and the society that she must move through: ‘She
smelled, heard, saw, guessed faster, longer more than others, it seemed to
her. She listened…with a galling politeness, because what she had to say
was not to tell them.’
Teresa’s nineteen-year-old angst at the opening of the book (‘You offend
my honour! I would kill anyone who offends my honour…Honour is more
sacred than life,’ she exclaims in the earliest scene) I first read as out-
moded and overblown; almost a decade later, I recognised this sense of
grasping, this need for something more, as the pulsing bass-line to so much
of my life, even if the language has been different. And it’s so simple for
eating, the most basic, daily ritual, to become entangled in that striving, that
separation. Early in the novel, Teresa refuses wine at her cousin’s wedding,
and her denial immediately sets her apart. Her denial makes her powerful,
and it makes her strangely sensual: ‘Teresa looked at them proudly; she felt
immortal. The world was like a giant egg of golden glass, she could crush
it. She floated; she looked at them, gleaming.’
Teresa’s hunger, and her striving are always this sensual, and always
linked to love – this is hunger as a yearning, as desire made physically
manifest. ‘Shall I die hungry?’ she asks, thinking about the passion that the
cold and distant Jonathan cannot show her. But more than this yearning,
more than these horribly familiar character traits, what I recognised in my
second reading of the book was how Teresa’s walking, to and from work,
shifts, in those perilously small increments, from something primarily
practical – a frugality with money – to something mostly about
achievement, striving, a frugality of the body. More and more, Teresa’s
walking becomes a way to prove that she is strong, that she is worthy of the
love she craves, that she is earning her right to make choices, her right to
exist, step by step, even as she physically shrinks away. It is as if she walks
her way to England, and this is proof of her selflessness, because it is, at its
core, a kind of self-annihilation. Very quickly, she stops walking for love
alone, for the burning hope that she might be loved. ‘She was not now
walking only to save money.’ Stead writes. ‘She was outstripping illness
and failure.’
That’s what hunger does for people like Teresa, and for people like me. It
outstrips failure, or at the very least, it makes failure something that is
contingent, beyond our control: if we fail when we are hungry, we only fail
because we are ill, not because of something that is lacking in ourselves. It’s
a strange kind of power hunger gives us – beyond that physical drivenness,
hunger allows us to hold our potential as potential. Hunger keeps our
potential untested – and limitless – because we can never access it entirely.
But more importantly, in another of those strange inversions that eating
disorders offer, Teresa’s hunger is a kind of sacrifice of the physical to bring
her closer to a metaphysical ideal. Hunger is a measurable achievement
when achievement is usually something far more abstract and ill-defined;
hunger is a constant where Teresa can only be uncertain, of her purpose, her
place, of Jonathan’s love. Hunger is a constant reminder of what she wants,
or what she’s waiting for and working towards. It is grounding, it is stable,
and it can be held onto, relied upon, like nothing else that Teresa has ever
known.

It’s important, too, that Teresa is not the only character in For Love Alone to
equate – or at least align – hunger with love. Soon after Teresa’s arrival in
London, she and Jonathan go the theatre together, and return to his bed-sit.
After chastising Teresa for ‘doing nothing with herself’ in the years she had
been saving, Jonathan begins to talk about his university life and work:
Someone…says the relation between the sexes is based on food. Savages only have their women
once or twice a year. Their food is poor. All that about love-life of the savages is balderdash for
mammy-pappy consumption in the suburbs. Love is an illusion, love is food. Savages don’t love. It’s
due to an overplus of calories, we eat more than we need…Some of the superfluidity goes to the
brains, the nerves, and we get love, sighs, groans. Primitive love – raw fish, Cockney love – fish and
chips, middle-class love – cottage pudding, the grand passion – roast duckling and port wine.

For Jonathan, love is a kind of hunger, its satiation something he

imagines only in terms of food. For so many of the years I was unwell, I
was too savage to love, and kept all of my appetites unsatiated.
Similarly, Teresa’s family consider her sick body as both caused by, and
the cause of, the fact that she ‘hasn’t got a man’. In the final year of her
walking, she withdraws further from her family, eating most of her meals in
seclusion (a classic eating disorder symptom), or else watching on silently
as they argue over the meal table:

‘Terry’s going mad,’ said the brother…The way she’s going on, she must be
going mad.’
‘Women go mad if they don’t get married,’ said the father. ‘It isn’t their
fault. If Terry would get herself up a bit, make herself more attractive, she’d
probably get a nibble, but she can’t expect men to go after a bag of bones.
Now Terry was quite beefy when she was sixteen, she was quite an eyeful.

‘The brother’, as he is called most often, takes this even further:

Yes, it’s your fault because you’re so ugly, mangy, thin as a skeleton…It’s your fault. Look at your
hair and the hollows in your cheeks, you can almost see your teeth through your cheeks. I’ve seen
you bathing, you can almost count every rib you’ve got, your arms are like sticks, your legs are like
broomsticks, it’s your own fault no man will have you.

Teresa’s family sees her thinness not as a misplaced act of striving, but as
something hysterical, her shrivelled body as directly linked with her
stymied sexuality. They are, perhaps, partially correct – but only in that
Teresa’s hunger is a wanting, a long desire. Although the body does become
the most obvious expression of these illnesses, it is also, in a way, the least
important. Hunger is, I think, always an attempt to transcend the body, to
become something other, something more.
Metaphors of eating are prevalent throughout For Love Alone. A
description of Teresa’s adolescent love of reading (which is, incidentally,
held partly to blame for her high ideals) refers to her as having ‘eaten into
her few years’; an early family reprimand is ‘Eat your soup and don’t be a
fool.’ One of Teresa’s most vivid childhood memories is of barges in the
harbour, glimpsed on her way to school, dumping excess fruit into the
water, to ‘fall among the fishes,’ a waste that’s particularly resonant given
what lies ahead for her body.
On Jonathan’s part, his descriptions of and railings against his poverty
are constantly figured around food – he tells Teresa early on that he always
eats at home because it’s all he can afford, he conflates his lack of property,
and subsequent need to work, with a need to eat: ‘If I had property, I
wouldn’t have to use my brains…I’d just enjoy. But I can’t eat and so I
think.’ (This sentence also startled me when I re-read the book: one of the
hardest things for me to deal with, as I’ve moved away from my hunger, is
how I still find it so difficult to think, to write, to work, after I eat; how my
thinking feels so much sharper, more vivid, when I’m hungry. I know I’ve
said this to my doctors: I can’t eat or I won’t be able to think.) It is
Jonathan, after all, who introduces Teresa to the idea of frugality, before he
leaves for London, concerned as he is with always showing the world the
bootstraps by which he has pulled himself up.
Most important of all, however, is Stead’s presentation of eating as an
erosion, a wearing away, not only of the body, but also of will, hope, and
finally, recuperatively, of despair. When, in England, Teresa and Jonathan
become lost on a weekend hike (mostly due to Jonathan’s self-
righteousness) and are forced to spend an evening sleeping through a storm
in an abandoned mill, Teresa finally sees him for the callous person that he
is. She ‘release[s] him from her will’ and ‘the harness of years drop[s] off,
eaten through.’ It’s a remarkable choice of words, ‘eaten through’, and one
that seems, suddenly and subtley, to close the cycle of hunger and
destruction that has been plaguing Teresa for so many years.
In fact, Teresa has been physically recovering since her arrival in
London, again in those perilously small increments, helped along by her
new freedoms and independence, the kindnesses and attentions of
colleagues, a new lover, a release from poverty and its attendant need for
parsimoniousness. These are all slow and slight changes in and of
themselves, yet they somehow accrue to give her the clarity to be able to
cast Jonathan off (and reading this, the second time, gave me a thrill of
hope). On its own, hunger does not lend itself towards epiphanies, even
though it promises to do so. The metaphysical is impossible without the
physical, though hunger desperately tries to convince us otherwise.

What I admire most about Stead’s portrayal of Teresa is how her illness is
never made unambiguous, indeed, it is never named. In all of her years of
walking, Teresa does not recognise that anything has shifted – although she
knows that her body has been devastated, she never thinks that she is doing
anything other that what she has to do to get through. Teresa’s hunger is
deceptive, and her denial is complete – and this is not despite, but all the
more so because she is so fierce and wilful a woman. It was deceptive for
me too: I was managing the physical cause of my vomiting by cutting out
the foods that triggered it, preventing it from happening by barely eating at
all. I couldn’t see, for years, that there was anything wrong with this, that it
was any different from someone allergic to nuts avoiding eating pecan pie.
More than this, because of the way I’d thought about my hunger, my
denial of my denial, the way the shifts were always so small that I didn’t see
them happening, I never recognised that there might be a way to write about
falling under its spell, without pinning some clear progression or false
awareness to the process. But Stead manages this, for Teresa, by keeping
her largely unaware of the process – although the trade off for this lack of
acknowledgment may well be that Teresa’s hunger, or more precisely, her
anorexia, is easy to miss in any reading of the book. By my second reading
of For Love Alone, I was simply more attuned to it.
For people like Teresa it takes so long to realise that hunger is no longer
an act of will, even though it is, perhaps, that willing for something else.
Teresa’s willing is a want to live for love, and by love alone; it is a willing
to live by word and thought and not by bread and body.

OceanofPDF.com
IN BOOKS II
 There are books that I’ve had with me in hospital
waiting rooms that I can never re-read without re-reading, too, the traces
that they carry of the spaces that I took them into. I once borrowed a book
that a friend had brought back from the six months she’d spent living in a
commune near the Margaret River in Western Australia – there were crusts
of red dirt that fell, at times, from the gutters of its pages. I think of my
waiting-room books like this. Crusts of hunger, the crusted-over time spent
sitting, waiting, trying not to think or look too much. I read poetry in my
first frightened visits to the outpatient clinic, after the doctor I’d started
seeing, for what I still thought was simple anxiety, managed to convince me
that the specialists there could help me restore my bony body, and to
convince me, more remarkably, that checking in there was my own idea. I
read Dorothy Porter’s last collection, The Bee Hut, shot through with poems
about hospitals and death, Emily Ballou’s Darwin Poems, about bodies,
disfigurements and death, as I sat picking at the skin around my fingernails
and avoiding the eyes of the other patients. These were poems of longing
and a strange, anticipatory loss, and they seemed to fit me in a way that so
few of my clothes, at that time, did. Whenever anyone walked in to the
waiting room, those of us already sitting would run our calculating gazes
along their body, not even trying to disguise where we were looking. I’m
not as sick as her, I remember thinking, so I’m okay.

In that same waiting room, three years later, when I began the process of
trying to secure a second day patient admission, of trying to convince the
program directors that I was ready and able to change, that I could follow
their rules to the letter, that my physical condition was stable enough not to
interfere with their procedures, I was carrying my brokenbacked copy of
Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. I had reopened the book for the memory of
Rose, the only daughter in the flailing Pickles family, who grows sick and
hard and thin shortly after she turns sixteen. The receptionist laughed at the
post-its I’d left waggling out at all angles through the book as I took my
shoes off, waiting to be weighed. Happy 16th, hope you enjoy it, love from
Mum is written on the flyleaf. At sixteen, I had been well, unlike so many
of the women and men I’d met in these overheated, pale green corridors. At
sixteen, I didn’t know what lay ahead.
I’d already re-read Cloudstreet, I read it for the second time in that year
when I first became ill; like For Love Alone it had been set as an Australian
Literature course text. When I last read about Rose Pickles, who had started
vomiting after meals at age sixteen I thought she didn’t mean to do it either,
that she too was at the mercy of a body doing things that she couldn’t
understand. Winton phrases it like this: ‘Rose didn’t mind the sight of food
these days…But whenever she ate more than a few mouthfuls she vomited
it straight back up again, just like she knew she would.’
That line, ‘just like she knew she would’ deceived me, for years, because
I too knew that I would throw up after I ate certain foods – I still do. I didn’t
recognise Rose’s selfdelusion because it was too similar to my actual
experience.

I’ve since found out, reading medical histories and practitioner books, that
in the years when anorexia was first medicalised (first as a form of
consumption, then as hysteria), most patients reported initially ‘going off’
their food because eating caused them indigestion or stomach pain. I’ve
since learnt that the stomach contains more nerves than the spinal cord, that
it can feel and agitate with all the emotions that we usually ascribe to the
heart, that it’s the first part of the body affected by emotional distress, or
stress, or trauma. Perhaps it’s in the stomach that we fall in love, that we
yearn, that we become heartsore and heartbroken, sick at heart. And yet I
know my physical illness is not a metaphor, that the misfiring nerves and
muscles of my stomach mean as little metaphysically as a broken bone or
virus. It’s just so tempting, at times, to try to make it all make sense, to give
a shape to my disease, proscribe (even prescribe) a meaning.
When Rose becomes ill, her hunger is a weapon, because it frightens those
around her, as I was always aware that mine did, with a strange and spiteful
satisfaction that I’ve never really understood. Rose’s anger is mostly
directed at her mother, an ageing, alcoholic small-town beauty, too
narcissistic and too disappointed to find space in her heart for her young
daughter. But it’s her father’s heart that Rose’s hunger breaks: a gentle,
generally taciturn man, all Sam Pickles knows to do is ‘joke around it’.
When I re-read Cloudstreet in those waiting rooms it was this that hit me
hardest, Sam’s tableside interaction with his thin and distant daughter, a
conversation that I barely remembered from my previous reading:

Jesus, Rose, you look like a corpse these days. It’s a crime you know, he
says quietly, a bloody crime.
I get fat.
You haven’t been fat since you were hanging off a tit… You have to start
eatin again. It’s not a joke anymore, love.
I can’t, Dad.
Christ, you must be starving hungry!
I am. But I can’t any more. I just toss it up again.
Bullshit, you’ve just talked yourself off yer tucker. Siddown an eat some
with me…You’ll bloody die if you don’t eat.
Dad, I can’t…
Give yourself some.
Dad.
Put some on your plate. Go on…Eat, Rose…
She spears a snag and bites it in half, chews recklessly and feels it slip
down greasy and fine tastin.
All of it.
She can’t see him for the waterblur now, but she eats and lets her cheeks
run…she’s up and running for the door with it all ramming upwards in her
before she can even think about it…She just wants to disappear.

I’ll always remember the unconscious hiss of air through my father’s

teeth, the sad and frightened look he gave me as I walked outside in the
sleeveless cocktail dress I wore at my brother’s wedding, the armholes
gaping under my scraggly shoulders, the veins raised and ridge-like down
my arms, the professionally made-up eyes huge in my head. That same
sound he’d made weeks earlier, at a family barbecue, after he’d told me
about the varieties of meat he was going to cook. I wasn’t angry about this,
just sad: he didn’t know how to speak to me at all when I was at my sickest,
when I tried to make desperate, deluded jokes about my size. How terrible
and inconceivable these things must be for fathers, whose bodies have
never been political in the same way as their daughters’, who can’t
understand why we can’t just eat and save our lives.
But even as I remember the number of times I’ve cried at dining tables, I
remember that overwhelming desire to simply disappear.
My mother too used to ask me if I thought it was her fault, if there was
anything that she could have done differently; I can’t imagine how often she
must have wanted to intervene. But my hunger is, has always been,
something that I can own, something that is mine alone, and it’s just this
that makes it so hard to let go of. Rose has nothing she can call her own
within the over-crowded, noisy house at Cloud Street, within the family
where she’s become the nurturer, at age sixteen. Rose doesn’t own her time,
her space, her body; but her hunger is her own, and preciously so.

Yet Rose recovers. It happens in the background of in the book, as other

characters move to the foreground, until she relapses, years later (I know
now that this happens so often that it’s almost considered a normal part of
the process). Eventually, though, Rose pulls herself clear of her hunger,
swimming in the Swan River and falling pregnant to her new husband, the
sad-eyed Quick who grew up right next door. Even so, she still recognises
that there is a ‘shadow in her, this dark eating thing inside’ and ‘sense[s]
that it’d always be with her.’ I didn’t remember this line from my earlier
reading of Cloudstreet, but it resonates profoundly with me now. The body
doesn’t forget. Perhaps my hunger will be carried with me always, together
with the things that drive it – my tenacity, my determination, and my
writing above all else. They’re dark within me, still, and I don’t know what
to make of what persists.

My second admission was a split one, interrupted by the four weeks around
Christmas and the New Year, that intense period of family, functions and
food that can be difficult even for people who aren’t ill or anxious. I was
rudderless over those weeks, still raw; all of my specialists were on
holidays, all of my routines disrupted by the season. I spent a few days with
my parents on our annual family holiday, to the same coastal town we’ve
been visiting each January for over twenty years. I walked along the
waterfront each morning, with joggers and cyclists sweeping past, all
wrapped in tight nylon. My mother smiled and squeezed my shoulder each
time I ate a piece of toast mid-morning, or took a single chocolate from the
box installed on the kitchen shelf. I swam in the surf and let it buffer me
about; I read on the balcony in the afternoons, watching children walking
back from the lolly shop on the corner with white paper bags clutched in
their fists, beach towels wrapped around their waists. I was so afraid of
slipping. On that balcony, feeling suspended, I read Carmel Bird’s The
Bluebird Café.
I knew nothing about the book when I chose it from the second-hand
bookshop near my house, but I instantly loved the staginess of its set-up:
The Bluebird Café is a kind of absurd mockumentary, complete with a cast
list and glossary, about the establishment of the Historical Museum Village
of Copperfield, a recreated town built beneath a huge glass dome,
somewhere above the hills surrounding Launceston. To celebrate the
opening of the Museum Village, a playwright with connections to the area
has been sought out and commissioned to write about the old town; she is
Virginia O’Day, who first came to live with her aunt and cousins in
Copperfield as a seventeen-year-old, in her family’s last-ditch effort to cure
her anorexia.
What’s remarkable about Virginia’s illness in this book is the way the
adult, healthy Virginia’s perspective, given in a series of publicity
interviews about the commission, interacts and intersects with her morbid
teenage perspective, which in turn is mostly presented in diary entries.
Virginia, in both incarnations, is always eloquent, articulate and self-aware.
She is a writer, even as a seventeen-year-old, and her writing is a part of her
pathology, as well as one of the things that pulls her clear.
As a teenager, Virginia’s writing is her only means of asserting her
selfhood, her way of imagining something more than what Launceston has
to offer. Virginia wants to be different from her family, whom she sees as
‘fakes’, and to escape the future of university, teaching, marriage, that they
have planned for her. The teenage Virginia sees this ‘settling down’ as
nothing less than a kind of slow death; writing offers her a small rebellion:
I am supposed to get married and settle down in Tasmania forever. ‘Settle down’ suggests to me that
I am now an active volcano, but if I do the right things I will stop exploding and bubbling and
seething and throwing up rocks and I will gradually become less and less active…and then go to
sleep and then die altogether…[but] I will continue to lose weight and I will continue to write [my
novel] Savage Paradise, and when the book is published I will be so thin, and there will be so many
shocking scenes of violence and passion in the novel that I will be forced to leave home in disgrace.

The teenage Virginia throws thinness, violence, passion together as the

transgressions that are her only power. The adult Virginia recognises her
younger self’s desire to escape, her desire for disgrace, but is conscious
now too of the fear behind it, the fear that plagued that younger self and fed
her hunger. She tells the interviewer:

When I left school I didn’t want to go to university and become a teacher and get married and so on. I
didn’t even want to grow up; I didn’t want any responsibility…I was terrified of being an adult, of
getting old and dying. I was even prepared to die young in a perverse attempt to cheat death. So I
began to starve myself…[these] are conclusions I have come to over the years.

There’s so much story hinted at in the differences in these accounts, so

much hard-won change that really appealed to me, at a time when I was
constantly revising and reshaping what I thought I knew about my self, my
life and my disease.
Virginia’s hunger is always explicitly tied to death, which seems to offer
her the ultimate escape from her family and fate – perhaps the only escape
that her adolescent self is able to envision – but it is also a sacrifice and a
transcendence. Virginia’s fast began, according to her sister, after a teacher
suggested that her students give up eating meat as an offering or penance
for a dead schoolmate’s soul in Purgatory. Virginia, alone amongst her
classmates, takes this advice so far as to stop eating altogether. She starts
planning her funeral (‘she’s made a will with a description of the flowers
and the music and the prayers…What she has is an incurable condition,’ her
sister states). Her uncle describes her as having ‘a look of saintly self-denial
and smugness’. Even her name, Virginia, is saintly, but also eternally
childlike, untouchable, aloof.
The teenage Virginia constantly describes her own death, and writes too
about things and people that have disappeared: the Indigenous inhabitants
of Copperfield, her mother as a girl. My favourite of Virginia’s imagined
deaths occurs in the younger woman’s diary, after she reads that adipose fat
cells in corpses left in water become ‘suet-like’ in consistency as they
decompose. She writes:

I like to think that if I ever did drown and stay in the water for a long time I would have so little fat
on my body I would not turn to suet. Suet is one of the most horrible substances I have ever seen.
‘The body of a young woman which was washed up at Rocky Cape had undergone virtually no
adipocene change owing to the almost total absence of fat in life. The coroner said “If this girl has
been in the water for the length of time suggested by the weight of evidence, I am inclined to suggest
she had been subjected to a rigorous program of starvation prior to death. I support this theory with
further evidence that the stomach of the deceased woman was in fact in a remarkably shrunken state,
and was completely empty of food.” Relatives of the deceased are being questioned concerning the
young woman’s diet and eating habits over the past year and a half.’

In those waiting rooms, I was always thinking, I’m not as sick as her, so
I’m okay. I never thought, when I was hungry, about my death because I
thought that my hunger, the way that I was eating, was what I needed to do
in order to stay alive, in order to manage and live with my physical
condition. A doctor told me, at twenty-five, I had a metabolic age of twelve,
and I thought this proved that I was fit and strong and well. In the lead-up to
my first admission, I was given a letter to take to my GP, outlining the care
that I would need:

In the initial stages of treatment, it is recommended that the patient has the following fortnightly
blood tests and assessments: Hormone levels (oestrogen, progesterone, luteinising hormone, follicle
stimulating hormone); vitamin D; bone mineral density; pulse and blood pressure; electrolytes, urea,
creatinine, calcium, magnesium, phosphate, potassium, blood glucose level; white blood cell count;
liver function, thyroid function; allergy diagnosis (self-reported allergies from eating disorder
patients are often not reliable); body temperature. An ECG conducted monthly.

Heart, kidneys, liver, thyroid, hormones, bones: I hadn’t realised that so

much could be going wrong. The nurse who stuck the ECG stickers on my
sternum, wrists and ankles, in a half-circle underneath my prune of a left
breast, clicked her tongue whenever she touched me. ‘No good,’ she said,
‘so skinny, no good at all.’
But what’s interesting about Virginia’s invented newspaper report is not
so much her fascination with her own death – it’s been a part of her illness
from the very beginning – but the implicit punishment of her family in the
last line. Like Cloudstreet’s Rose, like Teresa in For Love Alone, Virginia
wields her hunger like a weapon, against a father who doesn’t recognise or
credit her desire to be a writer, and her mother, who has accepted the same
conventional future that Virginia’s father sees for her (university, marriage,
children) and has even come, in her imagination, to embody it.
Virginia writes, ‘My mother is so fat. She is fat and disgusting and she is
so busy doing good works in the world and working for charity she
wouldn’t even know if I fell down dead.’ Virginia’s thinness visibly and
violently differentiates her from her mother, Margaret O’Day – Margaret is
as fat as Virginia is thin, but they otherwise look very similar. Virginia’s
uncle describes Virginia as ‘a pale, faded milky impression of her mother’
and their destinies too are designed to resemble one other. Virginia has seen
photos of her mother, slim and beautiful, in her youth; Margaret’s weight
gain is said to have occurred in bursts after the birth of each of her seven
children. But alongside child-bearing and child-rearing, Virginia aligns
other duties of domesticity, especially cooking and entertaining, with fat –
and from this is borne her fear. In another extract from her diary, she writes:

Were all the fat women with shopping bags and tribes of children once graceful brides with shining
hair and shining eyes?…The dainty hands have mixed and moulded and manufactured jellies and
puddings and chocolate cakes with fluffy cream and strawberries and hundreds and thousands and
hundreds and hundreds of legs of roast two-tooth…They bake yellow sponge cakes called Lemon
Snowdrift and cream the butter and sugar thoroughly…for the Nectarine Soufflé they beat and beat
the whites of eggs…they make ice-cream in three flavours and they pluck fresh fruit from the fruit
trees… Knives spread with butter things that are spread with butter such as bread and scones and also
fruitcake…Then they start pushing and poking and popping, tossing and slipping and jamming these
fruits of the earth, these works of human hands, into their open mouths…

The level of detail in this passage, the encyclopedic listing, is an echo of

an earlier description of Virginia lying in bed, taking imaginary stock of her
mother’s pantry: candied almonds, tins of sardines, peanut butter, powdered
milk. This too is a symptom of starvation syndrome, continual and
uninterrupted obsessive thinking about food, looking at and lusting after
that which the body is denied.
And what is refused here, alongside food, is the domestic role of food-
giver, carer, provider for the family, that her father’s conventional
imagination has projected for her. Domesticated women are fat women, and
Virginia fears this fate, aligning and even substituting control over her body
for control over her future.
It’s interesting too that Virginia specifically rejects her mother’s food as
‘poison’, eating instead apple cores and scraps of food from rubbish bins,
things that are discarded or forgotten, accidental. Later on, in Copperfield,
Virginia puts her problem simply: ‘The trouble is, I am a girl.’ She realises,
in what becomes something of a refrain for her adult self, that the ‘trap’ she
is in is the trap of ‘her own nature’, her gender, and the expectations that
come with it.

Virginia is finally sent away to stay with her cousins Bedrock and Carrillo
Mean in Copperfield after she refuses to go to a family picnic in the
Launceston Gorge (constantly referred to simply as ‘the Gorge’, in a
beautifully perverse pun). Her excuse is that she is too weak to attend, that
her hunger makes her as unable as she is unwilling to participate in the
rituals of her family. But instead of staying in bed, she takes a bath and
admires her protruding bones, she makes herself vomit as she imagines her
family eating together at their picnic, and she walks to the cemetery to
continue writing her novel. Her absence is discovered when her father
returns to the house early, and his anger and confusion lead to the decision
to send her to the country for a ‘spell’. Virginia’s writing and her hunger are
the paired catalysts for her removal from her family; they hold her clear,
and finally bring about the physical, as well spiritual separation from her
parents that she craves.

It is in the strange town of Copperfield that Virginia really begins to

struggle, both with her loneliness and isolation, and with the fear that comes
when her patterns of eating are threatened and disturbed. Virginia’s uncle in
particular is unyielding and unsympathetic to her hunger – he comments at
meal times about people watching their figures and looks at Virginia as she
eats, close to tears. But she continues to write, and her first diary entry from
the town reads:

I am sad and lonely and I am very far from home. Today I have eaten nothing… Here with my aunt
and cousins it will be different, and I will have to work out some different tricks…I escaped to my
room without any dinner; I said I was too tired out from travelling. Tomorrow I must look for some
scales in the bathroom.

I remember this from the hospital, the exposure of sudden transparency, a

doctor sitting at the head of the table at every meal, coaching us on: just put
a bit on your fork, they’d say, take some deep breaths, remember why
you’re doing this, I need you to take another bite. I remember the horror
when I realised, at the first meal, that the only way out was to eat it and eat
it all, that none of my tricks would work here, that I was on my own,
without my hunger. I remember clutching my stomach on the couch after
each meal.

In Copperfield, Virginia spends most of her time in the library, writing in

her notebook and reading Dickens. She is left alone, that is, for the very
first time, to do just as she pleases, to be imaginative and unconstrained,
and to satisfy her craving for stories, for art, for something beyond the
world she knows. It is in the library that Virginia has her most important
revelations about her disease; and it is in the library, surrounded by books,
that she begins to eat again.
In the library, Virginia first eats under the soft duress of obligation, when
her aunt brings her a biscuit and cup of tea, and stays to talk about Dickens.
Virginia nibbles away at the edges of the biscuit until the whole thing
disappears without her realising it, although she does feel scruitinised and
watched the entire time. It’s a small act of surrender, but not a simple one,
and it’s certainly not final. Describing the incident in her journal, Virginia is
caustic and sarcastic, and it’s this description that has made the book so
important to me now. Virginia imagines her uncle watching her eat her
biscuit, minutely, slowly, hidden in a compartment in the library wall:

He lurks in the secret place behind the wall until I have eaten the whole biscuit and then he rushes
down to the Palace and shouts to all the people that the fast has been broken; the drought has ended;
the rivers will flow in the parched and searing desert; the princess has laughed; the sin is original, the
niece will toe the line.

This description delights me because it’s such a beautiful negation of so

many portrayals of recovery from eating disorders that I’ve read or seen,
where the hungry woman suddenly decides that she’ll start eating again,
suddenly comes to the table, as it were, and breaks the fast. I watched the
first season of the BBC drama Skins with my housemates in my first
sharehouse; an early episode centres on the anorexic Cassie, after her last
day in a private eating disorders clinic. There’s a wonderful scene where
she demonstrates to a friend precisely how she fooled people into thinking
she was eating, mixing her food around on her plate, waving her cutlery and
talking non-stop, distracting attention from the meal that she’s not eating.
This I recognised. But the episode ends with Cassie sitting in a diner, taking
a breath, and biting into a burger. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t pick the bun
apart. Her hands don’t shake. We don’t see her shrunken stomach aching
afterwards, her overwhelming need to sleep, the sadness that sweeps over
her when the meal has been endured. It’s as if a switch simply needs to be
flicked to turn the illness off, a tablet taken to cure the infection. But even
as a teenager, Virginia knows this is not the case. She knows she has to dig
her own way out of the trap that is a part of her very self.

It is in the library too where Virginia realises exactly what it is that she
needs to do. Writing in her notebook, she remembers seeing a doll that once
belonged to Elizabeth Batman, the daughter of the founding father of
Melbourne, on display in a museum. The doll, she remembers, had become
an object as impersonal as any other artefact, removed from its world and
its purpose. In her first direct and conscious statement about her hunger and
her writing, and the links between them, she writes:

Dear Diary, I feel like a doll…I feel like the doll in the glass case with the harpoon gun and the
revolver. And I believe I have realised, dear Diary, that my way out of the glass case, my way out of
the trap, is through writing…I will learn to use words like tempered steel to cut my way out….if I
can’t get out of my own glass coffin, through my own forest, I would rather be dead.

I sometimes think that this is all I’m doing, trying to use words to cut my
way out of the trap. They’re not enough, but they are the strongest steel I
have.

Virginia’s recovery is not outlined in The Bluebird Café, but it is present in

the space between the voices and perspectives of the character at different
ages. The adult Virginia can illuminate the thoughts behind her teenage
counterpart’s writings, the voice that’s being suppressed alongside the
appetite, and we’re left to notice what has shifted, what has changed. This is
most powerful, when the adult Virginia describes her time in Copperfield,
in the library, as the time when she recognised the symbolic value with
which she had inadvertently burdened food. She describes a local boy, Jack
Fisher, coming to visit her in the library with produce from his family’s
farm:

He tempted me with apples…lovely little red apples that looked so sweet and crisp. In the end I
started eating them…Jack somehow changed my outlook…and made me take the simple way out
which was to start being honest about what I wanted, I started by eating the apple I wanted to eat, and
then, after quite some time, you understand, I was able to explain to my aunt and then to my father
that I wanted to be a writer.

‘After quite some time, you understand,’ is such a small moment of

qualification, but one that makes all the difference. It’s one thing for
Virginia to realise that she has been suppressing what she wants, what she is
hungry for, another thing entirely to be able to seek it out, to give herself
permission to incorporate it into her life and her body. The average time for
a recovery from an eating disorder is said to be seven years – the same
length of time it takes for all of the cells in a human body to be replaced.

And as with Rose, hunger leaves its shadow on Virginia, her body never
forgets. It is the legacy of Virginia’s teenage hunger, her obsession with
disappearance and death that guides her choice of subject matter for her
play about Copperfield. She has been given free scope in her commission,
but her interest is held by the now-mythic story of Lovelygod Mean, who
disappeared from her bed one night, aged ten, never to be seen again.
Lovelygod is thought of with the same measure of speculation and
fascination as the equally fictional Miranda from Picnic at Hanging Rock –
and she is certainly another incarnation of the almost archetypal Australian
legend of the missing child.
But Lovelygod also represents another version of the narrative the
teenage Virginia was trying to construct for herself through her hunger: the
girl who will never grow up, whose body has become a thing of mystery, a
thing that disappears, never to be found. I think it is this that the adult
playwright finds haunting in the story, this act of disappearance that
obsessed her younger self for so long.
What writing offers Virginia, above all else, is as a way to shape her self
and her experiences, especially as a teenager, when the only other way she
had to do this is through her body, and her body’s own extremity. I know
that writing has always been the only thing, besides my hunger, that helps
me make sense of the world, to find patterns and connections and with
them, some kind of solidity or definition; it is also a kind of striving, a
reaching for something more. Writing has always been the thing that allows
me to voice what is too difficult to speak.
But even so, I resisted, for a very long time, ever writing about my illness
– although my doctors had been encouraging me to do so, even from the
outset of my treatment. I didn’t want to write about myself, least of all
about my vulnerabilities, I didn’t want to be exposed or to expose the thing
I thought was ugliest within me, I didn’t want to show it to myself. Even the
poems I wrote while I was ill are sometimes strangely disembodied – my
writing group often pointed out that there was no self within them, but I
didn’t know how to do things otherwise, didn’t want to show too much.
What there was, instead, was detail, and other peoples’ voices, a focus on
the world around me, but never my place within it.
I realise now this was, at least in part, probably tied to my pathology: the
last hospital I attended was headed by a doctor who believes that at the root
of all anorexia is a fear of vulnerability, of intimacy, of the possibility of
rejection; a fear that we allay by making ourselves impermeable and
untouchable, unimpeachable in our hunger.
But when I did begin to write about my hunger, I was flooded with both
apprehension and an intense exhilaration. Unlike Virginia, whose writing
always centres on disappearance, for me, writing about my hunger
demanded that it be seen. And because hunger thrives on secrecy, on that
private, inviolable inner world (the very thing that makes it so appealing to
Rose Pickles), it is less potent when it is public.

OceanofPDF.com
IN GROUP
 There are some conversations that you shouldn’t
have with your mother, especially if you are a poet, and especially if you
are a poet four months into your third stint of group therapy.
I had arrived a little early to the café where my mother and I sometimes
meet for a mid-week breakfast – anxiety always lends itself to punctuality –
across the road from her Ultimo office and a crisp, half-hour walk from my
home. I still always order the same thing, and eat it a bit too slowly, and we
still sometimes argue about whether my coffee should be made on skim
milk or full cream, but we both know that barely two years ago even turning
up at all would have been impossible for me. I was reading as I waited,
curled up at a corner table, and when my mother arrived she asked:
‘What’s that you’re reading?’
‘It’s a novel I found. By a poet, about group therapy.’
My mother turned the book over – away from the bespectacled and
magnificently bearded man scowling on the front cover – to read the blurb
on the back.
‘It’s unfinished?’ She looked at me. ‘Did he decide it was too hard to
write? Or that he shouldn’t write about the other people in the hospital?’
My mother is the only member of my family with whom I talk about my
writing; we’ve spoken about how strange and difficult it has been, at times,
to write about my illness. I hesitated before answering:
‘He threw himself off a bridge.’

The book is John Berryman’s Recovery/Delusions. There’s something

maddeningly perfect about that title, something that sits right at the heart of
the problem of the brain, the knots it can tie itself into through illness, or
when trying to come back from it: it’s so hard to tell, sometimes, how much
of my thinking has recovered, how much is still deluded. Untangling these
knots, untying recovery from delusion, is always a messy, tentative process,
and one that may well lead to other snarls – new problems, new confusions
– as it progresses. How can we ever know, after all and at any time, how
much of our own mind is rational, how much is operating in the fantastical,
the mad? At what point does imagination tip into self-deception, at what
point does narrative slip from being the best system we have for making
sense of the world into sheer delusion? When is it, that is, that the mind
takes on a mind of its own?
A different American poet, Wallace Stevens, puts it like this:

The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a
violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.

He adds that poetry is simply the expression of the mind, this violence
within, which is why it ‘has something to do with self-preservation’, why it
‘helps us to live our lives’. But even in this formulation, the imagination, as
it presses back, sounds remarkably similar to delusion.
The psychiatrist in charge of the clinic where I was admitted for my third
stint as a day patient, loves poetry, thinks metaphor might cure us all, would
quote Walt Whitman at every opportunity. ‘You are large, you contain
multitudes,’ he’d say to a room full of bony women, many clutching
cushions in front of their stomachs, some so underweight that the outlines
of their teeth were visible through their cheeks. ‘You contain multitudes,’
he’d say; and ‘there will never be any more perfection than there is now.’
I only realised later that Berryman’s unfinished novel is actually only
titled Recovery. Delusions is the title of his last collection of poems, and in
the edition I have the two works are published together, as if in composite
they might offer some kind of complete – and completely morbid – picture
of the poet’s mind in his last days. I can’t pretend that for me this isn’t part
of its appeal.

John Berryman began writing Recovery in 1970, a year in which he was

hospitalised four times for alcoholism. His first hospitalisation occurred in
1958, and not one of the remaining twelve years of his life passed without
at least one readmission. Nonetheless, he continued to write, and to teach,
often giving lectures while on short passes from various hospitals and rehab
programmes. His best-known work, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Dream
Songs, was written during this period; my favourite line from this work is
‘my psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist’.
The main character in Recovery is Alan Severance, an illustrious and
famous scientist, a man of high intelligence, creativity, and rigour, at times
as severe as his Dickensian name suggests. He is, of course, a fictional
stand-in for Berryman – it is impossible to read him otherwise, especially as
the novel’s epigraph states, ‘The materials of this book… especially where
hallucinatory, are historical; all facts are real; ladies and gentlemen, it’s
true.’
There’s something wonderfully appealing about the concept of an
historical hallucination.

The novel opens with Severance’s admission (his third, too) to Ward W of
an unnamed psychiatric hospital, determined this time to ‘submit’ to the
program, to dry out and straighten out and ‘find out what the hell [is] wrong
and fix it’. And this means group therapy. As a ‘Repeater’, to use the
novel’s terminology, Severance has to participate in both Group and mini-
Group therapy sessions, all of which are run according to the precepts and
structures (and with the strange jargon) of Alcoholics Anonymous, an
organisation to which Berryman had, by 1971, held a membership for more
than a decade.
There’s no Anorectics Anonymous. This is perhaps fitting, because the
disease is so often bound up with a desire for anonymity, even though,
perversely enough, the body becomes increasingly conspicuous as it grows
ever more extreme. It’s so often, for so many, a whittling away of a self that
feels intolerable, or somehow offensive: too big, too loud, too demanding,
somehow too much. Part of recovering from the disease, then, is reclaiming
an ego – reclaiming a sense of, and space for, the self and all its
inconsistencies and imperfections.
Nonetheless, the addiction model pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous is
often touted as a method of treatment for eating disorders, especially in the
US, and especially in private practice. Because hunger is – and certainly
was for me – addictive; because it sharpens the senses and it numbs pain;
because hunger, when it’s chronic, feels so good. And like compulsive
drinking, hunger happens in secret, and thrives on deception, and it cuts us
off from the social world. There’s even evidence that the changes it wreaks
on the brain’s structure are eerily similar to those caused by more obvious
substance addictions.
According to the addiction model, the first step towards recovery is
admitting powerlessness over the substance, over the disease: admitting that
‘our lives have become unmanageable’. Yet this powerlessness is one of the
biggest ironies of anorexia, one of the hardest things to admit to. Anorexia
is driven, at least in part, by a desire for control or predictability – a desire
to assert some kind of silent and horrible power, even as the completeness
with which it takes over, with which it shuts down possibilities and
circumscribes day-to-day life, is incredible.
At my sickest I worked mostly from home, to avoid eating lunch with my
colleagues. I spent hours preparing salads and vegetable dishes before any
picnic or party or family gathering so that there’d be something there that I
felt comfortable eating, and my avoidance of the usual chips and dips and
cheeses would be less obvious. I went out almost every evening so I’d be
too busy to have dinner; my concentration was so fragile that I had
difficulty driving. Even now, I’m nervous travelling out of range of my
routines and support. Even now, I struggle to accept the advice of my
doctors, because it feels as though handing over that control – the structure
and regulation of my illness – means free-falling. I still don’t know what it
means to exist within the everyday chaos of the world, without
disintegrating entirely.
And yet I know that my life had become unmanageable, that I was never
in control of my hunger, that it grew stronger and more acute the more I
denied that it existed. I realise that it may well have been the
unmanageability of my own young confusion, insecurity and sadness,
alongside the unmanageability of my unusual and uncomfortable disease,
that led me to hunger in the first place, whenever it was that the ground
shifted. That violence from within pressing back against the violence of the
world.

Recovery is not a linear novel. (Recovery is not a linear process.) As well as

having those strange gaps and the abrupt ending that is common in
unfinished books that somehow find their way to publication, it is episodic,
and it is interwoven with small sections of the journal that Severance keeps
throughout his hospitalisation. This is where he most directly tries to
understand his problem, his own personality, his progress – or otherwise –
through the twelve steps of the program. This is largely where he struggles
with Step Four: make a searching and fearless inventory of the self, and the
related Step Ten: continue to take personal inventory and when wrong,
admit it promptly. In his journal, Severance guesses and second-guesses at
the causes of his drinking, the failings of his personality, what he needs to
address to get better. The logical narratives he constructs continually morph
and change: from recovery to delusion and back again.
These journal entries are remarkable because Severance always believes
what he is writing: in one entry he states, triumphantly, ‘All has pointed
HERE’; in the next, ‘Humbled (I hope) and shook…ill, deluded’ and
‘whether I’ve made any progress at all I don’t know’. He writes long,
interwoven explanations of his faith, his father’s suicide, his overly-
forgiving mother, his promiscuity, his childhood, his children, his work;
each time working out a narrative whereby that particular issue lies at the
heart of his addiction. Each of these narratives is logical, each chain of
cause-and-effect makes perfect sense, until Severance’s mind digs up
something new and recasts what came before as mere delusion. It’s a
disorienting process to follow, and to follow in such a raw state. It’s blackly
humorous too (at one point, Severance becomes convinced his salvation lies
in converting to Judaism), but most of all, it’s terrifying for the unmoored,
grasping despair it evokes in him. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Severance writes,
‘tell me whether this belief of mine is real, and whether I can depend on at
least it. I am a dependent man, I need something.’
‘The terror is real,’ a long-recovered friend wrote to me last year, and
I’ve held this close since. My illness terrifies me, and so does the prospect
of getting better, because I don’t know where I stand without it. But more
intensely, and more frequently, I know that delusion terrifies me too.
Delusion horrifies me, because I know how insidious and complete a
process it can be. When I first sought treatment, it was simply for anxiety,
because I genuinely believed that anxiety was the only problem that I had; I
believed that the way I was eating, while by no means normal, was no more
unusual than a coeliac not eating bread, a diabetic monitoring their sugar.
Anxiety is, in fact, the brain’s normal and functional response to the threat
of acute hunger, as well as the most common co-morbidity to disordered
eating. I was so unwell that I only escaped forced hospitalisation because an
administrator miscalculated my BMI, but I was also so deluded that I still
thought, even at that point, that I was fine.

At one point in Group, Severance reads aloud from his journal, telling his
fellow-patients, ‘I have lately given up the words “sincerely” and
“honestly”, as mere con-words designed by my diseased brain to support its
lying products.’ He recognises and acknowledges how utterly convincing
delusion can be, but ultimately qualifies even this, adding, ‘So I won’t say
this is a sincere attempt – though, friends, it is.’
I love the paradox of this last sentence because it points towards a
different kind of truth, a different kind of thinking – one that is at once
sincere and diseased, as well as something in between. A kind of thinking
that is the best the imagination can do, for now, to deal with the pressure of
a reality that is equally as uncertain as it is inconstant.

Severance is, after all, a scientist – someone who, like a poet, is driven to
find patterns in the world, to make ultimate sense of himself and his
surroundings, to find meaning. Even if the systems and languages that
scientists and poets use are vastly different, the impulse is the same. It is
this very striving for sense that lends itself so easily to delusion. Writing
and science are perhaps each, in themselves, a peculiar form of madness.
In one group session, Severance is asked by a facilitator, ‘Alan, what sort
of fellow do you see yourself as being?’ and the only answer he can give is
this: ‘Well, I do science. Write books, lectures and so on. Sometimes I give
seminars…serve on boards, train younger men. Various things.’
The facilitator replies, ‘I didn’t ask what you do, I don’t give a damn
what you do. I asked what you are.’ And Severance is lost, for once, for
words.
When I first read this exchange I was shocked, because it so closely
mirrored one that I’d had in my first weeks of admission, when I’d
responded to the psychiatrist’s request to tell him about myself. I had
begun, ‘Well, I’m a writer, mostly a poet…’, and he let me speak for several
minutes before stopping me and repeating, ‘Tell me about who you are, not
what you do.’ I too couldn’t answer. At the time, I felt I had been silenced
by frustration: because by saying that I am a writer I had been trying to tell
him something important about how I am within the world, but I fear now
that it points too to some kind of hollowness, some lack of essential self that
my hunger fills – or at least masks – for me, the same way drinking does for
Severance.
I lost track of how many times the doctors at this clinic, where my third
admission took place, told me that my confusion and frustration are
important, are generative, told me to stop trying to understand, to stop
narrating. ‘Get out of your head,’ one therapist told me, ‘and into your
body.’ At the time, I countered that my head had never betrayed me as my
body had, but now I’m not so sure.

Berryman’s novel is most remarkable for its portrayal of the group sessions
that Severance must attend; group sessions that are now an integral part of
many forms of modern psychiatric treatment, especially those that involve
hospitalisation. The clinic I attended for my third admission, my first in the
private system, treats mood disorders, eating disorders, and drug and
alcohol addiction in three separate wards, each with its own schedule of
group sessions, universally referred to, here too, as Groups.
We’d go to Group. Say, ‘See you next Group.’ We were asked by our
psychologists, ‘So, how are things in Group?’ These groups are fascinating
little societies, partly because of the severe and strange conditions under
which they form, and the intense experiences that members must share in
order to qualify for membership, but also because they are constantly
shifting and changing as patients come and go and shift and change
themselves. And they’re almost entirely invisible to the wider world, and
even largely absent from literature – despite the incredibly high incidence
of mental illness and addiction amongst writers. (The rates are higher still
for poets.)
Severance’s group includes a retired professional hockey player, a
businessman who can’t live up to the expectations of his family, a pale girl
with a manipulative, alcoholic father, a thin young woman who’s convinced
she’s a compulsive eater (although this too is a delusion), a middle-aged
janitor who phones his elderly parents several times each day, and a man
simply described as a ‘benign lizard’. There are discharges, new
admissions, one death. The group spends a lot of time, when not in Group,
attending lectures on the physical and psychological effects of heavy
drinking, reading the AA manuals (called The Big Book and The 24-Hour
Book respectively), and eating Eskimo Pies and drinking coffee in the
Snack Room.
All I want to say about my group is that we were not all women and that
we ranged in age from eighteen to fiftynine. There were, at times, within it,
two other literature students, an English teacher, an actor, a musician and a
photographer, as well as an Army paramedic, a trainee doctor, a
chiropractor, three mental health workers, a government clerk, a swimming
teacher, three mothers, one father, and people whose illnesses have made it
impossible for them to work for years. We arrived mid-morning, left mid-
afternoon, had structured meal times, and sat at a single round table with
happy aphorisms written on the napkin dispenser in coloured textas: ‘You
are beautiful and you are strong’, ‘It’s just one meal’, ‘Tomorrow you might
wish that you started today’. We spent a lot of time, when not in Group,
knitting or crocheting, doing crosswords, and looking up cat videos on
YouTube.

Berryman’s Recovery is most powerful in the terrible, charged moments

that deal directly with being in Group, in the interactions and confrontations
between members, or between therapists and patients. These scenes are
short and there’s a lot of dialogue, which gives them an immediacy that’s
sometimes horrifying, and that tips, at times, to violence. In these scenes the
novel captures that strange space between delusion and recovery, the raw
emotion and confusion of people desperately trying to help each other and
themselves, and the strange dynamics, the strange language, of people
thrown together in a space deliberately removed from the external world
and their regular (if less than functional) lives.
Severance’s Group, according to the psychiatric principles of the time,
works by confrontation, by trying to shock people into a forced recognition
of their delusions, temperaments and the patterns of thinking and behaving
that contribute to their problems. Each member of the group is encouraged
to critique the others’ behaviour, and the answers they give to the questions
of the therapists. ‘You’ve got to help each other, and you can, though all of
you are crippled,’ one of the doctors says.
 I was fascinated by these exchanges because they’re so different from the
gentle coaxing, the quiet but continual insistence, with which the therapist
in my group interacted with us, the way we were encouraged to give advice,
but not step on each others’ toes, to congratulate each other for the things
we had achieved, ignoring whatever else we may have done that was
unhelpful, unhealthy, or downright stupid. I’m aware that the difference
may well be one of diagnosis – our delusions are different from those of
alcoholics, far more self-critical and harsh. Eating disorder patients are,
almost without exception, hypersensitive to the opinions of others,
punishingly judgemental of themselves, and easily wounded because of the
fragility of their sense of self. So gentleness itself, arguably, is therapeutic,
because it’s something that we never grant ourselves. At criticism, cruelty
and violence, however, we’re old hands.

But following Severance across his group interactions has been equally
fascinating and confronting for me, because he too has difficulty placing
himself within the Group, at times feeling unavoidably and inexorably
different from the others, at times feeling that he utterly belongs. The
problem, for Severance, in his own words, is that his ‘highly developed and
strong will’, his intelligence, his creativity, make it that much harder for him
to negotiate the Group, because he can’t help but watch on, can’t help but
be fascinated by the Group and its constant transformations. He struggles, at
times, even to be aware that he is having difficulty completely engaging in
Group and its peculiar kind of treatment, that he can’t just ‘swallow the
Group-mystique’ as he puts it.
He often describes himself as going ‘into doubleconsciousness’, a state
that I recognise well, and have often spoken about with other writers: a
strange state of participating in the world, but simultaneously observing and
analysing it. It’s not quite detachment – more a sense of both living, and
filing away, the same events at the same time. A psychologist once told me
that I had ‘excellent meta-cognition’ and my first reaction was to add the
new and beautifully peculiar word to the list in the back of my notebook.
I know that double-consciousness is problematic in group therapy, that
it’s prevented me, at times, from being able to give myself over to it
completely. On my very first day in the clinic, we were taken to the
facility’s art room, directly after our supervised morning tea, for a session
of art therapy with an occupational therapist. She had unpacked several
bundles of construction paper, thick crayons, pots of acrylic paint and glitter
(but had not unlocked the high cupboard where the scissors were kept) and
as we sat down explained to us that we were going to spend the next hour
drawing our eating disorders as trees. I remember thinking, right away, how
excellent a detail this would be, even before I reached for the purple paint.
But this double-consciousness is also difficult because it often means that
I can’t help but be enthralled by the other patients, to be drawn in by their
stories, when I am supposed to be making an inventory, as it were, of my
own.
I’ve struggled with this in every Group I’ve attended, often walking away
in the afternoon distraught by what I’ve heard from people whom I’ve so
quickly come to care about, furious at the people who’ve hurt them and
thinking up lists of small kindnesses – playlists, recipes, loaned books – that
I can give them. I often leave mulling over the unexpected reactions of
others, the strangely logical irrationality of the beliefs and fears they’ve
spoken about, the points where they stop themselves from talking, shrink
back into the room. It’s easier, somehow, to get involved in other peoples’
stories so as not to touch my own.
This continual interaction with other unwell people and their all-too-
visible sadness and confusion often leaves me exhausted, distraught, yet
perhaps this is exactly how Group is supposed to work. It’s so much easier,
too, to recognise delusion and distress in others rather than in ourselves, to
see solutions for them where we ourselves feel trapped. One member of
Severance’s group describes it as confronting ‘the imposing and uniform
and entirely unacceptable world’ presented by his fellow patients, and
realising that ‘threequarters, at least, of every story was my story. Mirrors
on every side.’ These mirrors may be that much more powerful for the
people in my Group: with our illnesses so closely tied to a need to be seen,
or a fear of how we may be reflected back to ourselves by others.
This experience is also startlingly similar to the one I had in my very first
admission, three years before this one, when I still thought that I wasn’t like
that, that my physical condition was the totality of my disease. I used to be
amazed by the completeness of this delusion, that someone as intelligent as
I have always thought myself to be could think so stupidly, could participate
so completely in what I know now was blatant denial. But I realise now that
delusion is a creative act, albeit a perverse one, and this was the only way
that I could apprehend my unacceptable illness, that violence without.
It is also Severance’s strong will that makes it difficult for him simply to
give himself over, and submit to the regime, as much as he believes he
wants to do this, as much as he wants to ‘find out what the hell [is] wrong
and fix it’. Severance knows the rationale behind the manoeuvres of his
therapists, and so he’s often cognitively recognising their strategy rather
than engaging with it – like me, he’s read far too many books on the subject
of his illness and so he often knows what they are trying to do, and is able
to defend himself against it before he even realises what he is doing.
Severance is, after all, used to rationally, meticulously looking for solutions;
he calls it ‘rigorous honest private mental work’. But rational, rigorous
mental work cannot unpick delusion (‘if you could do it by yourself, you
would have already done it’). And Severance is accused, repeatedly, of
hiding behind his brain so as not to have to touch his heart.
I can’t help but wonder, at times, about what happened to Berryman as he
tried to write Recovery, what it cost him, what he gained.

But even though Severance’s will is scientific and mine is not, I know that
my will too was problematic in Group, that I still had difficulty suspending
my disbelief, and in not rejecting wholesale the activities and concepts we
were given, if I’d read about them or the psychological methodology
beforehand. It didn’t help, in my Group, that the therapist wore shellac
nails, meticulously straightened, waist-long hair and towering heels, and
was several years younger than me – a fellow patient had hunted her down
on Facebook – or that the language of these methodologies, riddled with
threeletter acronyms, never failed to make me cringe.
There’s a whole language to recovery, of course, with ‘recovery’ itself as
its principal proper noun (and ‘meal plan’ coming a close second). We talk
of choice points, emotional regulation, compensation, compliance, and
weight-andshape, as if that were one word. Mechanical eating, social
eating, flexible eating, normal eating, refeeding, safe food, fear food,
challenge food, trigger food, fun food. Taking responsibility, checking back
into life. Self compassion, self care, self talk, coping strategies, coping
mechanisms, crisis management, urge surfing, down arrowing, thought
challenging, distracting, dissociating, dissembling, dissonance, defusion,
diffusion, ambivalence, acceptance, making space. Writing is called
‘journalling’ – though I refused to use the term.
This language is useful, of course, and even felt radical to me at first,
because I’d never before had a way to talk about my illness and its
manifestations as something separate from my self. But now it feels like
swearing: use the words often enough and they lose any power to shock.
In Berryman’s Recovery, a therapist makes a list of common Group
behaviours on a chalkboard, and these buzzwords I am all-too-familiar
with: ‘minimising, denial, silence, projection…attacking, explaining,
humour… intellectualising, agreeing, complying (playing Group),
smugness, hostility, shifting’. Severance’s Group, like my Group, is
constantly told to ‘stay real’ (‘Once you’re real, you don’t have to be
consistent.’) or to ‘be authentic’ (but also to ‘fake it ’til you make it’), to
‘level’, to ‘let go’. But more interestingly, Severence’s Group distinguishes
between being ‘dry drunk’ – being on the wagon, but still wanting to drink
– and being ‘sober’, neither drinking nor wanting to. Group has its own
inside language for its initiates, and I know it’s just for us, on the inside,
that it’s normalised. Only last night I did a double take when a friend-of-a-
friend (holding an empty soup pot at the time) said she’d just been ‘on a
Game of Thrones binge’ at her boyfriend’s house.
I realise too that this normalisation is not just linguistic – in Group, we
quickly lost the ability to be startled by, to even bat an eyelid at, the awful
and often insane ways that others behave. I’ve watched women in their
thirties and forties suck on the corners of blankets or the ends of their hair
and a young man inspect every single egg in six different cartons, trying to
select the best dozen. Most recently, an hour before we were due to meet for
a drink, a friend from Group sent me a text cancelling our plans because
she’d taken too many laxatives and couldn’t leave her bathroom. It was
only later that I realised these events would be unthinkable for anybody on
the outside. But illness is a foreign country, as it were; we do things
differently here.

The worst problem with strong will and its delusions, for Severance at least,
is that they mean he’s never able to understand how he is progressing,
because he can never escape the confines that his will and delusions impose
upon his thinking. He can never come to understand precisely what is
turning or changing within him and his mind, however furiously he writes
in his journal, and he feels entirely and utterly lost because he cannot make
it, or will it, otherwise. At one point, a doctor congratulates him on his
progress, and Severance is rattled to his core, he writes: ‘I felt witless to
hear that in his opinion I’m going strong. So much for my opinion about
anything.’ It’s terrifying – for Severance, as it is for me – to not know your
own mind, when your mind and its work are the only things that have
seemed to hold solid throughout the slow erosions of chronic illness.
My psychiatrist first told me I was doing well after a week when I’d sat
in my shower after eating dinner on my couch each night, crying under the
hot water, having kept myself constantly busy through the day, as if
momentum alone could stop me from collapsing. I was constantly aware
that this didn’t feel much different from the period when I was physically at
my sickest. After a week when I’d felt skinless and spilling as I walked
beneath the ancient fig trees in my suburb, squashing the fallen, seedy fruit
beneath my sandals; when I’d been always ‘aware of the action of my heart,
in the absence of physical exertion’, to use the strangely haunting language
of a basic diagnostic tool. This brokenness, this damage, this was doing
well, perhaps precisely because it was a breaking down of will. But even if
we can’t trust our own wills and we cannot know our own minds, it’s still
difficult to operate around them, to try to understand that this is not a
process we can think through perfectly, that we can ever understand, pin
down, or control.
And yet reading Berryman’s novel offered another kind of recognition to
me, as if I had been in Group, a much smaller, more interior kind of Group,
with Severance and Berryman too, or at least the figure of Berryman as I
imagine him. An imaginative alliance with the two men, all of us confused,
and all of us equally bewitched and betrayed by our own minds. And all of
us, most importantly, in a place that is unfinished. Severance, of course,
must remain here indefinitely, interrupted by Berryman’s death. Between
Recovery and Delusions, in the edition that I have, are transcriptions of
Berryman’s fragmented notes for the rest of the novel, but they’re not a
satisfying substitute for an ending: the novel simply stops, in a suspension
(I’m tempted to write: a falling) between the two states. Part of me thinks
this is exactly as it should be: an unintentional but radical inconclusiveness,
a denial of the three-act structure that biography is often made to fit, even
though life itself is never so simply and tightly contained. Another part of
me thinks that if the striving for logical and fixed conclusions in our own
thinking is a catalysing force that allows the stories that we tell ourselves to
harden into delusion, then Severance, suspended and un-ended as he is, is
finally freed from both. It’s still difficult to try to imagine our own stories in
this way, unfixed and uncontainable, difficult to abandon definition for our
selves and lives. But the idea appeals to me because it means that any
delusion must always be transient, short-lived, and so no more dangerous
than a bad decision: a thing that is imperfect and regrettable, perhaps, but
which was, and always is, the best thing that the mind could do to manage
at the time.

OceanofPDF.com
IN PASSING
 I received the news digitally, in a text from my
old housemate, Kat. Just to let you know, the message said. I was curled on
my couch, twisted up against my boyfriend, whom I was introducing to a
trashy sci-fi series that I’d watched in the months after my first stint in the
hospital program, when I still felt too fragile for the social world, too
tentative in my new routines and thought patterns, to expose them too
frequently to the world. It had been about a year since I’d left the house that
I’d shared with Kat, the house in which I’d hit what I now call, when I talk
about it, the crisis point. Where my weight had dropped to less than it had
been when I was ten years old and I’d been unable to sit still for any time at
all. When I was driven, constantly, by the restless, almost manic energy that
acute hunger pushed through me, when I was most completely convinced
that my tightly controlled, minimal eating was not a problem in and of
itself, but was simply what I needed to be doing in order to manage the rare
physical illness that I’d been living with since I was nineteen – by that
stage, for six or seven years. When I talk about that house now, I always
mention how Kat and her girlfriend Michaela would spend two or three
evenings each week knitted together on the old, brown sofa that we’d
rescued from the street, eating the dinners that Kat had cooked, and
watching awful movies that had them both in stitches. I always mention
how I’d largely stayed out of the lounge room as a result, but had visited the
kitchen after they’d both gone to bed, and eaten the vegetables out of the
containers of leftovers Kat had kept to take to work for the next day. Just to
let you know, the message said. Michaela died of a heart attack in her sleep
last night. She was thirty years old. I’d fallen out of touch when I’d left that
house, when I started trying to leave my hunger and the strange half-life
that it propped up as well.
 I hadn’t seen Michaela in person for about five years. I hadn’t been in
touch with her wider circle either, even though we all still live within three
suburbs of each other, even though, for a time, we spent almost every
evening together. Kat had been, perhaps, my best friend, for a while: she’d
moved into my sharehouse from Canberra, and after travelling across
Europe for several months. She knew no one in Sydney and invited me
along on all her outings. She was brashly funny, curious, intensely
charming and wickedly outrageous. More importantly, perhaps, she was
completely certain of herself and her own decisions in a way that I have
never been and that I have always admired. Later, that winter, she started
dating Michaela, and I tried to cling to that same friendship, even though
there wasn’t the same space for me any more and I was really just third-
wheeling along, wildly, blindly and a little furiously, as my body fell apart.

My friendship with Michaela, however, largely had developed because she

and her circle spent a good three nights a week at the Warren View, a pub at
the end of Enmore Road, the arterial road from which the street I lived on
peeled away. I knew that if I went along I could drink vodka-sodas instead
of having dinner, and avoid both empty time and an empty stomach until it
was time to go to bed. When I knew Michaela best it was my heart that was
at risk of failing, the muscle itself being slowly metabolised by my
malnourished body.
I’ve been more present in her death, and in her mourning, than I ever
really was in her life, even when I was physically sitting alongside her.

Hours before I received Kat’s message, I’d been on Facebook, and noticed a
mutual friend had changed her profile picture to an older photo, taken at a
party in the house that Kat and I had shared. In the photo, she was standing
in our old kitchen, clinking beers with Michaela, both of them dressed in
mens’ shirts, with false moustaches and aviator glasses – the party had had
a gender-bending theme, mostly so that I could wear the secondhand boy’s
waistcoat and suit pants that I’d found at an op shop one weekend.
Michaela’s moustache had been drawn on with eyeliner, and was pencilthin;
our mutual friend’s had been made by her boyfriend, who worked in a TV
art department, and was a glorious and vaguely pornographic ’70s-style
brush. It was a great party, I remembered, and flipped back to looking at
articles about misbehaving footballers, photos of cakes, and cat memes.
In the days that followed, after I received the news, I watched our other
common friends do this too, change their own photos to shared shots, each
of them standing next to, dancing with, winking at, toasting or passed out
beside Michaela, slinging their arms across her shoulders, holding matching
grimaces for the camera. They reposted old photos too, and all of these
images from years ago, from the years I now think of as my lost years, as
the years I don’t like to remember, were suddenly a steady presence
scrolling downwards on my computer screen. I was seeing Michaela far
more frequently than I had in all the intervening years, precisely because I
could now never see her again.
The man I’d been curled against that night called this frantic, almost
instinctual reposting, this public, if mediated mourning, a digital ritual; he
compared Facebook’s wall to a wailing wall, against which my friends were
lamenting, crying out their loss and pain. Our generation has no real rituals
for grief, no way of publicly acknowledging private loss. But now we
grieve as a community, because we are part of a community that exists
which is expressed online, and also because it is more vital, more important,
than traditional family for Michaela and for so many of our common
friends.
There’s an uncanny aspect to this too, of course – these rituals are only
possible because of the data that the site itself has stored, the documentation
of so many of the small events and interactions that make up a life, in all its
minute and mundane glory. My friends were sifting through these, digging
out those tiny, routine gestures that we come to love in other people, and
putting them back on display. Facebook was a mausoleum, or the accident
site where they were placing their own small memorials. Photographs of
particular expressions, a lifted eyebrow and sardonic grin. Recordings of
mock-manic dance moves. Screen grabs of text message exchanges (Wanna
come to Centrelink with me on Valentine’s Day? I’ll buy you a beer and
we’ll call it a date.) This, they were saying, this is what I’ve lost, what I
will miss. These are the things that I loved.
And it seems that I am the only one who does not want to remember
those days.
One of the first reposted photographs of Michaela that I saw was taken in
the Domain, during one of the public festival performances held there in the
long evenings of summer, a close shot of three faces, Kat’s, Michaela’s, my
own, all of us big-grinned and quite obviously tipsy. I’m wearing a pair of
over-sized earrings that I loved, and that I lost some months later when I
loaned them to an absent-minded friend, and a bright red jumper that
doesn’t hide the ridges of my collarbones. I remember those summer
concerts; we’d always take picnics of cheeses, chicken, dips and bread, the
pre-mixed sugar-free vodka cruisers I drank at the time, the occasional
Scrabble board, once, a fondue pot. I’d almost always end up eating
something that I knew I couldn’t, and throwing up in the line for the
portaloos that never moved quickly enough for me to hold my troublesome
stomach at bay. I clicked on the photo, to see it in closer detail, and
accidentally opened up Michaela’s own, still active, Facebook page. No
one, it turns out, knows her password. No one can shut it down.

Many of the photos that were suddenly recirculating were photos of

Michaela at the pub, her local, close to Kat’s and my house, but also
halfway between Michaela’s flat on the edge of Stanmore and the
townhouse halfway to Marrickville that her best friend Naomi shared with
two friends and an ancient, bedraggled dog. I don’t know how many hours I
spent there too, sitting in the beer garden that’s the backdrop to these
photos, in those strange and vaguely hazy months at the height of my
illness. My own face, smiling wildly under dead-fish eyes and sheenless
skin or staring absently at the drink in my hands, recurs again and again,
near the edges of so many of these photos.
I was unsettled by this too because I had stopped going to the Warren
View. When I started moving away from Kat and Michaela, and began the
long and awful process of distancing myself from the illness that had come
to dominate each day of my life, I moved to a new house, with new places
and venues in its orbit. I clung to different friends, with whom I could talk,
however cautiously, about unspecified sadnesses and anxieties, and with
whom, sometimes, I convalesced. I hadn’t been to the Warren View for
more than five years, until a few months before Michaela died, on Anzac
Day. I went back, almost by accident, to meet up with another friend, a new
friend, a young woman I met in the day program of the private psychiatric
hospital in Western Sydney where I had my third admission; she was
playing a few rounds of two-up at the pub before moving on to a bar that
we’d be planning to try out together.
I walked up to the Warren View after eating my lunch at home, and sat
again in that leafy garden with my friend and her strange assortment of
companions – a colleague, a uni friend, an Army doctor, a soccer teammate,
several of their partners. I had a drink and chatted and realised that I was no
longer on edge, no longer sprung with that reckless energy that I was used
to feeling in that place. I watched my new friend flirt and knock back gin-
and-tonics, talk constantly and frantically, laugh with a tossedback head at
jokes that weren’t really that funny. I watched her steadfastly ignore the
bowls of crisps that the boys bought for the table over the hours. She bought
me another drink after I’d said that I didn’t want any more; in the late
afternoon I asked if she’d had lunch and she replied, with obvious evasion
and a vague hostility, that she’d been out for breakfast with her friends.
I watched her behave, that is, almost exactly as I used to, when I was
desperate to push away my illness, when I was frantically trying to find a
shape for myself, to hold myself together by clinging to the structures of
other peoples’ lives, when I moved around with Michaela and her circle.
But I felt, that day, like I made a different peace with the place, and that by
coming back to the Warren View I was able to see myself again, how much
I’d changed, regardless of how much I’d lost, across the years, to my
disease.

I didn’t ask Kat for the details of Michaela’s funeral, partly because I was
unsure of the etiquette around it, partly because I didn’t feel that I’d belong
there, surrounded by our common friends who’d still been so deeply
involved in her life, even though I’d moved away. But I kept watching
Facebook, and eventually I saw a new series of posts: photographs taken in
the backyard of Naomi’s townhouse, unchanged in the golden afternoon
light that I love in late autumn, that time of year. Our common friends
playing frisbee on the tiny lawn, clutching longnecks and sitting on the
wooden benches that line the fence, toasting the camera with raised
eyebrows. The captions all tagged ‘…with Michaela Collins’, even though
she wasn’t there, even though the photographs could never have been taken
if she had been.
 I wasn’t there, but had been in Naomi’s backyard so many times in those
months of acute illness, in that space too, alongside that circle of people.
And looking at those images, from my bedroom, I still felt close to them,
drawn into their common loss, a participant in their mourning every bit as
vicarious, perhaps, as I had been when I sat beside them in that pub.
Presence, just like connection, is always relative, and all that digitisation
has done is blur lines that were never as clean-cut as we’d like to imagine.
Loss a complex, multivalent thing: I know I’m mourning myself as much as
I’m mourning Michaela, and the way our lives were tied together for a time.

OceanofPDF.com
IN HINDSIGHT
‘It begins quietly in certain female children’
LOUISE GLÜCK, ‘Dedication to Hunger’

I resisted, for a long time, reading any anorexia

memoirs, even though I’d been reading about the condition in fiction and
textbooks. Partly, I think, this is because of my time as an editor – I’d read
so many badly-written pieces of ‘sick lit’, as I once heard the genre called,
that I didn’t think I’d find anything there besides excoriating descriptions of
self-hatred and self-harm, all laid out in excruciating detail. Partly too, we
were warned against such stories in the first hospital program that I
attended. One of the psychologists there had curled her lip when another
patient mentioned reading Portia de Rossi’s terribly-titled Unbearable
Lightness, then described it as a ‘how-to manual’. Another referred to
Marya Hornbacker’s Wasted, something of a cult book within this
community of illness, as ‘triggering as fuck’. (I love this term, triggering,
how it makes it sound like we’re all packed tight with emotional gunpowder
and coiled, ever ready to misfire.)
I resisted too because I’ve been frustrated by so many of the narratives of
mental illness I’ve seen in the media, in film, in literature too, which can’t
seem to hold together the complexities of recovering, of making mistakes
and slipping backwards, of forgetting and relearning and forgetting again,
of compromise and conditionality, or even the incredibly slow, repetitive
and exhaustingly mundane nature of the process of getting better. The fall
into illness, the difficulty of the illness itself, the realisation that something
is wrong: these things can be accounted for, if not always easily, but
everything that happens after we realise that we are ill and seek out help
can’t be tied up so neatly.
But my resistance softened recently, in part because I discovered a
collection of essays – called Going Hungry – by writers who were writers
before they became ill, not writers who become so because they had been
ill. Many of them I already admired as writers, before knowing that we had
our hungers in common: the poet Louise Glück, the novelist Jennifer Egan.
Many wrote of lingering symptoms, of fears that their hunger might reassert
itself at any time, some wrote of becoming well enough, though far from
well. The poet Priscilla Becker writes of ‘sett[ing] into a kind of working
anorexia, not careening towards death, but…[still] disciplined, self-
contained’; she quotes a friend of hers as saying ‘It doesn’t sound like
you’ve been cured of anorexia, just that you’ve raised the bar a little.’
I recognise myself in this, still disciplined, still frugal, still tightly
controlling of my meals; I still don’t like others to cook for me, am still
frightened by a wide range of perfectly ordinary foods. But I also think that
this is how the curing works – by raising the bar just a little, and then
raising it again and again: I know that some of the things I do without
thinking, now – like eating a sandwich, even if it’s the same meat-free and
salad-heavy sandwich every day – were unimaginable to me once, but are
terribly banal to write about.
Many wrote of continuing to work too hard or to ‘overschedule’, of
continuing to be self-contained and difficult to get to know, of continuing to
defer pleasure, of addictive behaviour, still, years later. One has written a
book about adults who continue to live, long-term, at ‘sub-clinical’ status,
well enough to evade diagnosis and the ever-tightening kind of control that
my hunger once had for me, but still far from healthy; the oldest participant
in her study was ninety-two years old.
I’m terribly afraid of living like this, sub-clinically, long-term. I know
that I still I have to fight hard for my own health, but also that sometimes I
still don’t want to. I miss the simplicity of illness sometimes. Because the
more acute pain is in trying to get better – and it’s a pain that’s chronic too –
and in stripping away the protection, the insulation, the certainty that my
hunger gave me.
More importantly, what I realised, reading the stories in Going Hungry, is
that I’ve been resisting, too, telling my own story, or rather, telling all of my
own story. Because I didn’t want to be one of those women, the story that I
tell, and that I’ve told myself, for years, is about how my physical condition
made me into one of them. How the caprices of my body changed me into
one of those women, that is, but not how I may well have been one of their
number for a long time beforehand. I still think that what happened to me
was the almost-inevitable consequence of a run of incredibly bad luck: that
my physical illness, and the biochemical changes that starvation wrought on
my body and mind as I waited for a diagnosis, combined with my
drivenness and anxiousness to lead me to my hunger. But I recognise now
within these other stories that my hunger was within me already, maybe
even always. I’ve resisted telling this other story, I think, because I don’t
want to hear it myself.

The very first time I lost weight I did it on purpose. I was fifteen, maybe
sixteen; I was by no means large, but not lean either, and I was
uncomfortable in my skin. I didn’t possess the easy, unselfconscious grace
of my friends – the ballsy, glamorous Nina, dark-skinned and beautiful,
who even at this age was buying Dior make-up and French lingerie, and
wearing it with converse sneakers and Mambo singlets; the devil-may-care
Anna who draped herself in black, whose hair and limbs were long and
straight and glossy, who always carried a bag of lollies in her school
backpack and once called me greedy when I took an extra chocolate from
the bag that she was sharing around. (A teacher once told Anna that she
‘didn’t look like a lollies person’, and I asked, somewhat masochistically, if
I did, and he responded, ‘You do, yes.’ It’s strange that I remember this
now.)
I adored both girls with that teenage intensity of friendship that’s
ferocious, almost obsessive, crush-like, and never matched again in later
life. My friends seemed brilliant, carelessly eccentric, and completely
certain of themselves and their own minds. I was awkward and over-eager,
always trying to keep up; I wore double-D bras and brightlycoloured
chenille shirts. I made tie-dyed pants in textiles class and pinned novelty
buttons shaped like sunflowers and Volkswagons in my unruly hair. I know
I wanted to dress differently and unusually, because I felt that I was
different and unusual; perhaps all teenagers, to some extent feel this way. I
cultivated brashness, a deliberately unfeminine brazenness that I never quite
believed in, but that I still catch myself falling back into today. But these
too, I know now, are common traits in the kinds of people who develop
anorexia, complex and competing desires to stand out and to fit in, to be
unique but be accepted, to push away the people who we don’t think will
quite accept us, yet to long for them to take us to their hearts.
When I was fifteen, maybe sixteen, I borrowed my mother’s instructional
pamphlets from the weight-loss program she attended every week in the
hall of my old primary school; each food, and every ten minutes of exercise
was accorded a number of points, to be credited and debited across the day.
There was a booklet that listed an exhaustive set of foods by type and brand
and flavour, a card with a movable wheel for calculating the value of
anything not listed, according to its energy and fat content. I remember
doing this, and yet I say, still, that I’ve never counted calories. I started
walking of an afternoon, around the looping streets and bushland fire trails
of my suburb, or caught a different bus that only stopped a good twenty-
minute march away from home. I lost weight, and I liked it, and another
friend referred to me as ‘new and improved’. I remember packing my own
lunchbox, minimally, and yet I say, still, that I never had restrictive
tendencies until I became unwell.

In my second or third year of outpatient treatment, when I was twenty-six

or twenty-seven, I was waiting in the corridor of the hospital clinic, with its
pastel walls and its over-excited heating system always cranked right up to
keep our underinsulated bodies warm, when a woman walked up to the
counter from the doorway, her waist cinched in a wide elastic belt, black
and ribby over her striped dress. I recognised her from my high school,
she’d been a prefect in my year, one of those whip-smart and unshakable
girls, always groomed and composed, stately behind the assembly lectern. I
assumed she was at work – our school was an academically selective girls’
school, we’d been told since we arrived there that we were the crème de la
crème, the doctors, scientists, leaders of tomorrow – it made sense that
she’d studied medicine and was there to confer with a colleague. When I
greeted her she said she had come in to see someone, and I thought then
that she meant a friend. She later told me she’d assumed the same of me,
both of us unable to imagine that the other brilliant teenager we’d known
had ended up as a patient within those walls.
When I told this story to my sister, who hadn’t felt at home within our
high school and had always held a healthy teenage disdain towards its
rhetoric of guaranteed success and limitless achievement, she was
nonplussed. ‘I don’t think that’s a coincidence,’ she said.

I’ve always said that I thrived in my high school, largely because it was a
small community, and a place where intelligence was admired, and
eccentricity supported. I easily became notorious as someone who had both
in spades. The school was, by the senior years, hotly competitive: I’ve been
thinking a lot lately about the girl who was my fiercest rival in English, the
subject where we both sought to stake our claim, how she never ate at
school but always maintained that she had a big afternoon tea when she got
home, and how I dropped only three marks across the entire year’s
assessments but was devastated when I did so. (In her poem ‘Dedication to
Hunger’, Louise Glück writes about her fifteen-year-old, anorexic self ‘I
felt/ what I feel now, aligning these words –/ it is the same need to be
perfect/ of which death is the mere byproduct.’) We had another friend,
Nina’s best friend, who for a time seemed to live off jellybeans and green
apples.

In my senior years, my school allowed me to enrol in an extra unit of

German, even though no other student wanted to do the course – I was
allocated three lessons per week, one-on-one with a language teacher who
already had a full teaching load, such was the school’s faith in my abilities.
I was disciplined, I worked hard, and my achievement was always tangible
and immediate: we were ranked against our classmates every time we were
assessed. Lisa Halliday writes about the drive for ‘objective standards’, for
the measurement and assessment of her self, as being critical to the
development of her disease; because I never used the bathroom scales to set
these standards, like most others with my illness, I never realised that this
too was part of me, even then.
When I was fifteen, I remember being set an assignment in the subject
that I liked least of all, Personal Development and Health; we had to write a
poem called ‘About Me’ (it must have been an exercise for self-esteem) and
I stalled and avoided the task for months beyond its due date, until I was
told that I would fail the subject unless I handed something in. I couldn’t
say, at the time, why I wouldn’t do the task; one of the reasons I remember
this so clearly is that I’d never not handed in work before. Louise Glück
writes that in her school years, her anorexia served to ‘construct, in the only
possible way when the means [were] so limited, a plausible self;’ she adds
‘I had great resources of will and no self’. More and more now this makes
sense to me, I was modelling myself off the friends around me (perhaps all
teenagers are like this) but I always thought that they’d eventually spot my
fraudulence and catch me out.
I wrote my first poems at school, as a major work for my final exams. I
read these again recently, and was horrified to realise that one of the last
poems in the sequence is about a teenage girl who isn’t eating, who is over-
exercising to the point of dizziness, who wants to be empty and glossy and
untouchable. A girl who ‘watches her stomach’s juices/ turn to/ attack her
own body’ and who ‘knows she’s a martyr/ a hero/ a warrior/ and her will is
stronger/ than theirs.’ A girl who is obviously circumstantially similar to
how I was then – she lives near an athletics oval, catches the train to school,
refuses to shave her legs. I know the poem wasn’t auto-biographical, that I
was imagining myself into a character, the way all writers do, but it’s the
insight in the poem that chills me now – the anger in the girl’s running, the
distance she feels from others, the almost fetishistic listing of foods she
won’t allow herself, the way she feels the grease from what she does eat on
her lips. I didn’t know what lay ahead, but I seem to have been already
writing myself into an anorectic body, preparing myself for an injury that I
hadn’t suffered yet and the scale of which I never could have foreseen.
I was seventeen when I wrote that poem. It was barely eighteen months
later, that my physical illness developed.

In the interim, I started university, something I had been looking forward to

with an almost itchy anticipation. I had been told that I would have the best
years of my life there, that I’d flourish, but instead, I just felt lost. I was
studying media, because I only knew that I liked writing and had high
marks – too high, my school careers advisor had once said, to ‘throw away’
on a plain arts degree. It seemed like I was one of only about a dozen
students in the hundredstrong cohort in my course who hadn’t gone to a
private school, learnt debating and a woodwind instrument, and paid their
university fees upfront. They were mainly young women, and a kind and
class of women I’d had no contact with before – just as they had had no
contact with people like me. They asked each other where they’d gone to
school, and placed each other accordingly and simply. They carried their
notebooks and textbooks in those shiny cardboard bags with rope handles
that designer clothes shops use, and wore, as I wrote at the time, ‘sunglasses
wider than their arses’. Perhaps the differences between us felt embodied,
even then.
In the last hospital program I attended, another patient, a chatty, blonde-
bobbed woman, spoke about her first year at university. She had been one
of these private-school girls, but had chosen to study in a regional
university, and had not known how to place herself within its student body
because none of the students she spoke to cared where they or she had gone
to school. Our experiences, I laughed, were inversions of each other, but it
wasn’t until months later that I realised that inversions are more similar than
they are opposite.

When I started university, most of my friends from high school – those

women whom I’d unconsciously shaped myself off for years – got swept up
in their new lives and new friendships and fell suddenly and completely out
of my orbit. I felt Nina’s loss most keenly. I remember calling her on my
brand-new and first-ever mobile phone one day when we were supposed to
meet for lunch in Chinatown; she didn’t answer and I rang again, and again,
not yet knowing how uncool this was, too eager, too graceless again.
Where I did start to make friends was through a dazzling, chatty
strawberry-blonde from my German class, a woman with the same brazen
insouciance as Nina and the same casual ease in her slender body. Charlie’s
friends were mostly scholarship students, they were involved in theatre, in
bands, in student politics and even national-level competitive Scrabble; they
were witty and devastatingly ironic. When I talk about them now, I call
them protohipsters; but at the time, I just felt gauche and painfully ordinary
beside them, beneath them. At university, too, those objective standards that
I’d previously met so well, those marks and rankings, fell away, and I
couldn’t figure out how to measure myself without them.
 Sarah Haight, whose illness began in her first year of university, writes
that she found herself, like me, like my blonde-bobbed fellow patient, no
longer ‘a local celebrity, or even one of the smartest girls in the class’. She
writes that, when she found herself without the ‘constant external
affirmation’ of achievement that she’d experienced, like me, at school, she
was anchorless, bereft. It’s so simple a step for hunger to come to inhabit
this void, for denial to become a new kind of achievement, a shrinking body
to clearly delineate a self that feels amorphous. Anorexia has rituals, rules
and structure; I know that part of what confused me in my first year at
university was the complete absence of these things.

I know too that I dieted in that first year, because I had been diagnosed with
polycystic ovarian syndrome, a relatively benign endocrine disorder that
something like a quarter of all women have; the doctor had warned me that
the condition can increase the risk of diabetes and so it was important to
avoid becoming overweight. I had gained some weight that year, going out
for lunch with classmates during long breaks between lectures in the nearby
café-cultured suburbs so unlike where I’d grown up, and having late-
afternoon drinks on the balcony of the university bar (I drank luridcoloured
pre-mix then). They called this ‘fresher spread’ at the university I attended,
the phenomenon common enough to earn a colloquial name. I remember
eagerly mentioning my diet to Charlie at a Thai restaurant one night,
thinking somehow it would earn me some kind of praise; instead she
crinkled up her nose and turned away. (Charlie also asked me, the next year,
after my physical condition had developed, why I was eating my lunch at
all given that it was making me throw up.)
In the story that I tell, and that I’ve told myself for years, this diet –
barely a year before I first fell ill – never features. I had almost forgotten
that it happened at all. Because what happened next – the months of
unexplained and unconscious vomiting, the rounds of frustrating and often
condescending consultations with doctors and gastroenterologists, the rapid
weight loss that soon left me and those around me terrified – all of this is so
much more dramatic and easily narrated, as well as so much more unusual,
that the diet seemed unimportant in comparison.
So too this: in the year that I first become ill, when I ran into women who
I’d been to school with, they never failed to tell me that I looked wonderful,
that I looked different. When I went out for meals in groups I now had to be
catered for, given special menus or different dishes, I was no longer just
another part of the crowd. When I was hungry, I felt alert and intense and
alive along every inch of my skin, and I felt unassailable in a way that I
hadn’t felt for years. Jennifer Egan writes ‘I felt as if I were finally coming
into focus, hard and sharp and light, released from the bulky packaging of
my sadness.’ Louise Glück writes of sacrificing her ‘interfering flesh’ until
her ‘limbs were free/ of blossom and subterfuge’, I shared this sense of
paring back to something that feels bare and bold and true.
My illness, that is, began to give me the structure that I felt anchorless
without, came to give me the distinction that I couldn’t find anymore in the
huge and ever-mobile population of university. It felt definite when I was
anything but. And pushing through hunger, past the physical weakness and
tiredness that it imposes on the body was a new kind of achievement, and
one that no one else around me came close to being able to attain. My
illness made me different from the people I already felt alien to. They
needed, I didn’t, and I didn’t feel anything as keenly any more, my body
and mind both numbed by malnutrition. I had found a way to possess
myself, my own kind of grace.

This too, I know, is only a part of the whole story. My illness, and the long
months that it took to find a diagnosis, affected my cognition and emotions
and behaviour just as prolonged hunger affected those young men in
Minnesota. I know that my fear of throwing up couldn’t help but make me
nervous around food. (I’ve experienced this again recently, watching my
boyfriend react to my unexpected bouts of vomiting, listening on as he tries
to find a reason or a pattern or a way to prevent it from happening next
time; anyone, I realised, would become wary of food in my position.) I
know now that many people first experience disordered eating as a result of
physical illness; and that the intense pitch of my emotions makes me
vulnerable to mental illness. All of these things are still true; it’s just that I
recognise I’ve always been more comfortable with these parts of the
narrative, no doubt because – like all anorexics, ironically enough – I can’t
stand the idea of being common, of being a cliché, even and especially in
my illness.
I don’t know, though, where acknowledging all of this leaves me. I
maintained, for years that it didn’t matter exactly how my disorder
developed or took control, simply that it did, and the important thing was
learning how I was going to pull myself clear. I wonder now if these
elisions in the narrative have kept their dark power, somehow, for remaining
in the shadows of the story that I’ve told myself in the meantime. I know
that my hunger, my illness allowed me to fashion a new self. I have been
struggling now for several years, to find a way to be without my hunger,
and that in the process, I so often feel gauche and graceless, uncomfortably
thin-skinned, just like all those years before. (I often joke that recovering is
like a second adolescence, made all the more acute by the reignition of my
hormones – I’ve lived for so long without both ragged lust and raging mood
swings that they always catch me by surprise.)
On a recent weekend, I found myself walking through the grounds of my
old university – I now live just streets away, and was crossing through it as
a scenic shortcut to a bus stop I needed to use. I walked past the residential
colleges, past the bar used by the arts students, the grandiose main
sandstone building where my first media lectures had been held. The
carillon bells were playing, so I stopped in the shadow of the building, on
the clipped, plush lawns, to listen, and was overtaken, suddenly, by a swift,
deep sadness of place. For the girl that I was, I suppose, lost and desperate
and confused within those walls, and so terribly alone. For the girl who had
this hunger already within her, and for the woman who I’ve been, who I’ve
become. The bells stopped and I stood back up. I brushed the dirt from my
jeans and kept walking.

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 A Note on Sources

A number of works have been important to this book – and to my own

understanding of my experiences and illness:

In Colombo
This chapter draws on ideas discussed in As A Weasel Sucks Eggs: An Essay
on Melancholy and Cannibalism by Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson
(Sternberg Press, 2008) and Maud Ellman’s The Hunger Artists: Starving,
Writing and Imprisonment (Harvard UP, 1993). For more information on Sri
Lanka’s civil war, see William McGowan’s Only Man is Vile: The Tragedy
of Sri Lanka (Picador, 1992).

In Berlin
This chapter draws on Sharman Apt Russell’s Hunger: An Unnatural
History (Basic Books, 2009) for information about Ancel Key’s Minnesota
Experiment; and on Leonard Tushnet’s The Uses of Adversity: Studies of
Starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto (AS Barnes and Co, 1966).

In Miniature
This chapter quotes directly from the following sources: Melinda Alliker
Rabb’s ‘Johnson, Lilliput and Eighteenth-Century Miniature’, Eighteenth-
Century Studies 46:2 (2013), Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space
(Beacon Press 1964), Steven Millhauser’s ‘The Fascination of the
Miniature’, Grand Street 2:4 (1983), and Susan Stewart’s On Longing:
Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (John
Hopkins UP, 1984). The poem ‘What She Could Not Tell Him’ is by Denise
Levertov, and published in her collection Breathing the Water (New
Directions, 1987).
In Increments
Information about the history of treatments for ‘hysterical anorexia’ draws
on Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s seminal book Fasting Girls: The History of
Anorexia Nervosa (Plume, 1989).

Information about the anorectic brain’s responses to eating comes from

Laura Hill’s talk ‘Eating Disorders from the Insider Out’ accessible at
http://bit.ly/1GaA32Y. The American studies referred to are being
undertaken at the University of California, by a team lead by Walter Kaye.
Two of Kaye’s papers resulting from this work are ‘Brain imaging studies
reveal neurobiology of eating disorders’ in ScienceDaily, 10 April 2013,
and ‘Hunger does not Motivate Reward in Women Remitted from Anorexia
Nervosa’ in Biological Psychiatry 77:7.

In Books I
The book discussed in this chapter is For Love Alone by Christina Stead
(Imprint, 1991). For Love Alone was first published in the UK in 1945, and
in Australia in 1966.

In Books II
The collections of poetry referred to at the beginning of this chapter are The
Darwin Poems by Emily Ballou (UWA Press, 2009) and The Bee Hut by
Dorothy Porter (Black Inc, 2009). Also discussed here are Tim Winton’s
Cloudstreet (Penguin, 1991) and Carmel Bird’s The Bluebird Café (Vintage,
1990).

In Group
This chapter discusses John Berryman’s Recovery/Delusions (Dell, 1974);
and quotes directly from his poetry collection 77 Dream Songs (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1964). The quote from Wallace Stevens comes from his
book The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (Alfred
A Knopf, 1951).

In Hindsight
This chapter discusses the book Going Hungry edited by Kate Taylor
(Anchor, 2008). Thank you to Ceridwen Dovey for introducing me to this
work. Quotes from Louise Glüick’s poem ‘Dedication to Hunger’ are taken
from her Poems 1962– 2012 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

The epigram for this book is taken from Gwen Harwood’s poem ‘Past and
Present’, published in her Collected Poems 1943–1995 (UQP, 2003), edited
by Allison Hoddinot and Gregory Kratzmann.

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 Acknowledgements

The people who have been important to this book, and to me, along the way
are so many and their contributions so important that they’re difficult to
acknowledge, without also admitting that this list is written in the spirit of a
healthy imperfection and in full knowledge that the gesture is a small one
only. Thank you firstly to my family, whose love, patience and kindness
have been enduring – and undoubtedly an endurance at times. And to my
urban family: especially Susan Wijngaarden, Tim Curry, Tim Peters, and
also Nicola Vartuli, Ava Schacherl-Lam, Elle Warren, Elena Gomez, Sara
Jones, Jayna Staykov, Alex Scott and Pippa Jaminon. Thank you to Patrick
O’Rourke. Thank you to Elizabeth Hall.
Writing-wise, my thanks to Sam Twyford-Moore, Rebecca Giggs, Sam
Cooney, Kate Middleton, Pip Smith, Angela Meyer, Jen Craig and Eileen
Chong for conversation, commiseration and ideas; as well as the fabulous
folks at Sweatshop: especially Mohammed Ahmed, Luke Carman, Peter
Polites, Felicity Castagna, Lachlan Brown, Tamar Chnorhokian, Arda
Barut, Rebecca Landon, George Toseski, Peta Murphy and Amanda Yeo;
thank you to Alice Grundy and David Henley; and to Ivor Indyk and Evelyn
Juers for unending support and encouragement.
Some of the essays in this book have previously appeared in Sydney
Review of Books, Seizure, The Lifted Brow and Overland; or have been
performed as part of Sweatshop showcases. Thank you to the editors
involved.
Finally, to all of the men and women I’ve encountered on the way,
fighting the good fight: you know who you are, how wonderful you are, and
how important you have been. Thank you, and of course, luck and courage
to you always.

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Fiona Wright’s poetry book Knuckled (published by Giramondo in 2011) won the Dame Mary
Gilmore Award for a first collection. Her poems and essays have been published in the Australian,
Meanjin, Island, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Seizure and HEAT.

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