Anorexia

Something made me cry in Harriet Brown’s One Spoonful at a Time — a long, personal story on anorexia from last week’s New York Times. I’ve been unbelievably emotional these days but blame it rather on it being a superbly written account (“The rough days were predictable only in the sense that they kept coming.”) by an extremely intelligent, rational, and honest mother trying to cure her daughter’s anorexia — and that it manages to be a fairly deep, scientific intro into the eating disorder (“Anorexia is one of the deadliest psychiatric diseases; it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of anorexics die, from suicide or complications related to starvation. About a third may make some improvement but are still dominated by their obsession with food. Many become depressed or anxious, and some develop substance-abuse problems, like alcoholism. Almost half never marry.”) while still being punctuated at every paragraph with raw, emotional portraits of desperation (“I woke with my heart pounding, full of rage and hatred for Not-Kitty, the demon who lived on air, who wore my daughter’s face and spoke with her voice.”) and hope.

*In what is to date my longest translation I’ve put the story into Spanish: Una Cucharada a la vez. * Please pass it along to someone who might need to read it.