Small Acts of Disappearance (17 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.