Thin
Authors: Grace Bowman
PENGUIN BOOKS
Grace Bowman was born in the city of Durham in 1977. She studied English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and now lives in North London. This is her first book.
For Linda
If I share a secret with you, do you promise to tell everyone?
This is not a secret to be kept inside any more. This is not a secret to be shrouded and embedded in hushes and quietness. This secret will not be one that forges itself into deep wrinkles and is held fast with a sharp intake of breath. This is a story to be told. It is a story to be shared, and shared out loud, to be discussed and considered and passed on.
Pass it on.
It is a story which I feel I need to tell. At the moment, it is only in my head – almost as if it didn’t happen. I don’t speak about it any more. Some people know fragments, but no one has heard the whole thing from beginning to end, although these two folds of my tale are hard to define. I struggle with where to start.
I could explode my narrative with a bold statement: ‘One day I wake up and I’m an anorexic.’
But that’s not really true, so I could start: ‘One day I wake up and someone tells me that I’m an anorexic. So before, things are fine, I’m just me, and the next day, someone gives me a label, which makes me someone completely different. One day you know me, the next day I’m a presence you hardly recognize.’
I could even contextualize it: ‘I was eighteen when I was labelled anorexic. I was caught up in getting through being a teenager, I was spun out, tongue-tied, I felt displaced, disrupted. I was changing, and anorexia did change me.’
Or, I could take you back to my beginnings. I would start with those pre-memories; the parts of me before the eating disorder took hold. I could say, ‘My tale begins with my childhood. I grew up in my semi-detached house on a northeastern street with my two sisters and my brother and my mum and my dad. My house had a back and front garden and I had a little bedroom with my books and my toys. I was happy and stable. I was what people might term “normal”. At my primary school and my comprehensive school I wore the same uniform as everybody else. I did my homework, I liked boys who didn’t like me back, I had friends; I grew like everybody else did.’
It is hard to locate the right memories for a beginning: to decide which ones are relevant to the overall picture. We always take ourselves back to the start to try and find out why things happened; to try and force some blame into some day or some month or into some half-shaded memory. I don’t find my experience as simple an equation as that. I suppose this is because I have relatively few strong childhood imprints. I cannot put those years on to a film in my head – rerun even a day as if I were living it. I only have blank snapshots, hardly seen through my eyes at all – uninhabitable frames. Thumbing through photo albums I see pictures that show I once smiled and tell me that I existed, but if you took them away, I wonder if I would remember anything much at all. There are flashes of childhood memories, which add themselves into my story, but when I look at the whole they don’t stand out. These are the days of childhood that are blended, or lost, or forgotten about, where the seams of my memory are almost too perfect to be able to dissect and pull apart. There will be times, distinct and clear to others, things that I said (or didn’t say), which they hold firmly in their minds, but which I have stopped up, never to explore again because I didn’t think them significant,
or because they have simply slipped away. In this way, I suppose that my narrative will be incomplete because it cannot tell everything. But in its making it will reveal how I remember: how I build my identity and my history from a handful of images, which shape my understanding of myself as a child, and which I use to try and interpret my adult self; the whys and wherefores of me, now. I could tell you about such memories and you could forge an understanding of me; perhaps it would help.
‘I am on the beach with my bucket and spade by the frosty North Sea. I am squatting by the edge of the shoreline and smiling at the camera, with sand in my hands and grains falling through the cracks between my tiny fingers.’ But the reality is that I can’t remember that sand, that frost, that day, that year. My childhood memory has been fostered by others, those who lived it with me, who brought me up and who have replayed parts of it back to me. And now as I recount it, years will become paragraphs, ages turn to simple numbers and then all of a sudden childhood is over and there are new beginnings on the horizon.
Perhaps, then, I should begin my secret story with an ending, an ending that would explain to you that I have moved beyond this experience and that, ‘Now, after the event, I am something different again. This is a story of recovery and hope. There is a me beyond the thin, absent person reflected in the dictionary definition: “
Anorexia nervosa: absence of appetite of a nervous origin
”.’
This is a definition, anyway, which no one seems to properly understand. A term which obfuscates and closes up something that thrives and survives upon the secrecy it is afforded. This should not be an account of absence and of whispers. It is a story of the presence of something, which strangles and takes hold and manipulates. It is also about finding a centre, and discovering a shape.
This story will also reflect the shape of many people’s lives. As someone with an eating disorder in the UK, I was not one in a million. I was not one in a thousand. I was not one in a hundred. It may be that I was as many as one in sixty.
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It could well be more. And what I experienced may be a part of everyone in some way or another.
If I was so different, strange and alien, then I might find my experience harder to admit – I might find it difficult to present myself in this way – but I know that I am not. It is only because more people have not spoken up about this that it seems like I am telling something extraordinary, something at the edge of our lives and not at the centre.
The theories on anorexia nervosa pile on top of one another; they do not make sense. They contradict and argue over causes and issues and blame. This public fight over our bodies ends up marginalizing many and compartmentalizing others. No wonder the illness did not make sense to me at the time, nor is it clear to many others now. Indeed, through the passage of my experience, I came to lose all understanding of my own centre and my own edges. So people moved me out of
their
centre of things and on to the periphery, because I did not make sense to them either. Telling this story now, I might start to move those boundaries and judgements; that is my hope.
So, I have this story to share and in its telling I break a secret code. In putting down my story into words, I even risk the reinforcement of the messages within that code. I risk that some of those still living inside anorexia, without clear perception, will read messages in my text. Strange as it may sound, it might lead them to try and imitate, even emulate, my behaviour, twisting it to their own needs. But, as with any code – one that appears mysterious from the outside – it needs to be broken to allow those from beyond its boundaries to understand it. Without understanding, it
remains cloaked in myth, and people like me will continue to feel that it is best to be hushed about their lives. And all of this closure will not help the people trapped within the rules of anorexia to get out of it. Nor will it help those on the outside, families and friends and helpless onlookers, to get under the skin of this illness. I want to share my experience with you to shatter the mystery, to take away the clouds of shame attached to it and to talk about it right from the inside as well as the out.
I want to bring this story together. I want to make sense of it. I want to reinhabit it, so that it no longer remains a separate part of me, but one that contributed to me, in the present, to the shape that I am now, and to the shape of the world around me.
