and find a therapist, fast. What she didn’t tell me, what I read for myself later, was that the average length of time for recovery from anorexia is five to seven years. That most people with anorexia bounce in and out of hospitals, recovering and relapsing. That anorexia is the deadliest psychiatric illness; close to 20 percent of anorexics die, about half from starvation and the other half from suicide. Nearly one-fifth of all anorexics try suicide; many succeed.
There was relief in having Kitty’s illness out in the open—on the table, so to speak. But I still couldn’t see the path to recovery. I was numb and terrified; I felt like a block of stone with a tiny crack in one corner. The crack would widen, with stress and time, and the stone would come apart. The only questions were when and how.
Dr. Beth sent us downstairs to the lab for blood work and to check Kitty’s vitals, including her heart. She said she wasn’t too worried because Kitty was a gymnast, and athletes have slow heart rates. I was reassured by her words, though later I learned that anorexia can cause cardiac arrhythmias and heart attacks.* I wondered, later, if Dr. Beth, too, was in denial about how serious Kitty’s illness was. Or maybe she was simply trying not to overload us with terrifying news.
The lab technician lifted Kitty’s sweatshirt, and for the first time in weeks I saw my daughter’s naked chest. The sight made me want to howl. Her skin stretched tightly over her sternum. I could see the arching curve of each rib, each nick and indentation of her collarbone. Her elbows were bowling balls set into the middle of her matchstick arms. She looked like a concentration camp victim, right down to the hollow, hopeless look on her face. My bright, beautiful daughter lay broken on the table, her eyes dull, her hair lank. I could not bear it.
And then the tech smiled at Kitty and exclaimed, “You’re so nice and slim! How do you keep your figure?”
If I’d had a gun in my hand, I swear I would have pulled the trigger.
My daughter closed her eyes and turned her face to the wall. This wasn’t the first compliment she’d gotten on her slenderness, just the most inappropriate. That spring, strangers stopped us on the street all the time, wanting to tell Kitty how attractive or darling or stylish she was. In a shop one afternoon where I was trying on clothes, the saleswoman turned to Kitty and said, “Aren’t you lucky—you got the thin genes!”
Every one of these comments made my skin crawl. Yet how could I protest, when people were just, as the tech insisted later, trying to be friendly, offering a compliment? What could I say, when I, too, liked to be told that I looked thinner, prettier, sexier?
That night, after Kitty’s diagnosis, I spent hours online and came away bleary-eyed and confused. The next day I called a therapist I knew, retired now, but who’d treated eating disorders for many years, and asked for her advice.
“Anorexia and bulimia and cutting, problems like that, are always about the great crisis in a teenager’s life, the onslaught of sexual feelings,” she told me. “Anorexia is a way to stay small, to not grow. It reflects a teenager’s conflict about growing up. It’s not about the food.”
Just about every parent of an anorexic hears this somewhere along the line: It’s not about the food. And the next comment is usually something like So don’t make an issue out of her not eating/binging/purging/fill in the blank. It’s a hell of a mixed message. Kitty’s illness wasn’t about the food, but we had to try to get her to eat. It wasn’t about the food—but she was starving to death.
Though I respected my friend the therapist and her years of experience, her words made no sense to me. With each day that passed Kitty was disappearing, mentally as well as physically. She was hysterical, emotional, fragile. She couldn’t think straight, couldn’t sustain simple conversations, let alone express or “work through” feelings. If it wasn’t about the food, then why was she so irrational about eating? Why, then, would a relatively innocuous comment from one of us—“Kitty, have another bite of pasta”—send her rushing from the kitchen, screaming and crying?
If it wasn’t about the food, what was it about? I didn’t care. What I really wanted to know was, How was Kitty going to get better? She