at these thighs. It’s a wonder I don’t break the chair.
Food as an object of fear and loathing is a strangely seductive idea. Which reminds me of a Yiddish folk tale I heard as a child, about a miser, a miserable old coot who kept a dog to protect the gold coins hidden under his mattress. Being a miser, he was always looking for ways to spend less. One day he had a brilliant idea for how to save money; each week, he would feed his dog a little less than the week before, so the dog would get used to eating less, bit by bit. He did just that. Each week the dog became weaker and hungrier. Eventually the miser stopped feeding the dog altogether, and not too long afterward, the dog keeled over, dead. And the miser lamented: Just when I’d trained him to live on nothing at all, he had to up and die on me!
I realize how deeply we as a culture have fallen for the notion that food is a regrettable necessity. As if the ideal, the holy grail we are all working toward, is to do without food altogether—and as if we not only should but could attain this state, were we good enough, determined enough, strong enough. As if that’s what we should want.
So I tell Kitty no bargain; she has to eat a piece of cake. We all have to eat a piece of cake. Still, I’m shocked when she does, spending half an hour over a small slice of dense chocolate ganache. Afterward she weeps in my arms. “That was scary, Mommy!” she cries.
When Kitty was four, she scrambled onto the back of an enormous quarter horse for a walk around an indoor ring. When the horse reared, she held on without a sign of panic. I asked later if she’d been scared. “Not really,” she said. “Can I ride again?”
This is the child who is now terrified by a slice of chocolate cake.
Later that night I prowl the house, unable to sleep. I pad into Kitty’s room and lean over her bed, wanting to see her face relaxed even a little, free of the shadow that haunts it when she’s awake. She stirs at my approach, rolls her head from side to side, and says clearly, “Make it go away.” Her eyes are squeezed tight, her mouth drawn down in a rictus of pain. Physical pain? Emotional pain? I have no way to know.
Make it go away. The shadow is always with her now, even in sleep.
The next day, I decide to run errands before heading to work. For the last month and a half, everyday life in our house has pretty much stopped; the only trips we’ve taken lately have been to the grocery store and the doctor’s office. Emma needs new shoes and a haircut, but she says she doesn’t want to go out with me this morning. “I need some time to myself,” she says, blowing the bangs out of her eyes. I know what she means: time in the house without Kitty (who’s at work with Jamie), or the endless discussions about food that seem to take up every waking moment these days. I kiss the top of her head and lock the door behind me.
At the library, I pay for a stack of long-overdue books, then force myself over to the new books section—not that I have the time or the energy to read. But I always cruise the new books at the library, and right now I’m hanging on to any shred of life as it used to be. As I stand unseeing in front of the New Nonfiction shelf, one title jumps out at me: a book called Eating with Your Anorexic, by Laura Collins.
This book is not like those despairing memoirs I couldn’t read. It’s written by the mother of a fourteen-year-old with anorexia, who was dismayed at the treatment options offered; she found another treatment, one I haven’t heard of before. I read the whole book, sitting on the floor in the library, and by the time I’m done I have a glimmer of real hope for the first time.
That night I spend hours online, digging up everything I can find on family-based treatment for anorexia. FBT—or, as it’s often known, the Maudsley approach—draws on the work of Salvador Minuchin, who more or less developed family therapy in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s. Minuchin discovered that when he treated anorexic teens with