Harriet Brown’s Brave Girl Eating: A Review by Amy Whipple

“I found something better than cutting,” my friend Anne announces over Instant Messenger. In the black-hole moment between when I ask What? and the ping of her response, I consider smoking, drinking, drugs. The big ones. She is sixteen. I am twenty. I have known her since she was three, the younger sister of one of my friends. She’s run away twice in the past few years. Things are, obviously, not good.   She responds with the only action as volatile and violent as her emotions.

“Throwing up.”

***

Harriet Brown‘s elder daughter, Kitty, is fourteen when she is diagnosed with anorexia. Brown’s memoir Brave Girl Eating covers the long eighteen months of Kitty’s recovery.  Though the standard treatment for a teen with an eating disorder is to distance her from her family (the purported problem) in an inpatient environment, Brown and her husband choose instead family-based treatment (the Maudsley approach), which boasts a 90% recovery rate to the traditional 36% recovery rate. Under the guidance of Kitty’s pediatrician and a therapist, the Browns take control of Kitty’s recovery. This means sitting with her through every excruciating meal and snack. It means putting Kitty’s needs ahead of their own and sometimes in front of their younger daughter’s as well. And it means a crash course in what it truly means to have — and to recover — from the most deadly of all mental disorders.

For all the work the family does, Kitty’s recovery continues to elude them; she gains the weight and then grows another inch, another half-inch. Gains more, grows more. They have to find the balance of allowing Kitty to be a fourteen-year-old girl (hey, mood swings!) but at the same time making sure outbursts are not the eating disorder talking.

Brown must also fight against public misconceptions about eating disorders and how contemporary American culture deals with parenting. Are they doing the right thing for their daughter? Are they being ‘helicopter parents’ and impinging on her overall mental health?  And why is mental health care so far behind what science has repeatedly proven?

***

I’m old enough now that most of the little problems in my life and in the lives around me have faded, but that means that the ones that remain grow increasingly harder to deal with.  As with the night I saw my friend Lynn do cocaine for the first time (“I just want to try it this one time, I promise”), I knew that Anne had just sunk her feet into a wet concrete path the moment she confessed to purging. It’s not like I didn’t have other friends who did drugs or wobbled on the line between disordered eating and eating disorders, but the ones for whom this would be a problem that didn’t shake out with the completion of adolescence/college, I knew. I just knew in that lead-gut way that these friends were in for the long fight. It scared the crap out of me then; it fills me with irreconcilable sorrow now.

***

I’ve been reading Brown’s blog, Feed Me!, for a few years now. There, she keeps the reader up-to-date on the latest in eating disorder science, treatment, and the like. Though these things change (not as quickly as we might hope), Brave Girl Eating serves as the connection for those tidbits, bringing them all together in what amounts to a good current base education for a previously uninformed reader, and a convenient collection of information for fans of the blog.

Informative nonfiction is frequently touted as dry and memoirs as self-indulgent, but Brown is neither. Scientific information regarding Kitty’s treatment is organic to the narrative and thus more inherently interesting; Brown and the rest of her family are learning along the way, too. As for the memoir part, Brave Girl Eating is — at its very root — a story of great compassion and strength for another person. Through memoirs both good and bad, readers know what it’s like inside the sufferer’s head — the voice of the eating disorder, the tricks, the transgressions. It’s only here (and if we’re terribly unlucky, in real life) that we see how a disease like anorexia looks from the outside at its most disturbing.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up as the words pour from Kitty’s mouth. No, not from Kitty’s mouth, because this is not Kitty. It’s not my daughter who looks out of those dead eyes, who rocks on the bed, her bone-arms wrapped around her flat chest, who says the same words over and over as if her brain was reduced to a single thought.

***

We could spin our entire lives into nothing but a series of regrets. In this instance, I have two: that while I mailed Anne a campus-health-center pamphlet on bulimia the day after her confession (which she promptly shredded), I did not call her mother. Not then, not in the years that passed, not the summer she starved herself near-skeletal. With Lynn, I know in retrospect that nothing I said or did that night she tried cocaine would have altered the following years. But with Anne–maybe nothing would have changed; maybe everything would be different.

The second regret is perhaps less up for interpretation. During the better part of the recent two years Anne spent in eating disorder wards, I allowed the 3,000 miles between us to actually feel like 3,000 miles. I need to write Anne a letter, send her some music, send her a card or some books — those thoughts so rarely translated into action. The hospital trips, the two text messages I received — I wanted to let you know I tried to kill myself; and don’t worry, I’m okay — were too scary. I, the friend who always listens, who is always there, could not remain that same friend when mortality became a tangible option. This is molten regret.

***

I can’t imagine a review of Brave Girl Eating without the following sentiment: Harriet Brown is one of the bravest writers I’ve ever read. A memoir like this could so easily become a mother-martyr disaster, but it doesn’t. Brown owns her bad days, her frustrations, where she and her husband fall short. She also keeps her daughter out of a similar space, allowing her to be fully a teenage girl, a real person, and not just a victim of anorexia. Most of all, in the world outside the page, she sat there with Kitty — because her heart and science said one thing even though culture said another. “No family’s perfect,” Brown writes. “But maybe they don’t need to be perfect. Maybe they just need to be able to get the job done.”