Thin Read online

  Grace Bowman

  THIN

  Contents

  Edges and Centres

  PART 1: A View from the Outside

  One

  Two

  Three

  GAME ON

  PLAY

  Four

  Five

  Six

  PLAY ON

  Explanations

  Growing

  Addiction

  Power and Control

  Bearing Witness

  Memory

  PART 2: This Is I

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Perception

  Achievement

  Anxiety

  Outside v Inside

  Categorizing

  PART 3: What Am I Now?

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Turnaround

  PART 4: Stories of Grace

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  PLAY ON

  Nineteen

  Spillover

  PART 5: Finding the Edges

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  PART 6: What Shape Am I?

  Twenty-three

  GAME ON

  Twenty-four

  Voice

  The Passage of Time

  The Shape of Emotions

  PART 7: Finding My Shape

  Twenty-five

  My Story

  My Shape

  A Letter

  Notes

  Recommended Reading

  Directory of Useful Addresses

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THIN

  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

  Edges and Centres

  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.1 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 marginalizin
g 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.

  Part 1

  A VIEW FROM THE OUTSIDE

  One

  The growing-up house was perched on the slope of the hill, facing open landscapes which stretched to Grace’s child’s eye like squares on her drawing paper, plots in the distance, marking out unvisited areas, new imaginings. She sensed the edges of her world as the edges of this quiet, loving space. Her quietness was undisturbed until the birth of her siblings, when textures and colours previously unseen appeared and showed her new possibility. The little house on the hill squeezed in its occupants, sheltering them from the outside, wombing them in its warmth. And as the family grew, more bricks were added and a coat of paint was splashed on the protective walls; an old carpet stretched to fit the growing spaces. The house moved and pulsed and breathed more heavily as each body got bigger within it.

  Three: Grace is taken up the snow-covered hill by Mum who pushes the buggy to and from the small, motionless town. Some days they take the bus; Mum smiles down on her daughter, as they wait in the bus station where northeast accents echo in the dampness. The rain drips down the hood of Grace’s shiny red waterproof mac, along the folds of her eyelids and glides off the edge of her cold nose.

  Baby brother’s arrival confuses Grace’s own sense of specialness, and she sulks with her dark brown ringlets in the corner of the room. Mum and Dad divide up the bedroom with a partition wall, taking over her space for him, with his ringing cries and broad blue eyes. She feels unsure of this new arrival in her perfect little world. He is fed and he is nurtured, and it seems to her that he has no judgements or expectations placed upon him. His delicate fair hair is gentle and light. His lightness matches his mum’s own. Grace watches him closely. He has taken the attention and focus away from her.

  Five: Grace goes to school. She is the first, ahead of the little brother. Gold stars, happy faces, ticks, well done! She is invited to lots of other children’s houses, which do not feel quite like her own warming one.

  ‘Would Grace like to come round and play?’ one mum says.

  ‘I’m sure she would love to. Would you like to?’ Mum tilts her head and smiles. Grace is not sure and scowls back at Mum. She hides behind Mum’s long maroon skirt and nods reluctantly.

  Dad takes her to the door. They knock. Another dad answers. Grace starts to cry. She screams; she cannot go in, she is terrified: ‘Daddy, don’t make me go.’

  Daddy shouts loudly at her in the middle of the street. She doesn’t like it when he shouts because he never usually does. Not at all. But she knows there is always a way out, she should never have to do anything she doesn’t want to – Mummy and Daddy will protect her.

  Mum comes out of the hospital, opens the car door and sits down slowly. Grace jumps up and down on the back seat. Mum is going to have twin babies. Mum and Dad look worried because, even though it is the best, amazing day, life is going to be too expensive with four children. Dad feels sick and can’t eat his fish and chips – they go cold. Grace is happy, though, because it means that she will be special and everyone at school will want to know about the little twin babies. Gold stars, full marks, happy faces.

  Six: Dad walks in the door. ‘It’s twin girls. You are the big sister of lovely baby twin girls!’

  Gran picks her up and swings her around and around, and Grace laughs. ‘Can we have twin boys next week?’ little brother protests.

  Grace tuts at his silliness.

  Eight: The happy-filled, children-filled growing-up house is busy now. There are crying babies and there is a tired mummy. Grace sees Mummy cry and doesn’t like it.

  Grace likes to watch over her little sisters to help Mummy out. They are perfect and soft and gentle and cuddly. She looks at them in their cots and wants them to wake up so she can play with them. She feeds them in their side-by-side high chairs. She makes them fish fingers and beans and puts the plastic spoons into their little mouths and they throw it all back into their red plastic bibs.

  In Grace’s family, there is control. Orange squash is full of sugar and is not good for you. Coke isn’t allowed because it costs too much money and runs out quickly.

  Grace goes to the supermarket with Dad to help him with the shopping. Grace leads the way. She knows a lot. She licks her lips over Lemon Barley Water: ‘Please, Daddy.’

  But Daddy says no. Mum and Dad can’t believe that anyone would feed children with such sugariness. One of Mum’s friends gives her little baby Cadbury’s Buttons – Mum’s mouth drops open.

  Nine: Grace is scared of dogs and roller coasters and most animals and strange places – lots of things. She is an expert at running away, faking illness to escape things that she would not like to do, not in a million years, like going to the dentist or competing in a drama competition, or going for a walk with dogs (even if they are on leads and ‘would never hurt anybody’). The fear grabs her in the tummy and so she stays in her room and hides in her wardrobe and makes up stories, much more exciting than any ride in a fun fair, anyway.

  Grace likes to be the top girl.

  ‘Test me, Mummy, test me on these questions,’ Grace asks.

  ‘Dad, let’s go through a list of all the capitals of all the countries of the world – me first!’

  ‘OK, if that’s what you want, bubs.’ Dad smiles.

  Grace must always be the first person to finish her work at school. She makes sure that she gives a loud sigh as she turns over the final page of her mental arithmetic test and glances up at the other girls who speed against her, just to let them know that she is winning. Grace races to be at the top. She makes some little mistakes but she doesn’t care because as long as she is in the lead then people talk about her. That is what she likes – people to know how good she is. It gives her a buzzy feeling when she is the best.

  Janet and John has been replaced with some new modern books and Grace is on a high level. Not the top level, though. She is annoyed about that. The teacher obviously hasn’t thought it through properly. If Miss knew her better then things would be different. She is not a very good teacher if she doesn’t think about Grace’s ability enough. Gold stars, top marks, happy faces. Tick, tick, tick.

  Ten: Grace makes up plays and always takes the main part: Juliet, Audrey Hepburn, Cinderella. Sometimes in the proper school plays the teachers make her the understudy or the second lead. What do they know? It ma
kes her hurt and cry. They prefer another pretty girl. Secretly, Grace is so jealous that she wants to tear her own hair out. It makes her feel sick that someone else has got her part, and the applause and attention with it. She is happy when it turns out that girl can’t sing too well.

  Grace writes a story about a successful racing driver who is a girl. ‘Formula One Girl’ wins the race and beats all the boys. The moral of the story is that girls are better than boys. Girls had not been allowed to work and make money and be a success, not in the olden days. Grace would like to be successful when she is grown up. Grace is sure that Mum would be happy about that because she is a feminist.

  ‘I’ve decided to start my own business. Smash Fashion. I’ve designed some clothes, and I’m going to make them and then sell them. I’m going to be a fashion designer.’

  Grace holds a coffee morning with her best friend in her big garden to raise money to buy the material to make clothes, but the other Durham mums complain. ‘It’s not ethical for ten-year-old children to keep money from this kind of thing, they must give it to charity.’

  Grace runs up to her friend’s bedroom and cries. ‘It’s my Smash Fashion and it’s my money.’

  She sits on her second-hand bike and longs to ride away – ride away from the mums and the friends and the school and the small city, and realize her big plans.

  Eleven: Grace sits on the concrete steps of her new school. She is surrounded by nervous-looking girls and boys in grey and black uniform. She is glad that the teacher tells the class that they have to, ‘sit with somebody that you don’t know’.

  Grace doesn’t have anybody she wants to sit with, anyway. Her best friend from junior school has found somebody else to be friends with.

  The form teacher pulls her aside. Grace tells the teacher that she isn’t happy and that she doesn’t have any friends, not at this big school. The girls in her class have called her a flirt. She was reading the boys’ palms. One girl pulls her tie, and pulls her hair, and calls her posh. She is not posh. Don’t they all know where her mum and dad come from?