If you didn’t know, when you’re writing a book proposal for querying agents and publishers, you need to craft what’s known as a Comparative Literature section, where you list and describe other books like yours in your field. I am pages deep into the proposal experience, and had some difficulty with choosing from the insane amounts of eating disorder memoirs, let alone food memoirs or memoirs with similar structure or themes.

Luckily I have found a few and this is the first of them I will recount, briefly, in case you are interested in this type of thing :}

going hungry: writers on desire, self-denial and overcoming anorexia, edited by kate taylor (2008), is a collection of essays written by professionals in the writing and publishing industry who have also had the experience of struggling with anorexia. I imagine, as the editor is a writer for Slate and The New Yorker, that these were people she met over the years and got to know during her time in the profession. I find it incredibly interesting that all of these authors both have this eating challenge and are professional writers.

The first essay is written by kate, the editor, and was the one that really pulled me into the book. In this, she recounted her desire to be in the hospital, be taken care of, how her illness functioned to serve this need–a story that I felt I carried alone in my experience with anorexia. So much of the external behavior of patients is one of rebellion and resistance, so I hid this desire to be hospitalized for a very long time, ashamed of it, or at least feeling very, very different from these peers I was supposed to have the same disorder as. Needless to say, her words and description of this was like beauty unfolded before my eyes, almost like a whisper calling me forward to also share my story.

She also recounted her experience with the extreme discomforts of feeling full, and the almost spiritual euphoria of being empty, and although it is not the first time I’ve seen writings on this from other journeyers, the way she described her perceptions felt like reading my own thoughts. Again, through reading I felt that suddenly I was not alone in what I thought was my own weird, shameful sub-section of anorexia or whatever it was that I had since it didn’t seem the same as others who were vocalizing their experience.

I wasn’t as pulled into the stories by the other writers in the collection–I felt as if kate taylor’s voice most matched my experience and therefore moved me deeply to read. Yet the topics each writer brought up were intriguing, revealing and honest. Most appreciated was the lack of “I’m all recovered and perfect now” stories–many were stories of how they had overcome the threatening extremes of their struggle, but still to this day were challenged by their relationship with food and their bodies.

I also appreciated that there were a few male voices in this book, as it is still so very rare to read the male experience of anorexia, despite our growing awareness that males are very much affected. In his essay, Hungry Men, John Nolan describes how although there may be some particular factors contributing to males and eating disorders, the central issue is similar no matter what gender–the “desire for control and a deep fear of what its loss would mean.” In his essay he describes this existential and mysterious undertow that takes over the lives of those with anorexia, and that urges them to take part in extremes most people would not dare to.

In Trisha Gura’s essay, The Voice, I appreciated her discussion about how those without normal motivations to eat–those with confused and sensitive appetite signals which many with anorexia struggle with–how we muster motivations to eat, especially in cultures rewarding thinness. This is such a great topic, how to “recover” in a world that is basically trying to lose weight and hate/change their bodies all of the time!

There are many things I could say about the other essays in this book, but overall I would say it is worth a read if you want to understand the complexities of dealing internally with anorexia. The layers and reasons and hidden struggles and day to day managing as one finds themselves in middle age in “kind-of” recovery, all of these are explored with different voices in this book. It is not a book to read if you want to hear heroic battle-and-win stories, nor is it gleamy and sun-shiney. It is real, and lets you peak into the lives of real people struggling with this strange and mysterious drive called anorexia. It is also a book that you might want to read if you have felt alone, and some shame around not being “recovered enough”–it may provide solace to you, as it did for me, that there are others out there thinking deeply, trying hard and yearning for life just as much as you.