Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

by Carrie Brownstein

Everyone read something from their journal about my mother. As I listened I sensed that within this configuration of fellow patients my mother was a known entity, she felt cared for and safe, seen. But I was outside the circle. My mother was a stranger to me. My sister was eager to be a part of whatever form my mother was taking on; she melted, molded herself to the dynamic. I didn’t want to engage with the illness; the anorexia was what was taking my mother away. I was surprised to find that I was such a focus of the narrative in the room, my mother’s desire to be closer to me, my feistiness and anger and alienation a piece of some puzzle I couldn’t see the edges of. Everyone was sobbing, including my father. It was the first time I’d seen him cry. It was like an irrigation system, each person a sprinkler, all watering the room with their tears. I felt drenched, soggy. I wanted everyone to be stronger, to embrace the stoicism I was perfecting. I judged. These weak women and their diseases. Eat already, or stop eating. Get it together! The fragility was suffocating, the dysmorphia so pronounced it made my head hurt. The two-dimensional anorexics and the three-dimensional claymation overeaters—no matter the size of their own sense of insubstantiality, each had taken on the form of her disease. It made me hungry and empty, too, but not for food. I was hungry for family, for strength, for wholeness. On the day my mom was released from the hospital, we stopped at a grocery sto...

This might be the best passage in the book.