Three anorexia recovery memoirs: the new Slip and two older ones, How to Disappear Completely and Mirror Mirror Off the Wall.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley (2025)
Tarpley, a journalist and professor, who was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa in childhood, explores what it means to be in a recovery that she deems a “middle place,” not perfect but a healing always in process. Per Alicia Garceau, NPR, Tarpley “examines how shifting from an all-or-nothing recovery approach of her teens and early 20s to one where setbacks are expected and accepted has allowed her to live a full life while continuing to strive for progress.”
Selected Quotes from the Author’s NPR Interview
I left treatment when I was 16 and really did feel like I wanted to be fully recovered. I wanted, in some ways, to be the poster child for that because I’d spent so many of my teenage years just wanting to be the perfect anorexic. But I never really knew what full recovery looked like.
…I started to do some work around restorative narratives, which is this genre that is really looking at how people in communities make meaningful pathways forward in the aftermath of trauma and illness. As I began to slowly reframe my thinking, it enabled me to embrace the imperfections, and it made recovery feel more attainable.
We know people with eating disorders often share the same temperament traits, and one of those traits is perfectionism. There’s a lot of black-and-white thinking, and that can really be detrimental because it feels like, well, if full recovery is perfection, I’m never going to get there, so why even try? In some ways, that push for full recovery can actually leave some people feeling defeated.
II. How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia by Kelsey Osgood (2013)
Osgood wanted How to Disappear Completely to be unlike those anorexia Recovery memoirs that actually come off as “how to’s” for people aspiring to have eating disorders. And thus, states Molly Fischer (The Cut): “She’s written an anorexia memoir that’s largely a critique of anorexia memoirs.”
Eating disorder recovery is possible, asserts Osgood, which she backs up with a statistic: the majority (up to 60%) recover. She counts herself as one of these folks.
Referring to a certain persistent myth possibly attributable to 12-step program beliefs, Osgood adds, “…I personally find the ‘forever recovering’ aphorism fatalistic and disempowering, and I worry that when a person believes it, he or she can continue to endow anorexia with an unnecessary amount of allure and influence. Ultimately, what I object to the most is the constant presentation of this ‘always in recovery’ idea as fact, when it really is in essence a cultural construct.”
III. Mirror Mirror Off the Wall by Kjerstin Gruys (2013)
A recovering anorexic, scholar Gruys had self-described as a “body-image expert with a body-image problem.” So, her self-challenge was to go a year without mirrors and then write about it. Gruys enlisted a good support system, including her therapist, to help her through this.
Abigail C. Saguy, author of What’s Wrong with Fat? “Interspersing this personal account with insights from sociology and psychology research, Gruys shows how her own struggles are taking place within a broader social context, thereby holding up a mirror to contemporary American society. Highly recommended for anyone who has felt herself peering a bit too intently in the mirror.”
