Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

boys”—after which she’d drawn a smiley face—“and the doctors and nurses are all wonderful too. We are kept very busy by all sorts of meetings and activities … and I’m beginning to learn a lot about myself, and a lot about other people too.”

I didn’t know what to make of this. If Joannie had lost too much weight, surely all she had to do was eat more. Why would she have to spend three months in a hospital? How could she take the time, in the middle of her crucial senior year?

In January 1973, I had never heard the words “anorexia nervosa.” The self-starvation that would become an epidemic of female adolescence was still little known in the United States and wasn’t yet discussed at all in Australia.

Like many Australians, I had been raised to be suspicious of neurosis. Ours was the sentiment so perfectly articulated in the movie Crocodile Dundee, when Mick Dundee meets a woman at a New York party who has seen a psychiatrist. Mick, alarmed, assumes she’s crazy. His American girlfriend tries to explain that the woman isn’t mad, she just needed to see a psychiatrist to talk over her problems. “Hasn’t she got any mates?” responds Mick. To an American audience, that’s a gag line. To Australians it’s a sensible query.

My mother, in particular, despised what she considered the navel-gazing of psychotherapy. To her, neurosis was nothing but self-pity indulged until it had run amok. She had mild claustrophobia that made her panic when pulling a sweater over her head. Going into elevators was a penance, yet she forced herself to ride them; she never took the stairs. “You have to fight your fears,” she said.

I had my own neuroses, although I didn’t think of them that way. Whenever our debating team traveled to a competitor school, my first stop was the bathroom, so I could throw up. When I started going out on dates, I threw up during those, too. I had inherited my father’s stage fright, but it was stage fright amplified by the terrible adolescent delusion that I was walking around lit up by a spotlight, and that every gaffe I made was noticed by the whole world.

It would never have occurred to me to try to get help with this. “Stop dwelling on yourself,” my mother said. “Think about how the other person is feeling instead.” My mother also said what always is said to adolescents: “Everyone goes through it. Everyone feels like you do.”

Of course, I didn’t believe her. I certainly didn’t believe that Joannie—my well-traveled pen pal who had recently been elected class president—could be battling the same tide of insecurity that was tugging at me.

I don’t know exactly what I wrote back to Joannie, but I suspect it was something Pollyanaish, with a “look on the bright side” tone. Her reply, on January 23, began brightly in response. “I just finished playing Ping Pong with my favorite one of those ‘nice boys’ you mentioned in your last letter !”

But after a few polite queries about my vacation plans, the facade of cheerfulness soon fell away. “I was accepted last year at Vassar College, and had been planning to go in September ’73. But now I’m not really sure, mainly because of the hospitalization.” In 1973, I had heard of a handful of Ivy League schools—names like Harvard, Yale or Princeton would have meant something to me. I hadn’t heard of Vassar, so the extent of Joannie’s achievement in getting admitted to such a fine college was lost on me. And that meant I also missed an important signal as to the seriousness of her illness: that she was considering passing up such a prize.

“I don’t know if college right away would be the best thing for me,” she wrote. “There’s a lot of talking with everybody to be done.” Some of the talking took place Saturdays and Wednesdays, when Joannie’s parents made the five-hour roundtrip drive from Maplewood to take part in “Family Meetings.” Patients, their relatives and the staff talked about “family difficulties, or problems they have in common, or what have you.”

Over the years, Joannie had written a lot about her brothers and sister, and had warmly mentioned her mother a number of times. But she had never said anything about her father. She had never even told me what he did for a living. It was an odd lacuna in a correspondence as detailed as ours. All I knew was that his work had taken them to live in both Washington, D.C., and Austria for a time.

Now, given the hints she was dropping of family strife, my overactive imagination began conjuring scenarios for its causes. I knew that Austria, in those Cold War days, was a key espionage base for spies operating behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps Joannie’s father was a CIA agent. It would explain her silence on the matter; also, given her left-wing politics, it would account for bitter feeling between them. My theory thrilled me: I rolled it around in my head, thinking up clever questions that would allow me to test it.

Joannie’s next letter mentioned her father, but only in the context of a package I’d sent containing books, bangles, rings and incense. “The incense even my father liked, and usually he hates the smell of it.” (Perhaps because it reminded him of nefarious CIA doings in Southeast Asia?)

It was early March, and Joannie was writing from home: “I am finally out of the hospital and am going to school again. I have been so glad to see all of my friends!” They had thrown a welcome-home party for her. She was glad to be back in school. The class vice-president had been particularly pleased to see her—“he decided he wasn’t cut out for the job of President. As for me, I can hardly wait, I love the job, although it’s a lot of work, but the sense of responsibility is really good for me.” Aside from worrying about