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

Elizabeth had been relieved when Joannie, in her junior year, burst from her cocoon to run for class president, win parts in local plays. Then, in early summer, she went off to Salzburg to the American Institute for Foreign Study. Something happened there. She had written to me that the program wasn’t what she’d hoped for, and that she was “eating far too much.” Elizabeth knows that Joannie was extremely lonely, but beyond that, she isn’t sure what went wrong. She only knows that the daughter who came home wasn’t the emerging butterfly who left.

It was just before Thanksgiving when Joannie confided to her mother that her diet was out of control. The next day the two of them went to the family doctor. “When I saw her stripped, I was appalled. The doctor said she must be anorectic, and I said, ‘What’s that?’ ”

The late August sunshine is strong, but that isn’t the reason Elizabeth shades her eyes with a long-fingered hand. Now, she knows as much as any lay person about anorexia. She has read all the textbooks, all the scholarly articles. She knows that anorectics tend to come predominantly from higher-social-class families, that their parents are described as overprotective, over-concerned and overambitious; that the typical anorectic’s family is dominated by the mother, with the father an emotional absentee.

Elizabeth was forty when Joannie was born, at a time when giving birth at forty was far less common than it is now. Everyone assumed the pregnancy was accidental. “It wasn’t. She was wanted.”

Over the years Elizabeth has had plenty of time to reflect on whether the gap in their ages caused problems, and to examine minutely every facet of her mothering. “Sometimes, when I read about the role of the anorectic’s mother, I see some of my traits described there. But I also see some that are not mine at all.”

Joannie’s troubled relationship with her father hadn’t seemed any worse than the usual frictions between a strict parent and a child entering adulthood. The irrationality of her anorectic behavior—insisting on making elaborate, rich meals, then refusing to eat them, exercising compulsively despite her skeletal frailness—aggravated her father intensely. “I know it hurt him, when she chose to take my name and abandon his,” Elizabeth says. It took years before “he realized that the things that got on his nerves were part of her illness, and he became more loving and pliable.” Joannie had written to me, toward the end, that she and her father were getting along better, “and that’s nice.” By then, she had resumed using his surname.

But there was one other way in which she had rejected him. Both Joannie and I, as girls, had thrown ourselves into obsessive interests. Talking about this trait with Elizabeth, I mention that my Mr. Spock mania had been replaced by an absorption with Israel and Jews. I tell Elizabeth how I’d hoped that Joannie might be Jewish, or at least share my fascination, and how disappointed I’d been when she’d dismissed my outpourings on the subject with a few uninterested sentences.

Elizabeth’s eyes widen. “Joannie never told you that her father was Jewish?”

After the family doctor diagnosed her anorexia, Joannie told him she was anxious about the approach of Thanksgiving, with its compulsory feasting. “He said, ‘Just relax and let your mother make you a turkey sandwich,’ ” Elizabeth recalls.

But Joannie couldn’t relax. She couldn’t sleep. Her refusal to eat and her exhausted state convinced her parents that she needed hospitalization. But Joannie became distraught at the suggestion. They gave her Thorazine to calm her. “We must have given her too much,” Elizabeth says, because by the time they arrived at the emergency room her blood pressure had plummeted. Joannie was admitted for the months-long treatment about which she’d written to me in early 1973.

And so the pattern began that would continue for the next eight years. Joannie thrived in the protected environment of the hospital, gained weight and pulled out of depression. But with each release came relapse. Elizabeth remembered getting Joannie ready to go to Vassar—making the Indian-print bedspread and curtains for the single room she’d wanted, but had written to me that she disliked and found too lonely. “Her balance was precarious—the hope was that she’d find herself if everything went perfectly.”

But it didn’t. And on a weekend trip home she binged, felt guilty and took the overdose of antidepressant she’d written about in her letter of November 1973. She told her parents she’d taken the Tofranil. They rushed her to the bathroom and induced vomiting. Elizabeth was stunned by the amount of food that came up—the magnitude of the binge. Because she’d vomited so much, they thought she’d surely eliminated the drug from her system. “She went to take a nap, and then I couldn’t wake her up,” Elizabeth recalls. And so began the nightmare weeks of emergency room, followed by intensive care, coronary care and psychiatric hospital again.

Joannie realized that she wasn’t psychologically strong enough for Vassar, but the fact that she couldn’t go back threw her into despair. For weeks, Elizabeth said, “She’d just sit with her head in her hands.”

Determined to find the best therapist, the family searched out Hilde Bruch, the eating-disorders specialist in Texas. She remembers the relief with which she left Joannie in Dr. Bruch’s care, feeling that for once she would be safe. Joannie did so well that Elizabeth urged her to stay on in Texas and enroll in university there, so that she could remain close to the therapist. But Joannie chose to come home. Once back, “all the old stresses and temptations” seized her again.

In her long search for answers, Elizabeth has wondered if Joannie’s voices and fears indicated a schizophrenia-like disorder. She feels reasonably sure that fear of growing up and unease with emerging sexuality were a large part of the problem.

Joannie had been just sixteen in the summer of 1971,