When Mallary Tenore Tarpley lost her mother at 11 years old, she wanted to stop time. If growing up meant living without her mother, then she wanted to stay small forever.
What started as little acts of grief, like restricting her intake of food, turned into a full-blown eating disorder. A year later, Tenore Tarpley was admitted to Boston’s Children’s Hospital.
In her new book, “Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating-Disorder Recovery,” Tenore Tarpley, now a writing professor at UT -Austin, catalogs her childhood struggles with anorexia to her present-day experiences grappling with recovery.
She joined Texas Standard to talk about her experience. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Mallary Tenore Tarpley
Texas Standard: You take care to note that “Slip” is a restorative narrative rather than a redemptive one. Could you say more about what you’re driving at and why is that distinction so important to you?
Mallary Tenore Tarpley: I think our society tends to prefer what I call redemptive narratives, which are stories with people who triumph over their disorders. And a lot of books on eating disorders are written from the perspective of people who are fully recovered.
But my own personal narrative is not redemptive because I haven’t overcome my disorder. I’m far better than I ever thought I’d be, but my disorder does remain a vulnerability, and I still contend with slips and setbacks.
So I tend to think of my own story as being much more of a restorative narrative. And restorative narratives really look at how people are making meaningful progress forward and they explore the messiness of recovery without sugarcoating hard truths.
How did you find yourself in the throes of anorexia? I have heard stories of people sort of driven to some ideal of body perfectionism or something along those lines, but this seems to be coming from a different sort of place.
For me, developing anorexia was never about trying to be skinny or about losing weight. It, in many ways, was about trying to gain some semblance of control in the aftermath of my mother’s death.
And it was also about staying small. I conjured up this idea that maybe if I stayed the same size my mother was when she was alive, I could somehow be closer to her. And so food restriction became this warped form of time travel and, of course, the irony is that I thought that eating disorder would help me to be closer to my mother, but in fact it left me feeling farther than ever from her and left me feeling more out of control than ever.
I think we often have a limited cultural understanding of what an eating disorder looks like or how it manifests. Where did the alarm start to go off for you or members of your family or your friends?
For a while, my father and I really didn’t know that I was struggling with an eating disorder. In my mind, I thought that people with anorexia did not eat anything at all and I was still eating something. And when we had gone to my pediatrician at the time, my pediatrician did not know about eating disorders and thought that I was just going through a passing phase, as he called it.
And it wasn’t until I really started experiencing pretty severe physical complications that my father realized that Boston Children’s Hospital had a whole unit that specialized in eating disorders and he then took me to the hospital and they admitted me that same day because they realized I was in need of critical care.
I know that there are parents that must be listening right now, maybe younger people, who are wondering, how do I know when behavior crosses the line into a disorder?
There are real clear warning signs for one, certainly physical indicators.
So if there is general fatigue, if someone is losing hair alongside weight loss… Also we know that eating disorders affect not just the body, but also the mind. And so it can be very quickly something that spirals where a child or an adult begins to think that their whole identity revolves around the way that they look and what they eat.
When you begin to see the eating disorder or even just these disordered behaviors start to take over someone’s identity and dictate all of their choices, that’s a very clear warning sign that they are going to need some sort of help.
How do we discuss eating disorders with our kids? And, by the way, is it misguided to think that we should somehow serve as healthy role models for our kids?
It’s something I think a lot about as the mother of a nine-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son. And I think that for a long time, parents were often blamed, especially mothers, for children’s eating disorders.
And fortunately, there’s a lot of genetic research out right now showing that eating disorders are sometimes caused by genetic factors and parents don’t categorically cause eating disorders. And yet we know parents can still influence children’s thoughts around food and bodies.
So for me, it’s been really important to begin talking with my children about my own experiences with an eating disorder. And I don’t go deep into the weeds because they’re so young. I keep it somewhat general, but I let them know that I didn’t do such a good job taking care of my body when I was younger. And that led me to be sick. And if they’re ever in a position, where they feel like they’re not treating their bodies with respect, I want them to come talk to me.
And I think opening up those avenues for conversation is really important. And also thinking about the fact that we are never going to be perfect in terms of modeling healthy behaviors, but there are some small steps that I think we can take.
And for me, that has meant not labeling foods, for instance, as good or bad, because a lot of times kids tend to think in black and white and. They might then ascribe moral values to food in terms of thinking, well, I must be bad if I eat “bad foods.” So I try to avoid those labels.
What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions about eating disorders?
In many ways, I fit the stereotypical mold of someone with an eating disorder in that I’m a woman, I’m white, I live in a smaller body, I’m middle to upper class. And this is partly why I interviewed so many people for the book, because I wanted to include others who don’t look like me. Because we know that people of all different sizes and races and ethnicities and genders and ages do struggle with eating disorders. But because they don’t fit the stereotypical mold, they don’t always get the treatment that they need.
I looked at some research that found that doctors are significantly less likely to ask BIPOC or transgender people about eating disorder symptoms, despite statistics showing that eating disorders are prevalent in these populations. There’s also research looking at the fact that many people who struggle with eating disorders, including anorexia, are not clinically underweight.
And so all of this is exacerbated by the fact that medical doctors receive about zero to two hours of training on eating disorders in medical school and in residency. So there are a lot of misconceptions and a lot of times people can get overlooked and remain undiagnosed because there’s not as much awareness in the medical community about who does and doesn’t need help.
What would you say to someone who might have struggled with disordered eating in the past, and they want to read your book, but perhaps fear they might struggle with a slip of their own?
I thought a lot about triggers as I was writing this book. And “trigger,” of course, is a subjective word because what triggers one person may not trigger another.
But I was very careful not to include certain things like numbers in terms of weight. I never included numbers around how much I weighed or how my weight changed, and I never glamorized the disorder. Sometimes in literature, there can be this glamorization of an eating disorder and that can lead people to really begin to think more positively about the disorder or to fall back into disordered behaviors.
And so for me, as I wrote this book, I thought a lot about this and decided to make recovery a throughline of the book. So rather than just confining recovery to the final chapter of the book, I wanted people to be able to read it and think about the fact that recovery is never perfect, and there are going to be slips and setbacks, but it is still possible.
I’m curious, do you feel free of this? Do you feel like this is a weight that you carry with you as a kind of a burden? How are you today and how do you navigate, given that this doesn’t have the happy ending with a bow on it?
I don’t feel free of the disorder. I think five years ago, 10 years ago, I would have had a hard time grappling with that reality. But it is something that still is part of my life, but it no longer defines my life. It no longer defined my identity.
I like to think that I still live with the imprints of my disorder, and if there’s something really challenging that happens in life, I find myself still thinking about disordered behaviors and sometimes I have to really try hard to stop myself from engaging in them.
Part of what’s been empowering for me in writing this book is recognizing that reality and speaking truth to it, because I think for many recovery can be ongoing. And in some ways, I equate it to grief. I don’t think there’s ever going to be closure for me as I think about the loss of my mother. But the weight of that grief has lightened over time, and I would say the same is true for my eating disorder.
It used to feel like this huge burden to carry, and now it’s still there, but I can walk more freely and continue to move forward in my recovery.