Mallary Tenore Tarpley on writing about eating disorders and navigating ‘the middle’ in recovery

 Sometimes places can inhabit our past, but that doesn't mean they need to invade our present. That is an important motto that I carried through with me during this process. I'll just say that there were times when I would be writing about something and I would find myself slipping.

So I talk a lot in the book about just normalizing slips in the recovery process. And sometimes I had these moments where I could see myself slipping. There was this very real moment of slippage when I was writing about my experiences binge-eating in college, and I found that as I was writing about that experience, I ended up binge-eating. I thought, I need to be really careful that I don't fall into this trap of reengaging in behaviors just for the sake of feeling like I can access those behaviors more and write about them in a clearer way.

I needed to really try to recognize that about myself, that the eating disorder remains a vulnerability and that I could get into really risky territory if I let myself think that I needed to recreate these behaviors in order to write about them accurately. So that was something I had to be very cognizant about and also kind of give myself grace in those moments where I did have slips.

 When I was in my late 20s, I was director of this very small nonprofit called Images and Voices of Hope. At the time, I was tasked with essentially helping journalists to tell what we called restorative narratives.

These were stories that showed how people in communities were making meaningful pathways forward in the aftermath of illness or trauma or tragedy. And so often in media we hear about the trauma or tragedy, and then a lot of times we move on to the next story. Maybe we get a couple little follow-up stories sprinkled in, or maybe a journalist goes back and looks at the one-year anniversary of a particular trauma or tragedy, but so often those messy middles are overlooked.

Those sort of times [are] when people are trying to figure out: “What does progress look like, and how do I navigate the day-to-day in the aftermath of something that just feels like it tore my whole world apart?” Somewhere along the way… I recognized that this could be a really helpful framework for my own story, because for so long I had told people that I was fully recovered from my eating disorder. But in my late teens and throughout my 20s, I actually had been struggling quite a lot with the effects of a relapse, and yet I was too afraid to admit that narrative, and I didn't really think that I could share that publicly, partly because so many of the narratives and books that we hear and see and read on eating disorders are written from the perspective of people who are fully recovered, such that it can make people who aren't feel as though their narratives are either not worthy of being shared or not really safe to share, because it can feel very stigmatizing if you're in this middle place.

So I decided that I wanted to think about this restorative narrative framework and apply it to my own narrative, which is then when I came up with this term, the “middle place.” I am interviewing lots of people for the book, [and I] realized that there are so many people in this middle place. For so long, I thought I was the only person because I didn't see others writing about it.

But of the 700-plus people I surveyed who have lived experience with an eating disorder, 85% said they could relate to it. So there was something there. But there was a disconnect between the sort of populous nature of this place and the actual media coverage and literature that we see about eating disorders.

In some ways [it] felt like an act of courage, too, because our society tends to prefer narratives with protagonists who prevail and who triumph over their disorders. But I really don't like the tidy narrative. I'm much more drawn to these messy narratives because I think ultimately they're more relatable. They help people feel seen and heard. And ultimately I think they can encourage other people to be more open and honest about where they're actually at with their recovery.

 The definitions are all over the map, which, from a research perspective, makes it really hard to compare data across studies. It's also why it can be really difficult to say definitively that X percentage of people actually fully recover, because everyone's definition of full recovery looks a little bit different. So that can certainly make it confusing, not just for researchers, but for people with lived experience who are trying to figure out: “What does full recovery actually mean, especially when you live in a society like ours, which is really steeped in fatphobia and diet culture?” There's even this term called “normative discontent,” which was coined by some researchers who found that the vast majority of people in our society have some level of discontent with [their] bodies.

So when we know that that sort of is more the norm than the exception, what does that even mean then to fully recover? For me it was an indication that, one, we need a lot more language around recovery. We can't have it be so black-and-white, which it very much has been in the eating disorder field where you're either sick or you're fully recovered. And two, we need to be able to give a voice to people in this place so that they don't feel so ashamed and stigmatized. 

The memoirist in me wanted to seek answers and to be able to empathize with him more. So I ended up talking with him and asking him questions about that experience. [I] asked tough questions like, “Why didn't you recognize that I needed more care and love and attention during that time in our lives?” And in hearing his side of the story, I could understand him a lot better. So I chose in that particular part of the book to actually frame it as a dialogue, so that the reader could hear my questions and my father's responses. That felt like a way of being really fair and also helping my father to have a voice in the book. 

Because I involved him so much in the process, when it came time for him to read the book, I think he felt like there weren't any surprises, and he really liked the book. And that was important to me, to be able to share that initial draft with him.

 We just societally aren't really accustomed to talking about the process of how we got to where we are. It's much easier to simplify narratives over time and to just say, “Well, I had this in the past, here's what it looked like, but I'm better now.” And we sometimes skirt over that middle part of the narrative.

As journalists, we don't necessarily always ask about that middle. We are more interested in the extremes, but it's in that middle that we find meaning, and it's in that middle that we can really get clarity around who someone is. Around what strength looks like for them. Around what hardship looks like for them. What resilience looks like.

So I always encourage journalists to think about these questions of how did you get from point A to point B? Or what was that like? Or how do you describe your recovery? Or what were some of the small moments for you that illustrated recovery? 

Very often we tend to think in more grandiose terms where we say, “What was the turning point that led to your recovery?” And for many of us with eating disorders and other mental health struggles, there was not necessarily one big turning point. Oftentimes it is just this slow accumulation of baby steps, but there are moments maybe that were pivotal in some way, shape, or form, and so being able to get a little bit more granular with our questioning and asking, “Tell me about a time when you recognized that you made a choice in service of recovery. What did that look like? Share the details of that with me. Walk me through that moment.” And really trying to tighten our questioning and going deep so that we can understand more about the messiness.