All she wanted to do was stop time. Stop time to get every last second with her mother. She couldn’t imagine growing up without her mom; she wanted to stay small forever. Mallary Tenore Tarpley’s mother passed away after three years of battling breast cancer. Tarpley couldn’t comprehend not having her mother and wanted to stay in the same 11-year-old body that her mother last saw her in.
She began eating smaller meals and just one year later was admitted to the Boston Children’s Hospital, where she was diagnosed with anorexia. Now an assistant professor of practice in the School of Journalism and Media, she wrote her memoir, “Slip,” to highlight the middle place in recovery, when a person is not fully recovered and has “slips” that might lead them back to their disorder. This month, “SLIP” won a PROSE award for Excellence in Biological & Life Sciences.
“I want people to be able to read the book and say, ‘Oh, there’s another way I could be thinking about my recovery as a middle place,’ and what would it mean to actually exist in this middle place, not with shame, but with acceptance,” Tarpley said.
After being told her eating disorder was just a passing phase, Tarpley said it was a relief to finally be diagnosed and receive care and attention. But for many of her teenage years, she grappled with recovery and experienced being in and out of the hospital.
“I continued to tell people that I was fully recovered because I was ashamed to admit that I wasn’t,” Tarpley said.
She always knew she wanted to write a book, starting the iterations of her memoir in high school. It was not until she received her Master’s in Fine Arts in creative nonfiction that Tarpley began writing a book that would blend both her personal experiences and reporting.
“I realized that, actually, this book could be really effective if I were to take a more honest and authentic approach to writing it as someone who is in recovery in an ongoing way, and as someone who’s not recovered,” Tarpley said. “I think that is what partly distinguishes this book from other books.”
When reporting on eating disorders, Tarpley surveyed over 700 people and conducted 175 interviews. She learned about people who had eating disorders who were in larger bodies, people who struggled due to their culture, and people who were in their 70s who were still struggling. Tarpley said that through her interviews, she wanted to break the stereotype of eating disorders only affecting white, affluent girls who wanted to be skinny.
“I want this book to create awareness around the fact that eating disorders don’t discriminate and they don’t have a look,” Tarpley said.
She also interviewed multiple clinicians and researchers to understand how treatment has changed since she was diagnosed in the 1990s. According to the National Institutes of Health, eating disorders alter the brain’s processes, which can trap a person in a vicious cycle of unhealthy behaviors.
“I realize now that when I was sick, I was really competing not just against my body but also my brain, which had really sort of fallen into this pattern of reinforcing some of my restrictive behaviors,” Tarpley said. “So all of that just gave me a much more comprehensive understanding of eating disorders.”
Over 30 million Americans will struggle with eating disorders, according to the National Eating Disorders Association. The word “slip” has a negative connotation in the eating disorders world because of how slips are associated with reverting to one’s unhealthy habits. Tarpley said she was actually told to change the name of her book; however, to her, it was important to spread awareness that recovery is not black and white, and it’s OK to fall back into those past habits.
“(When I slip) I try to talk about the slip with someone I trust, and then think ‘OK, how do I get back up now, not tomorrow, not next week, but now,” Tarpley said. “Years ago, I would have slipped, and then I would have thought, ‘Well, I blew it,’ so then I would just keep slipping. But now I sort of recognize that slips happen from time to time, and rather than berate myself, I look at those as just a normal part of the recovery process.”
Through her research, Tarpley said she learned that eating disorders are not taught about in medical schools or in universities in general. She hopes to bring awareness about eating disorders so that more people can receive treatment and learn more about them.
“No one’s really claiming studies of these disorders, and we find that a lot of people who end up researching and treating eating disorders are people who have lived through experiences themselves because they realize there’s a need for more conversations, more treatment, more research on eating disorders,” Tarpley said.
In her book, Tarpley took the approach of writing each chapter with two perspectives: her own experience with her eating disorder and the research side of the disorder. Her research consisted of both her own reporting and reading published research.
“I felt like this approach really helped me to think about how my present-day self could be in conversation with my younger self, and it also gave me a lot of breathing room to go really deep into the personal narrative in the first part of each chapter, and then to go really deep into the reporting in the second half of each chapter,” Tarpley said.
This year, Tarpley is the same age that her mother passed away 29 years ago. Tarpley said that growing older and aging are gifts and something she is grateful for. She said she feels lucky to be able to move through recovery, as her mother was never able to recover from her own sickness, and she uses her book to honor her mother’s memory.
“For so long, I fell into the trap of diet culture and thinking I needed to stay small, and now I’m always looking for ways to take up more space,” Tarpley said. “I also think about how I can just embrace who I am and what I look like naturally, without feeling like I need to lose weight or that I need to do something to change the way that I look.”
