When I was in high school, I was put into the hospital to recover from anorexia nervosa and cardiomyopathy (heart damage).

Four hospitals, two intensive care wards, and five weeks later, I finally came home.

1. The book Elena Vanishing, by Elena Dunkle and Clare B. Dunkle, gives a better understanding of the background of eating disorders and many reviewers are impacted by the book’s vital message. Many people are unaware of the background of eating disorders. Women are more likely than men to develop an eating disorder and they usually develop in.
2. Seventeen-year-old Elena is vanishing. Every day means renewed determination, so every day means fewer calories. This is the story of a girl whose armor against anxiety becomes artillery against herself as she battles on both sides of a lose-lose war in a struggle with anorexia.

Elena Vanishing Elena and Clare B. Chronicle, $17.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4521-2151-2. In a raw memoir, Elena Dunkle, writing. Elena Vanishing. By Elena Dunkle and Clare B. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2015. Edited by Ginee Seo. Companion memoir to Hope and Other Luxuries. A memoir about adolescent anorexia nervosa. My daughter Elena makes her debut as an author. Our book, Elena Vanishing, tells the story of her struggles with adolescent anorexia nervosa.

Did I think I had a problem?

Absolutely not.

Did I have a problem?

Absolutely.

My eating disorder began the very minute I was violently raped at the age of thirteen.

I hid that rape deep inside myself and tried to control away the rage and shame. I controlled myself almost to the point of death.

After the hospitalization, it took me another three years to face my illness and trauma and start to do the very difficult work of recovery. By then, my illness had spiraled out of control and damaged every aspect of my life. It ruled me so completely that even six months of fulltime treatment didn't budge it. I had to work on my recovery for a solid year before I started to see a little progress.

ELENA VANISHING is the story of my life with trauma and with this insidious and deadly eating disorder.

Half of the book describes my descent, step by step, into behaviors so severe that they almost ended my life twice. The other half describes my efforts to recover: an incredibly complex journey into the unknown, filled with twists and turns, false starts, and dead ends.

Every single episode described along the way is true, to the very best of my and my family's memories.

My mother, Clare B. Dunkle, and I wrote ELENA VANISHING together. She is a published author of award-winning teen fiction.

Her name is on the title page of my memoir because, even though I did the bulk of the remembering, she's the one who did the bulk of the writing.

The memoir was my idea. It took me years to talk my mother into helping me.

For years, I wanted this book more than I wanted anything else. The experience I was living through didn't match the experiences in the books I read. The memoirs I read either seemed to glorify eating disorders or seemed to focus only on the rosiest, most hopeful side of recovery. The truth as I lived it was more complicated than either of those two extremes.

Nothing about eating disorders is simple.

But I couldn't write this book on my own. Saying the words, describing details, remembering snippets, answering questions, even writing paragraphs . . . okay. But the thought of sitting in front of the keyboard for the entirety of the book from beginning to end, watching the words march onto the computer screen at a painfully slow, steady pace, immortalizing my indiscretions, failures, vulnerabilities, self-hatred, fears, and destruction in a series of cold, neutral Word documents—it would have been impossible.

It took me six and a half years to say I was raped.

Not even to describe it. No, just to say the sentence took me six and a half years. Six and a half years, four schools, two countries, six therapists, three psychiatrists, two treatment centers, four hospitals, two thousand three hundred and seventy-two days, fifty-six thousand nine hundred and forty hours, three million four hundred and sixteen thousand four hundred minutes to say that sentence to my parents over the phone and hang up. It took even longer to let other people discuss in it therapy. Longer still to say the hows and when and whys.

What's inside this book are my words, my descriptions, my feelings, my memories, my pain, my fears, my inside look at a world that has lost me many friends and that I have been judged for my entire adult life.

Elena Vanishing Chapter Summary

This book is the purest, truest definition of those years and myself as I lived them. Without my mother, it would never have seen the light. It would still be racing violently through my head, waking me up every night, whispering softly in my ear, reminding me in spurts and flashes that my past still dictates my life and it will forever. I scooped it up and threw it out, and my mother took the bits and pieces and glued together the perfect picture of who I am.

Last month we reviewed the amazing memoir Elena Vanishing, co-authored by Elena Dunkle and her mother Clare Dunkle. We recently had the opportunity to interview Elena and she shared with us some of her thoughts on body image issues and the media impact on young adults. Hp officejet k7103 printer driver download for windows 10.

GeekGirl World: How do you feel about the “dadbod” hashtags that is so popular on the Internet now? A lot of women are trying to get the “mombod” hashtag trending. Do you think that is an effective way to combat the double standard in body images for men and women in the media?

Elena Dunkle: I answered a similar question recently, and I will summarize what I said there as well. I think I feel somewhat uneasy about the current viral media positivity. There is a proven link between health and weight. And focus should be less on becoming accepting of all body types and instead be more on proper education of health in relation to nutrition and exercise. I definitely do agree that breaking very selective ideals of beauty is important. But it can be a very short-term solution to purely celebrate everyone without educating them.

When I was at my lowest weight, I was the most confident and happy about my body than I ever had or have been. The doctors told my parents I was mere weeks away from death. I would have not wanted someone to come up to me then and tell me that I was healthy and perfect the way I was. Because I would have died. Both my parents and my doctors showed me love during that time in a very firm and tough way. And I was hurt by it then. But the gift they gave me through standing up for my health first, was the gift of life that I am still blessed to be enjoying five years later.

Loving yourself and others means genuinely and sincerely wanting what is best for them. And sometimes that can mean being tough and honest to yourself or your loved one.

I would rather have an environment that celebrates proper health than makes sure no one is subjected to any criticism. Being in an honest and tough love environment saved my life.

GGW: Do you feel the media is to blame for body image issues and body shaming among young women and teens?

ED: I personally do not feel that the media itself is to blame for body image issues by the way that models are portrayed. Humans have had an ideal beauty standard throughout all of history, and that has not changed. But I do believe that the utter access teens have to every corner of the internet can set them up to be ridiculed and judged much more easily. When I was a young teenager, I had no pressure to constantly photograph and upload my life to social media sites because they did not exist. So any silly thing I wore or did are lost in the sands of time. Unlike teenagers today who are subjected to massive amounts of bullying and stigma for anything remotely different or silly.

That constant pressure could make a lot of insecurities come to a head very easily. I think parents need to be aware of those environments on the internet when their children are online, and adults need to learn when to disconnect from such a critical eye.

GGW: What advice would you give to a young woman or teen struggling with anorexia? And what advice would you give their parents, particularly their mothers in helping them battle the disease?

ED: It is hard to say that my advice to a young woman or teen would be any different than the advice I would want to give to any person of any gender of any age struggling with anorexia. This is a powerful, deadly disease than can touch anyone and the stigma surrounding eating disorders makes it very difficult to seek help or be open about it.

Elena Vanishing Movie

And to anyone struggling at this moment I would say: The pain you are feeling now will never go away by pushing it deeper and hiding it. Seek out an authoritative figure you can trust and let them carry some of that weight. The anxiety and symptoms will get worse early on in the recovery process but the longer you wait to deal with anorexia, the more long-term physical damage you will cause to your body. Let professionals help you find the source of your pain that triggered your eating disorder, try to break your cycle of self-hatred early on, and learn to lean on others around you. And the more you open up to those around you, the more you will be amazed at how many people will come forward with similar journeys. You cannot live life with a little bit of anorexia. It will take over and consume you and your family. Seek help, and know that you deserve to seek that help.

ED: I was most certainly an avid reader as a child. Growing up, my mother worked as a librarian, so although any type of television or media in our home was out of the question, my sister and I had any book we could imagine right at our fingertips. Even before I could read, my mother would take the time to read the classics to my sister and I, and created a deep love of books right from the start. But her career as a writer was monumental in giving me the courage and resolve to embark on this memoir. She has been through the process of writing and knew all the steps involved, so being able to watch that process unfold helped inspire me a great deal.

GGW: Who is your most favorite strong female character in literature and do you feel there are enough heroines in YA lit?

ED: It is very difficult to just pick one! But one that jumps immediately to mind would have to be Kate Sutton from the book The Perilous Gard by Elisabeth Pope. Her character is so powerful because she does struggle with her responsibilities and has to work through her fears before discovering the strength inside herself. Characters that show the process of growth are the most important to me. It teaches readers that no one is born with any answers, and everyone falls a few times before they finish their journey.

There are many many amazing heroines in YA literature. As a voracious reader, I would never turn my nose up at a few more. But I think it is vital that the heroines introduced to readers have depth and character to them. The books that allow the reader to struggle and ultimately triumph alongside the heroine are the ones that should be sought after.