Nancy Tucker - The Time in Between: A Memoir of Hunger and Hope

The TIME IN BETWEEN

A Memoir of Hunger and Hope

NANCY TUCKER

Published in the UK in 2015 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

3941 North Road, London N7 9DP

email:

www.iconbooks.com

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

7477 Great Russell Street,

London WC1B 3DA or their agents

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Distributed in Australia and New Zealand

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Distributed to the trade in the USA

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ISBN: 978-184831-830-4

Text copyright 2015 Nancy Tucker

The author has asserted her moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in New Caledonia by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK

by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

About the author

Nancy Tucker is a 21-year-old writer and nanny. She suffered from both anorexia and bulimia nervosa throughout her teens, but is now on the road to recovery and has gained a place at Oxford to study Experimental Psychology in 2015. She lives in London.

For my very special grandparents, John and Deirdre. I dont have the words to say how much I love you but I dont try to find them often enough.

Foreword

M Y BIGGEST FEAR in writing this book and writing it honestly was that it would serve the notorious cheat-sheet purpose often attributed to eating disorder memoirs. I feared it would be thumbed through by others as vulnerable as myself and dissected in search of tips on how to be ill. Why to be ill. Why to stay ill. It would be easy for me to say that my story doesnt encourage this sickness emulation because of the gritty detail I include about being so suffocated by anorexia that I was nothing more than a shivering, miserable bone bag, but I know this would be a copout. Perhaps it can only be understood by one who has been under the thumb of disease, but there is a voyeuristic something about anorexia nervosa which makes sufferers crave its gory, ugly depths. Fainting in public? Yes please. Fur from head to toe? Love it. Nasogastric tube? Ill take two. Ive read book after blog after Facebook post crawling with Oh-woe-Im-so-very-skinny-and-sad (usually accompanied by a melancholy picture of the writer, contorted grotesquely so as to give the most alarming view possible of clavicles, hip bones and ribcage), and have now learnt that this is really nothing more than code-speak for Oh-look-at-me-and-my-suffering-bet-Im-thinner-than-you-beat-that-(suckers).

I made two decisions when I started the feverish typing which eventually spooled into My Story; one easy, the other difficult. The easy was to leave out the numbers; I dont say what I weighed at my lowest, highest or in-between-est; I dont specify a body mass index (because any anorexic worth her salt has the weight-divided-by-height-squared calculation down to a tee and can use it as another point of comparison); I dont talk in calorie numbers. Why would I want to? I know how ill I was if, indeed, illness can be measured at all I dont need to quote figures to validate it. This way, if it makes you feel better, you can by all means go through the book reassuring yourself that my lowest weight wasnt as low as yours, that my BMI never dipped down as far, that my calorie restriction was not as extreme. I know how this illness works, so I know that if this is something you want to do then you are going to do it. Yes, I would urge you not to it wont help, wont give you the fulfilment you crave nor quiet the voices raging in your mind. But if thats the way you feel you have to read what I write, its not my prerogative to preach on the wrongs of doing so after all, Ive been there a fair few times myself.

The hard decision was to tell my story in its full, messy entirety. If I wanted an ideal story one which could be neatly packaged, sealed and read by everyone I know this book would stop at my eighteenth birthday. I would say something ambiguous about how I was Learning To Live With My Anorexia and that there was Light At The End of the Tunnel and talk about rebirth and lambs springing (and so on and so forth). My ideal story would not involve the giddying swing from starver to stuffer; it would not reveal the shameful momentum of my body hurling from one extreme to the other. But if I wrote my ideal story, I would have fallen into the trap of believing that if things are not said then they do not exist. By documenting, honestly and unflinchingly, my painful descent into post-anorexia bulimia nervosa, not only have I drained my story-self of all vestiges of secret, but I hope I have communicated the foul reality of eating disorders the fact that one can so easily morph into another, and that it may be the second which hurls you, broken, to the floor.

If you want to read this book and think, Gosh, it certainly sounds fun to have an eating disorder, maybe I should give that a go, I cant stop you. But I will say this: please dont. I didnt want to write a book in which I wallowed in my own suffering, I wanted to write a book which would give an honest insight into anorexia, bulimia, and, most importantly, the person behind these Big Bad Diagnoses. I wanted to write a book which conveyed the devastating damage caused by eating disorders, but not one which passed on this damage. To give people something to think about, but not something to emulate. Have I managed it? I suppose that depends on you.

Fifteen Years Forward

W HEN I WAKE up, it is because someone has poured poison into my mouth; sluiced it around my gums, dripped it between my teeth. The poison is sharp and spiky inside me; it arcs across my tongue, bitterness clawing at the insides of my cheeks. As the poison trickles over my soft palate, I absent-mindedly conclude that I will be dying today. Accept, with heavy boredom, that today, at fifteen years old and five foot three inches tall, I will be no more. Could be worse.

When, after long minutes of lying prone, swilling the poison from cheek to cheek, I realise I am not dead or, indeed, in the process of becoming that way I force movement into lazy arms. Disappointingly, I am still alive, but I do not yet know if I am safe. Reaching down to paw at the bones connecting foot and ankle, I clunk. An audible, hollow clunk between wrist-bone and hip-bone, the latter standing erect, like a guard between torso and pelvis. I run my fingers from knee bones to ribs, pausing only to press down into the well of my stomach, feeling for my back bone through the paper-skin. It is there. All of my bones are there, present and correct. I am safe. The guard must be pleased. As my busy fingers come to rest, curling themselves over the tops of my collarbones as they once clung to monkey bars, I replay the clunk over and over in my head. The sound of nothing-against-nothing. If I had the energy, I think I would smile.