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| Nancy Tucker with her mother, Jessica. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian |
Nancy Tucker
How I got back from anorexia
Joanna Moorhead
Sat 30 May 2015 06.45 BST
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Jessica persuaded Nancy to visit their GP, but the GP’s reaction was unexpected. She weighed Nancy, consulted lots of charts, and then said she didn’t meet the criteria for referral. Her weight wasn’t “low enough”, it seemed, to trigger help.
Three years later, Nancy was as dangerously ill with anorexia as it is possible to be. Twice she had to be hospitalised: Jessica remembers phoning the ward in the middle of the night to check whether her daughter was still alive. Could things have been different if the GP had heeded Jessica’s initial flag-waving? It is impossible to know, but what is clear, talking to the two of them, is that what should have been “help” on the part of medics and therapists was often more of a hindrance. “When the GP told me I wasn’t bad enough to merit referral, what that said to me was: go away and lose more weight,” says Nancy.
Then there was the fact that, once Nancy was diagnosed and referred to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), Jessica felt undermined and unsupported. “I felt blamed, disapproved of, traumatised. One therapist in particular was very suspicious of our relationship – she felt we were unhealthily close, and that I was colluding in Nancy’s illness.” Looking back, Jessica feels she was simply struggling with an incredibly difficult situation, with her daughter wasting away in front of her and a younger child to look after as well. The attitude of the therapists became one more burden.
Now Nancy is 21, and in a very different place. When doctor after doctor, therapist after therapist and hospital visit after hospital visit failed to make things any better, at least in the longer term, Jessica made the drastic decision to give up her job and to take Nancy out of the pressurised atmosphere of the independent girls’ school she attended: like CAMHS, she felt it was problematic rather than helpful. It was Nancy’s GCSE year: she continued to study, but she did it with guidance from tutors, and from home. “People around us were very disapproving,” says Jessica. Nancy agrees: “I think they thought that if I was allowed to retreat from the world, I’d never want to go back there.”
But Jessica had a strong instinct that this was the right way forward, and Nancy says now that, although her year cocooned at home with her mother wasn’t the end of her anorexia, it was a step on the road to recovery. “It got me to a place where I was living a life again, and that allowed me to move forward,” she says.
Nancy did well in her GCSEs, and went to a different school to do A-levels. Then, at the age of 19, she decided to write down the story of her illness. Strangely enough she had written to children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, of whom she is a big fan, a few years earlier, when she was in the throes of the worst stage of her illness, suggesting Wilson should tackle the subject in one of her books. “She wrote back straight away, and she said she had thought about it but she was worried about the sensitivities. But she said maybe I should be the person writing the book. And I suddenly realised it was something I had to do, and once I’d decided to do it, the story just rushed out of me.
“I wrote it in three days and three nights – I hardly slept. I just wrote it all down. I wrote it in a purging sort of way: it was as though I had this story inside me and I simply had to get it out.”
The story was never intended for publication, but then Nancy heard from a friend she hadn’t spoken to for a while and decided to send her what she had written as a way of explaining what she’d been through. That friend sent it to another friend, whose mother was a writer: when she read it, she sent it to her agent, who is now Nancy’s agent, and this month the story arrived in bookshops as The Time in Between: A Memoir of Hunger and Hope. Wilson, who gave her that initial prompt to write it, has said it “isn’t just another anorexia misery memoir – it’s a work of literature”.
It is easy to see why that writer mother sent Nancy’s story to her agent: the book is stylish and incisive, and she weaves her tale of fear and food, confusion and calories grippingly and with skill. At one point she provides the kind of description of how anorexia feels that could only have come from the vortex of the condition itself. “I am too big and too small and too much and not enough and too frightened to change and too sad to stay the same,” she writes. “I am an addict and a slave to the beauty myth and I diet and regress and reject and control and cry for help and I still can’t stop the ring-ring-ringing in my ears telling me that something bad is coming, something bad is coming RIGHT NOW. I want to shine and I want to be invisible and I want to be myself and I want to be anyone else in the world and in the end I think the only solution is to get smaller and smaller and smaller and then one day to disappear.”
For all its writerly skill, The Time in Between makes uncomfortable reading and not only because it describes such a complex and disturbing medical condition. The other disquieting element is how frank Nancy is about her family relationships, and especially what she feels about her father, David.
He is described, at times, as distant and critical and not as involved in her life as her friends’ fathers are. Some of the best parts of the book are written script-style, like scenes from a movie or a documentary, with camera directions (“Stay with Nancy’s face. She blinks heavily; she looks very tired”); and when Jessica reveals that her father directs TV dramas you can’t help feeling that what Nancy really wants is to please her dad.
Can it be that simple? Apparently, he criticised the book when he first read it, though he has since read it again and declared it extremely well written.
Jessica, it turns out, has not read the book. “I’m a bit scared of reading it. I lived it, and I don’t want to go back to those times,” she says.
Nancy, meanwhile, says that while she would not say writing the book was the key to her recovery, getting her story out was a catharsis that helped her begin to move on. She’s still “not normal around food”, she says, but she’s a great deal better than she was and hopeful of making a complete recovery one day. This autumn, having twice deferred it, she is taking up a place to study at Oxford University.
“Sometimes I think, what on earth am I doing, going somewhere so pressurised and competitive after everything I’ve been through,” admits Nancy. “But I really don’t think I’m doing it because I want to be an academic star. What I want to do is study psychology; and what my illness has done is made me realise that life isn’t all about getting top marks in exams, it’s about working out who you are and what you want to do with your life.”
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