In 1983, the year I found myself at Bridgeway, America’s obsession with anorexia nervosa was in full swing. The women’s magazines were playing both sides of the industry: models were getting thinner, daughters were starving trying to emulate them, and the magazines responded with not fewer but more skeletal models, alongside alarming (yet somehow titillating) articles and statistics about anorexia. The movie The Best Little Girl in the World, about a young woman secretly struggling with anorexia, had been released two years earlier, but it was the death of 32 year-old singer Karen Carpenter, on February 4, 1983 to cardiac arrest brought on by anorexia, that catapulted awareness of the illness into the mainstream. By the time I arrived at Bridgeway in 1983, I had had two close friends who were anorexic. One would never recover. In light of what I knew about addiction—and this included, in my mind, starvation, as the forces that drove not-eating were interchangeable with the forces that drove alcohol and drug abuse—the “art” approach to treatment seemed to me a flaccid arsenal against so steely an opponent. To say I did not understand the spirit of what Mr. Jenkins was saying—that therapy is bigger than techniques and progress notes and that people are not predictable or all the same—is an understatement. That there was not some acid test or thermometer to determine psychological health and wellness, that recovery was more than anything an agreement between two parties--the addict and the addict’s non-addicted side—should not have surprised me. I was living testimony to the wide gap between what appears to be true and what is actually true.
The front door bursts open. A tall, busty woman of about thirty, with a dragon tattoo on her neck and black hair cropped so tight it looks like it hurts, barrels in. With enormous blue eyes and heavy mascara, she is beautiful in a larger-than-life, dramatic way that terrifies me. I pray that she is not one of my clients. Mr. Jenkins doesn’t look up.