Have you ever flinched or cast a furtive look behind you at a person who is unhealthily thin? Fiona Wright’s been on the receiving end: ‘People visibly recoiled when I passed, or looked back over their shoulders in a double take that I could never help but notice,’ she writes in Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger. ‘From the outside, nobody understands the seemingly wilful hunger of those of us who waste away, nobody really understands the hold that it can have, its awful power.’

Wright is an award-winning Australian poet who has spent more than a decade battling anorexia nervosa. The ten essays in Small Acts of Disappearance form a moving memoir of her illness and span her years as a university student, a young journalist in Sri Lanka, on a writing fellowship in Berlin and as a writer in Sydney, where she seeks treatment.

The essays also contain literary commentary about how writers like Carmel Bird, Tim Winton, Christina Stead and Louise Glück explore hunger and anorexia. Bird, Winton and Stead are all Australian authors whose works contain characters troubled by hunger and Glück is an acclaimed US poet who has struggled with an eating disorder.

Wright’s illness emerged when she was a 19, piggybacking on a rare and misunderstood physical condition that made her vomit without volition after eating. She was advised to cut out foods that she thought triggered the vomiting but, in doing so, she says, ‘hunger became my safest state’.

We learn how Wright structured her days around food, kept scrupulous account of what she’d eaten and not eaten, was afraid of many ordinary foods, and was addicted to the effects of hunger ‘intensely sensual, pulling the body between extremes of hyper alertness and a foggy trance-like dream state’.

Attempting to conceal the extent of her problem she dabbled in deception.

‘I’d pulled the roast chicken meat off the bones and shredded it, flipped it underneath the leafy vegetables I’d left on my plate; and I had been relieved when my sister-in-law brought along six ramekins of dessert, even though there were seven adults there.’

As her difficulties around food arose from a physical condition she was reluctant, for some time, to identify herself as a person with an eating disorder.

‘I thought that eating disorders only happen to women who are vain and selfish, shallow and somehow stupid; it took me years to realise the very opposite is true.’

It was through individual and group therapy, hospitalisation and intense soul-searching that she eventually came to see the nature of her illness and to acknowledge the traits she shared with other sufferers.

‘Eating disorder patients are, almost without exception, hypersensitive to the opinions of others, punishingly judgmental of themselves, and easily wounded because of the fragility of their sense of self,’ she writes. ‘At criticism, cruelty and violence [to the self] … we are old hands.’

As Wright reminds us, the physiological damage from starvation includes shrunken hearts, stomachs, ovaries and other organs, hollow bones, cold extremities, brittle hair and nails and compromised hormone function. By her mid-twenties she had osteoporosis. Other women she met in hospital had slipped discs from vomiting, chronic bladder infections and damaged kidneys. One woman had to have reconstructive surgery on her oesophagus because the juices of her stomach had been leaking into her lungs.

A self that feels intolerable

Wright says anorexia is often ‘bound up with a desire for anonymity, even though, perversely enough, the body becomes increasingly conspicuous as it grows ever more extreme.

‘So often, for so many [anorectics], it is a whittling away of a self that feels intolerable, or somehow offensive: too big, too loud, too demanding, somehow too much.’

She also notes that medical science has yet to determine why one person will ‘turn their hunger inward’ and another will not—although it does appear that genetics, personality, power, sexuality, family, trauma, acceptance and self-esteem play some part.

Wright describes the rollercoaster of recovery with clarity and candour. She talks of terrible fear, bouts of uncontrollable sobbing, deep exhaustion, almost-intolerable despair and ‘unmeasurable movements, backwards and forwards and sideways, towards, away from and around whatever a return to health might mean’.

Anorexia, as her doctors tell her often, is a disease that is even worse in recovery. Treating the symptoms of most other mental illnesses usually helps to make patients feel better. As the anorectic starts to eat again she must face the very thing that most distresses her six times a day.

‘We feel worse, far worse when we don’t have our hunger to protect us,’ she says.

At the time of writing Small Acts of Disappearance, Wright still did not know who she was without her hunger and without the ‘structures’ and ‘scaffolding’ of her illness to support her. However, she had met three women who were able to talk about their hunger in the past tense. That none was able to describe how they’d climbed free of their disorders gave her tentative hope that change might be happening incrementally and unknowingly in herself. She says such change would therefore be ‘outside narrative or explanation, even outside any language I might use to try to pin it down’.

The scythe of her shoulder blade

While Wright does not write to evince pity, parts of her memoir left me feeling immeasurably sad. These included:

• When a lover folds a blanket over the ‘scythe’ of her shoulder blade to stop it digging into his chest.
• When she stares down at her cake, while she is on a hospital-group outing to a chocolate café, and thinks about all that she has lost over the decade of her disease; everything that might have been possible in her life had she not been so scared.
• When she realises that, despite having come so far in her recovery, she is ‘still disciplined, still frugal, still tightly controlling of my meals’ and still uncomfortable about other people making meals for her.

In the weeks since I finished reading Wright’s book, two quotes in particular have been lingering in my consciousness. The first is the ‘punishingly judgmental of themselves’ paragraph I quoted earlier. The second follows.

‘I knew I wasn’t vain, I wasn’t selfish, but I have always felt vaguely, interminably sad, too vulnerable to being hurt, too empathic and too open, too demanding and determined in the standards that I set for myself and my life.’

The quotes make me sad for Wright and for others like her who suffer from anorexia’s debilitating effects. They also make me sad for me. At various points in my own journey toward self-acceptance—and especially during the times I struggled most with eating (though never so intensely as Wright)—these are words I could easily have used to describe who I was and how I felt about myself. I could easily have used these words but I did not have them. This, I now recall with some sorrow, is how desperately inarticulate the pain of hunger and self-punishment can be.

When I stop being sad, I get angry at a world and consumer-driven society that insists on emphasising looks and weight as a fundamental measure of human worth—and even when it is obviously so damaging to people’s self-esteem and health. I get angry that, in 2015, so many people in the developing world don’t have enough food to survive and yet the developed world is stuffing its people to the gunwales with empty calories then telling them they have to starve themselves stick-thin to be acceptable. I get angry that girls and women must work so hard to find the sustenance that allows them to feel comfortable with who they are—regardless of their shape and size—and that enables them to feel substantial, empowered, satisfied and real. Safe.

As you’ll have gathered by now, Fiona Wright has a fierce intellect, a superb dexterity with language and a fine sensibility—all of which make this unique book a compelling and satisfying read.

You’ll also have gathered that Small Acts of Disappearance is not a self-help treatise, triumphalist ‘sick lit’ or in any way simplistic. This means that, if you know someone with anorexia and you’re struggling to understand their illness, you can trust Wright’s wisdom to give you insight into its complexity. Likewise, if you’re struggling with anorexia yourself—but have yet to find the language with which to express its subtle and serious entrapments—Wright’s perceptive words should help you to explore and articulate what you think and feel.

Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger
Fiona Wright
Giramondo, $24.95

Small Acts of Disappearance was launched at the Knox Street Bar in Sydney on September 22. Wright’s poetry collection Knuckled (Giramondo 2011), won the Dame Mary Gilmore Award for a first collection. Fiona Wright is currently completing her doctoral thesis, featuring the poets Gwen Harwood and Dorothy Porter, at the Writing & Society Research Centre of Western Sydney University.