Creating Bodies
Eating Disorders as Self-destructive Survival

Hannah wrote 18 diaries between the ages of 14 and 32. This work offers the excerpts that help you watch Hannah navigate violent adolescent friendships, descend into anorexia and bulimia, marry an abusive man, struggle to recover memories of sexual abuse, and finally to heal. It presents the story of healing and transformation.

Anchored in relational psychoanalysis and critical feminist theory, "Creating Bodies" provides a uniquely longitudinal account of the development of, and ultimate recovery from, an eating disorder fuelled by childhood sexual abuse. An invaluable contribution to the literature on adolescent and adult eating disorders, it is also a thoughtful meditation on how the act of writing deepens issues of relationality and, over time, promotes cure.

Acknowledgements. Introducing the Main Characters. The Anchors to Hold One's Self. There's No Safety in Numbers. A Primer of Self-destructive Rituals for Becoming a Woman. Writing the Absented (Un)conscious in Hannah's Diaries. Resisting to Differentiate/Differentiating to Resist. Containing Her Self/Creating Temporal Links. Creating Bodies in the Text. Epilogue: Tidying Up the Story.