Body Story

Body Story conveys Julia K. DePree's troubling journey from adolescence to adulthood and from anorexia to health.In high school, the five-foot-ten DePree weighed as little as 114 pounds. She was too weak to raise her arms above her head. "In a paradoxical way, I starved my body in order to understand my life," she writes. "I had to place my body in suspension before I could move physically into sexuality. Starving allowed me to create an interim space between innocence and experience." DePree renders the starkness of anorexia along with the process of recovery, relapse, and, ultimately, redemption. She also tells the story of the physical landscape, from her origins in the Midwest to the American South, Paris, and the vast New Mexican desert, as well as the psychic landscape of her body as it encounters the joys and challenges of maturation, childbirth, and motherhood. Body Story offers readers a new way of understanding women's bodily experience, as it probes the mystery and the meaning of this illness. This evocative and often radiant vision is a unique window into womanhood and selfhood in middle-class, contemporary America.

Julia K. De Pree is an associate professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. An award-winning poet, in her recent articles she explores the intersections between literary representation and psychoanalytic theory.