Body in the Prison of Soul

By Dóra Galgóczi

What might push an intelligent and pretty girl into the life-threatening trap of starvation? How does the soul take over control of the body stealthily, and drive it to despairing thinness?
The illness called anorexia nervosa has an ever-wider circle of victims, mostly young girls. We might think their good fortune provided them with everything: An attractive figure, outstanding abilities, and a charming personality. However, they live in permanent dissatisfaction. They feel they are not perfect and they are unsuited for life. Dancing on the edge of being and non-being, they loose weight to a fearful extent, and people around them just watch helplessly as they destroy their health.
In the novel, the secret of Anikó’s diary is revealed. The story describes her struggle with anorexia and with herself, and the way in which she moves from a hopeless fight to a liberating recovery. Between the lines of the novel, all those who would like to get to know their own character better and want to find their real way in life, can find themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publio Kiadó
• Release date: Dec 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370527878

Book preview

Body in the Prison of Soul

Let me free, Anorexia!

Dóra Galgóczi

2017

Publio Kiadó

www.publio.hu

Minden jog fenntartva!

Translated from the Hungarian by: Judith Sollosy

Illustrations: László Gerse

This translation is based on Dóra Galgóczi, Test a lélek börtönében. Engedj szabadon, anorexia!, Szaktudás Kiadó Ház Zrt., Budapest, 2010.

Hungarian copyright © Dóra Galgóczi 2010

English copyright © Judith Sollosy 2011

Anorexia: The Journey

A Personal Account

Blurb:

What makes an attractive and intelligent girl fall into the insidious trap of anorexia? How does the soul take control of the body, pushing it into a near-fatal thinness without the person hardly noticing?

The illness known as anorexia nervosa is challenging more and more people today, especially young females. We think that they are fortune’s darlings – they have attractive figures, good minds and talent, and they are likeable. However, they are unsatisfied with themselves. They feel that if they are less than perfect, they are unfit to live their lives. Balancing on the borderline of life and death, they starve themselves, while those around them look on helpless and bewildered.

In the novel, we are given a glimpse into the diary of one such young woman, Anikó. Her story reveals the details of her struggle with anorexia and with herself and described the road that led her from what seemed like a hopeless struggle to her liberation and recovery. The emotional roller coaster ride that she was on for years is familiar to many readers in one form or another. After all, we all have to face the quandaries inherent in choosing a mate, in parenth-child relationships, and in looking for a profession that is most suited to us.

For Anikó, her recurrent anorexia does not bring only suffering, but enlightenment as well. On the road to recovery, she comes to know her real self, and her new-found insight helps her body and soul to regain their lost harmony until one day, she hopes, she will be able to stand in front of her mirror and smile at what she saw.Anorexia: The Journey is a frank and fascinating account of this young woman’s often difficult but ultimately triumphant struggle to regain control of her life.

On the translator:

Judith Sollosy is senior editor at Corvina Books, Budapest and lecturer in translation at Budapest’s ELTE University. Her translations include five novels by Péter Esterházy, The Book of Hrabal (1993), A Little Hungarian Pornography (1995), She Loves Me (1997), Celestial Harmonies (2004), and Not Art (2010). Her own writings have appeared in Words Without Borders, Language Issues, PEN America, and The Wall in My Head, Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain (2009). She is also the author of two college textbooks on translation, Angol Fordítóiskola (School for English Translation), with István Bart and Kinga Klaudy (1996) and Hunglish Into English (2007). Her chapters on 20th century American culture and literature are included in Netting America, an internet college textbook. She is presently working on the translation of Péter Esterházy's latest novel, Esti (2010).

Hoping she wouldn’t notice, I watch her spear the sponge cake on her plate with a fork. The cake is chock full of delicious, dark raisins. A couple of years ago it seemed inconceivable that she would ever enjoy eating again. Just like everyone who loved her, I too feared for her life. Anikó was easy to like. When her friends needed advice, they thought of her first. And she was the last to leave her desk at the office when faced with deadlines. It is every parent’s dream, as it is every teacher’s, to hear words of appreciation about a student. It was in her nature to do her best, always, and it was this that gradually got her entangled in the web of anorexia. It had been a long and seemingly hopeless struggle, but she managed to wrangle herself free of its clutches.

Do you still feel guilty?

Because of the cake? No, of course not. I don’t feel like I’ll lose my grip on things if I eat it. Not any more. I still can’t believe that I’m cured. At times I’m still afraid. I’m afraid that it will return and won’t let me go. Still, I’m more and more confident by the day that it’s all behind me now.

You’ve been asked hundreds of times to talk about it, I know…

Yes. And I always turned a deaf ear. But I know now that there’s nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary. The doctor said that very few people could lick anorexia completely. When I decided to choose life instead, I suspected that I’d have to go through hell before I would recover. And now I’m proud that I made this decision. It’s my success story, and nobody can take it away from me.

I’m glad you say that, because now I’m not afraid to ask you to share your story with me. I’m so curious…

For a long time I had only my diary to confide to. It was like a friend to me. I can’t think of it as an object, even now. Do you know I’ve never shown it to anyone? When I was in the grips of my illness I lacked the strength to commit my thoughts to paper. I wrote my diary only afterward, because I felt I needed to share the experience of those years with someone… I mean something. Here. You’re welcome to read it. I have nothing to hide. Let it speak for me.

I slipped the thick notebook, it’s cover graced with a pleasing pattern of flowers deep inside my bag. I waited days for the leisure to discover its secret. When I held the first page between my fingers, the rain was knocking against the windowpanes. When I finished the last lines, I looked out the window at the chestnut tree, and the early June sunlight was filtering through its branches. Anikó had been right. The diary she had kept was not an object, but a friend, a testimony to her struggle from despair to rebirth. As I read its pages, it held me in thrall.

* * *

You’ll be fine, dear, you’ll see! I can still hear my mother’s voice as she tried to bolster my spirits and give me strength when I was about to lose all hope of ever gaining enough weight to live a normal life. It was pitiful looking at my own skeletal self, and it was a veritable miracle that I could go about my daily life as if all were in order, on and inside me.

Looking back at all the years I spent gripped by anxiety, I now saw one thing very clearly: if you’re afraid of food, you’re afraid of life. It’s not a conscious rejection. After all, I never felt that I wanted to turn my back on the world permanently. I wasn’t that dejected. Besides, I was curious to know what I could do and what I might become if fate allowed me follow my own path. But the force that kept whispering in my ear that I wasn’t good enough held me back from this great adventure. It was too persuasive. As if my hands and feet were stuck in tar, I was incapable of adjusting to the world around me, even though more than anything else, I wanted to live a full life.

It would be pointless telling anyone who has never been in my predicament that it’s more difficult to swallow a spoonful of food than to have nurses stick IV needles in your veins. Attempts at persuasion, words of encouragement, pleading or shouting were of no avail. My desperate resistance to food was too overwhelming. Anorexia took more than ten years out of my life, and though I went about my business as best I could, a deep abyss prevented me from feelings a sense of satisfaction, of balance and – it’s strange even to write it down – happiness.

* * *

Being an only child, I was the target of my parents’ unconditional loving care and attention from the day I was born. From the moment I came into the world, they ceased being a man and a woman and gave themselves over to their role as parents. And they didn’t just want to be good, they wanted to be the best. The spirit of the seventies also left its mark on child rearing, everything was done by the book, and so feeding was done by the clock. There were rules upon rules. If we add to this two enthusiastic and conscientious parents, we end up with an exhausted mother and father and a baby that won’t stop crying. Later on, of course, my parents realized that a child is not a machine that will sleep like a – well, like a baby – in its little bed if only you pour the prescribed amount of milk into it every three hours and make sure to disinfect all objects that come into contact with it. Be careful, the floor is creaking, you’ll wake her! Their every move was accompanied by fear and anxiety, so by the time I was old enough to go to kindergarten, saying goodbye to my mother, even for just a couple of hours, proved to be a serious problem, both for her and for me.This marked the beginning of the there’s something wrong with this child period of our lives. If she has such difficulty adjusting, we better take her to a psychologist! As a matter of fact, I couldn’t play uninhibited with the other children. The first three years of my life had been spent in the protective cocoon my parents provided for me. I felt good in it, and my mother did her best to be my playmate. Lots of storytelling, caring, cuddling – it seemed to be ideal, and we didn’t realize until much later that caring is like a polyp. It beckons to you, it protects you, and it keeps a tight grip on you – a very tight grip. When the time comes to step out into the real world, you have no weapons with which to confront it.

The feeling of inferiority soon reared its ugly head. Why should the others want to play with me? I thought, and so shied away from the company of my playmates. My kindergarten teachers kept commenting, Oh, how serious that little girl is! And yet I loved to play. I played all sorts of roles, but only at home, with my teddy bears, in the comfort of my familiar surroundings.

I don’t wish to be unfair, though. There was much to be gained from all that love and attention. I learned to speak so early that our acquaintances stood open-mouthed when the little child in the baby carriage that was me would communicate in complete sentences while her peers were still at the pa-pa, ma-ma stage. If I felt I could trust someone, I would conduct a veritable conversation with them. Consequently, the young psychiatrist I was taken to said by way of an aside, as it were, that my mother would be best advised to have her own anxieties treated, not mine. If a child has problems when she’s with other children, there’s usually a parent with similar difficulties behind the problem.She may have been right. My mother always avoided having to meet friends and acquaintances. Her small circle of co-workers and her family offered a safe haven, and except for them, she shied away from society. When our neighbor rang the bell, she was reluctant to answer, and when anyone tried to give her encouragement, she’d say that most of the people in the neighborhood are primitive and she has nothing to say to them. But the truth is that mother didn’t think very highly of herself. Though she was praised for her conscientious work at the office, she considered herself of little worth, a lesser human being than her fellows.

She even had a problem with accepting anything from others, even the present of a dress from my father. What for? I don’t need it. She preferred to give. She nourished herself by caring for others. It took many years until we understood how detrimental it is when a person is incapable of loving herself.

* * *

My father, a typical Sagittarius, was always after something more, something better than what life had to offer him. I am going to give my family a home that will make them proud, he thought, and we launched into it. A green neighborhood, a big house with a garden, spacious rooms, everything. His enthusiasm knew no bounds. But my mother felt uncomfortable in her new surroundings and went into silent resistance to the entire project. As for me, I understood only that I had to go to a new school and leave behind the friends I had found so hard to make in the first place. And there we stood, in the middle of our big house, with bundles of boxes, the remains of broken tiles, and an empty purse. Though father’s estimate of the costs had been precise, the price of building material had skyrocketed.

From then on, instead of offering me a protective cocoon, my family became a source of stress and anxiety for me. Financial problems and arguments, at times swept under the carpet, at others bursting forth like a volcano, marred our days. And instead of the appreciation he was expecting, my father