Body Story [Hardcover]

Julia K. Depree (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 19, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

DePree, a poet and French professor at Atlanta's Agnes Scott College, has struggled with anorexia for most of her life. In this sensitive memoir, she describes her experiences with the disease and the related behavior patterns that have threatened to disrupt (sometimes successfully) her work and personal life. DePree's illness began at age 13, after her grandmother's death, and continued for nearly 20 years. Although she was an excellent student and skilled violinist in high school, her daily life was overshadowed by anorexia. Starving allowed me to create an interim space between innocence and experience, between being a girl and being a woman." DePree's difficulties continued when she left home for college and during her stints studying overseas. There were brief periods when she gained weight, but DePree was always aware she was hiding in a "glass box" in which she felt safe. Only after the birth of her second child in 1999 did she start undergoing psychoanalysis and taking medication, finally beginning to learn why she was so comfortable as an anorexic. Less graphic than other anorexic autobiographies, this memoir is nevertheless quite moving, thanks to DePree's eloquent writing. She focuses on her feelings, rather than chronicling her diet and exercise, which should help her work resonate with both readers familiar with anorexia and those helping anorexics.
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From Booklist

De Pree's account of her life with anorexia might be characterized as a Sisyphean struggle to keep her body from weighing too heavily on the bathroom scale. She recollects an adolescence consumed with counting calories, early morning weight checks, and concealing her dangerously thin body from her parents. In poetically lean prose, she harks back to the midwestern, middle-class childhood that set the stage for developing emotional issues around food, body image, and sexuality. To begin with, her family idealized control--more specifically, self-control. Moreover, De Pree says that no one ever challenged the popular notion that a woman's appearance was an index of her worth. De Pree also describes several less-than-ideal early sexual images and intimate encounters, which left her unable to cope with her developing body. Despite all that and despite only recently connecting with a mental health professional who could help her in the long run, she managed enough temporary upturns to marry and bear two healthy children. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Swallow Press; 1 edition (April 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804010633
• ISBN-13: 978-0804010634
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 4.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,594,514 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is meaningful and insightful for all women, October 25, 2006

By 

Erica L. Warren - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Body Story (Paperback)

I find it odd that nobody has reviewed this book yet. I think it is extremely creative and beautiful. The chapters are labeled poetically; Virgin Body, Girl Body, Starving Body, Wedding Body, Giving Birth, and Blind Spot are most of them. These chapters are not only validating and insightful to the troubles of eating disordered women but also transcend the eating disordered "barrier" by relating fully to all women. At the end of the book the author, a Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, provides study questions and discussion topics for group reading making the book ideal for sharing and book clubs. This book is significant and a great work by a strong and very real woman. Do give it a read. You will like it!

1.0 out of 5 stars The Body Review, May 14, 2011

By 

allama - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Body Story (Paperback)

I picked this book at random to read for a creative writing class. I bought it off amazon, and when it arrived I noticed that a library had sold it to me. This was already a bad sign, this happens after a book is not rented out for a long time. I read the first chapter, which mostly consisted of every contrast of the "light/dark" kind of feel. It was cliche and overall boring. As I read the rest of the book I do not feel like DePree really went into her anorexia, but used this book as a chance to talk about her accomplishments...... her mot favorite being her daughters. This was cute, except she mentioned how she was able to recover and have two daughters, many many times. Her tone came across more pious than anything, but every once and a while she would include brief moments of humor, I wish there were more. If I did not have to finish this book for the class, I wouldn't have. It didn't seem original. The writing style was collage like, and also every paragraph was separated by a space. I appreciate DePree's effort to be different, but I found it annoying to read. I would not recommend this book, for a book so small it seemed to last quite a long time.