Body Story

Body Story conveys Julia K. DePrees 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 womens 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.

In a personal and cultural analysis of anorexia nervosa, poet De Pree (French, Agnes Scott College, Atlanta) writes candidly of her bout with this disorder. She includes a reading guide for book groups.
Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Body Story conveys Julia K. DePrees troubling journey from adolescence to adulthood and from anorexia to health.In high school, the five-foot-ten De Pree weighed as little as 114 pounds. She was too weak to raise her arms above her head. De Pree 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.

Julia K. DePree 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.