A Note on Sources

A number of works have been important to this book – and to my own understanding of my experiences and illness:

In Colombo

This chapter draws on ideas discussed in As A Weasel Sucks Eggs: An Essay on Melancholy and Cannibalism by Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson (Sternberg Press, 2008) and Maud Ellman’s The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (Harvard UP, 1993). For more information on Sri Lanka’s civil war, see William McGowan’s Only Man is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka (Picador, 1992).

In Berlin

This chapter draws on Sharman Apt Russell’s Hunger: An Unnatural History (Basic Books, 2009) for information about Ancel Key’s Minnesota Experiment; and on Leonard Tushnet’s The Uses of Adversity: Studies of Starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto (AS Barnes and Co, 1966).

In Miniature

This chapter quotes directly from the following sources: Melinda Alliker Rabb’s ‘Johnson, Lilliput and Eighteenth-Century Miniature’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 46:2 (2013), Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press 1964), Steven Millhauser’s ‘The Fascination of the Miniature’, Grand Street 2:4 (1983), and Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (John Hopkins UP, 1984). The poem ‘What She Could Not Tell Him’ is by Denise Levertov, and published in her collection Breathing the Water (New Directions, 1987).

In Increments

Information about the history of treatments for ‘hysterical anorexia’ draws on Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s seminal book Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (Plume, 1989).

Information about the anorectic brain’s responses to eating comes from Laura Hill’s talk ‘Eating Disorders from the Insider Out’ accessible at http://bit.ly/1GaA32Y. The American studies referred to are being undertaken at the University of California, by a team lead by Walter Kaye. Two of Kaye’s papers resulting from this work are ‘Brain imaging studies reveal neurobiology of eating disorders’ in ScienceDaily, 10 April 2013, and ‘Hunger does not Motivate Reward in Women Remitted from Anorexia Nervosa’ in Biological Psychiatry 77:7.

In Books I

The book discussed in this chapter is For Love Alone by Christina Stead (Imprint, 1991). For Love Alone was first published in the UK in 1945, and in Australia in 1966.

In Books II

The collections of poetry referred to at the beginning of this chapter are The Darwin Poems by Emily Ballou (UWA Press, 2009) and The Bee Hut by Dorothy Porter (Black Inc, 2009). Also discussed here are Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet (Penguin, 1991) and Carmel Bird’s The Bluebird Café (Vintage, 1990).

In Group

This chapter discusses John Berryman’s Recovery/Delusions (Dell, 1974); and quotes directly from his poetry collection 77 Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964). The quote from Wallace Stevens comes from his book The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (Alfred A Knopf, 1951).

In Hindsight

This chapter discusses the book Going Hungry edited by Kate Taylor (Anchor, 2008). Thank you to Ceridwen Dovey for introducing me to this work. Quotes from Louise Glüick’s poem ‘Dedication to Hunger’ are taken from her Poems 1962– 2012 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

The epigram for this book is taken from Gwen Harwood’s poem ‘Past and Present’, published in her Collected Poems 1943–1995 (UQP, 2003), edited by Allison Hoddinot and Gregory Kratzmann.