Quotes from Carol Lee

I was a very lonely child and it's funny but the first word that comes to my head is "starved". I felt starved of affection, starved of love and I felt that it wasn't OK to ask for it. Maybe there was a sense that if I deserved it, it would be there. There must be something I'd done which meant I didn't deserve it.

Deception' is the word I most associate with anorexia and the treachery which comes from falsehood. The illness appears inviting. It would seem to offer something to those unwary or unlucky enough to suffer from it - friendship, a get-out, or a haven - when, in fact, it is a trap.

her eyes are unfathomable to me, hostile, even, as if she had removed herself to a place where I cannot reach her - somewhere I cannot know.

Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of use would see as ordinary responsible behavior.

My parents never recognized the things that for me were achievements. I was praised for the things that came naturally to me, like my intelligence, but when I really put all my effort into looking nice (trying to), it went unrecognised. No-one ever told me I looked pretty or nice, or that I was a beautiful person (to them) and I needed them to...

Emma says her illness was a kind of self-hypnosis which obliterated the outside world, a way of escaping life and reducing its proportions to what she could manage.

yet still I crave the sight of my own hypnotic gaze reflecting out at me from the shared mirror of anorexia and bulimia, number to life and reality, existing only in my self-made tortured state

I was a very lonley child and it's funny but the first word that comes to my head is "starved". I felt starved of affection, starved of love and I felt that it wasn't OK to ask for it. Maybe there was a sense that if I deserved it, it would be there. There must be something I'd done which meant I didn't deserve it.

in some sense, she ignored her physical self, as if her body were merely something impersonal vehicle for moving around in. She seemed not to notice or care much what she wore or what she looked like.

I started crying when the group [therapy] was over because the last thing we did upset me - we all held a piece of the same cloth, leaned back and supported each other's weight. I couldn't do it. I bent my legs and elbows and stood very firm, yet . . . I needed to feel supported, as i do in life, but i can't let myself be, and i pretend not to need that support.

You obliterate my central sun and i hate and fear you for it . . . every moment with you is fraught with my anxiety of failure to be who you want me to be, to say what you want me to say . . . You don't remember you have a daughter. You never see my pain. You see yourself.

While she is still hospitalised, I take Emma out for strengthening walks, for her muscles and been under-used for a long time. She is sometimes breathless, I notice with concern, and there are other changes in her, either through a nerve her therapy touches, or through her illness, or both, which make her, quite often, disagreeable to be with.

Why should I, why should anyone, expect her to go on fighting in this way, torn apart, minute by minute? Although I want her to live, I do not believe I have the right to impose it on her, to demand it. Struggling to find a response to her cries for help, one which does not deny her pain or collude with it, I say no one who cares about her would ask her to do what is too difficult.

She fails to see who I am, even, for her eyes do not, will not, take me in. Instead they transmit a powerful message. She is like a billboard flashing, starkly: 'Keep Out'.

The reasons for Emma's illness and for her decision to allow life in, rather than die, are intertwined and involve the beginnings of her feelings of belonging, of safety and of competence to be in the world.

I want to kiss the bottom of the ocean before I burst through its surface into the sunlight. Otherwise I'll always be wondering about what was left unseen at the bottom.

Stoical' is the best word to describe her reaction to these compliments, Emma putting up with them as of they were one of my unfortunate foibles.