‘Light’ is Emotionally Charged, Tender

Kirkus Reviews praises Light: A Mother and Daughter Memoir of Anorexia as “emotionally charged but tender and highly informative.” Congratulations to authors Nancy Y. Levine and Rachel Levine-Spates!

Here’s the full review:

Levine recollects the painful days of her daughter’s life-threatening struggle with anorexia.

The author met her husband, Mark, when she was 27; she was a charge nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit, and he was a medical student with a winning smile. They married three years later and had two children, first Mike and then Rachel. Their family was close, with minimal acrimony. In retrospect, however, Levine identifies certain family patterns, combined with what is likely a genetic predisposition for addictive and/or compulsive behavior, that created a fertile field for anorexia to gain its terrifying foothold. The symptoms of Rachel’s eating disorder appeared gradually—the author pegs the first observable hints to a 2006 family trip to Australia, where Rachel was taking her semester abroad. But the red flags—she had lost weight, was becoming an obsessive runner like her father, and was rejecting high-caloric food—were easily dismissed. She was healthy and happy. However, by the time she returned to the Levine home in Vermont several months later, she had lost more weight. Levine began to study the symptoms, psychology, and devastating physical consequences of anorexia, which include bone loss and heart and kidney damage. It wouldn’t be until 2008 that Rachel would willingly enter an eating disorder treatment center. Levine’s memoir is a highly personal and vivid account of the period leading up to and including the 10 months Rachel spent in the center. It is written with love and a bold honesty about generational family history and dynamics. The book contains a wealth of information about the illness, and, supplemented by Rachel’s commentary and excerpts from her journals, it presents an intimate look at anorexia’s psychological underpinnings—the anxieties, the hidden sadness, and the persistent inner “voice” that kept telling her she was never perfect enough (“How could you have let yourself go? …You messed up. You’re a failure”), encouraged her to control every morsel she ate, and pushed her to dangerously unhealthy levels of exercise.

Disturbing, frightening, and emotionally charged, but tender and highly informative.