Inside Out: Portrait of an Eating Disorder by Nadia Shivack

This very serious and intensive graphic novel is a story about the author, Nadia Shivack, and her eating disorder, Ed. When Nadia was only fourteen years old she began suffering from what would turn into a lifelong battle between her body and food. Shivack retells events in her life that from the first memory of when she became aware of food (at age 6) all the way through her outpatient treatment (at age 40). Her story, although extreme, is one that many of us can relate to… not feeling great about ourselves, our bodies, where we are in life, etc. At the time this book was published (2007) Shivack was still recovering. Eating disorders can be very destructive to a person both physically and mentally, and hers has taken her through ups and downs. One of the only ways that she has been able to remain calm enough to work to fight off this disease is by writing and drawing on napkins after meals, and that is what makes up this book. The pages are formatted like nothing I have ever seen before, but for the story being told it works very well. The illustrations are literally straight out of her notebooks, her napkins, anything she could find to write on. This (reading and writing) is the medium that has help her cope, helped her remain living. She took me into an eating disorder and I will never think about eating disorders the same.

Now my experience is not an eating disorder, but in my Methods class this semester we have to write a literacy reflection… a time in our life we remember about an experience in reading or writing. I choose to write about a time in my life when I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I bottled up my emotions and didn’t know how or didn’t want to express myself, my feelings. My dad had just had a heart attack at the age of 48. I was devastated, scared, and upset. Today my dad is doing fine, but at the time it was a very serious thing. The one thing that got me through everything and kept me sane, was having to write about it in my rhetoric class. Writing about my feelings, my experiences, about everything… it helped!