Last week, Elena and I worked up an 800-word article together. There’s nothing new about that: lately, we’ve been so busy fulfilling interview, blog, or article requests that I’ve had no time to update our websites. And there’s nothing new about the fact that we co-wrote it, either. We co-wrote her entire memoir over the course of years, so we’re very comfortable collaborating on texts. One of us will create the first draft or jot the initial ideas down; we get on the phone, read it out loud, and talk about it; and then that same person will revise the draft and send it to the other for proofreading. Sometimes, we’ll do several rounds of revisions like this. For the book, of course, we did dozens. These two memoirs are very much a family affair, and we tend to deal with them together. So far, again, nothing new.
But something new happened with this article. So far, it’s happened 1,500 times and counting. People are sharing this article across Twitter, through Facebook, on their websites, and in emails to their friends. The interest and support have left us humbled and awed.
Elena and I wrote this piece for The Guardian, a highly respected British newspaper. They had asked for something for their teen books section, so we wanted to create something a young teen could easily absorb. No statistics. No jargon. We wanted twelve-year-olds to read this piece and say, “I get it.” But what would a twelve-year-old want to know? We summoned our inner twelve-year-olds and asked them.
How about “What’s going on with you when you have anorexia? What does that mean? What’s it like?”
That was the piece we wrote: “Inside the Head of an Anorexic.” I don’t know if any teens have read it yet, but I certainly hope so. I hope it helps them identify their own inner critic and learn not to listen to its self-destructive lies.
Text copyright 2015 by Clare B. Dunkle. To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page.