Beyond Anorexia : Narrative, Spirituality and Recovery

Beyond Anorexia is the first book to focus exclusively on recovery from 'eating disorders', drawing on the author's autobiography and the recovery stories of over thirty other anorectics. It demonstrates the importance of narrative and spirituality to the process of recovery and that of recovery to understanding anorexia.

Beyond Anorexia is a sociological exploration of how people recover from what medicine labels 'eating disorders', and the first book to focus exclusively on recovery. Beginning with her own autobiography, and drawing on conversations with over thirty other former sufferers, Catherine Garrett demonstrates that narrative is fundamental to social theory and to healing. Her central claim is that recovery is a 'spiritual' experience reconnecting the self with body, nature and society. She analyses spirituality and its relationship with formal religion along with its association with the ascetic rituals of eating disorders. Recovery is shown to be key to full understanding of anorexia, and the processes associated with recovery are explored in terms of embodied spirituality. Using the anthropological theories of Durkheim and van Gennep and contemporary theories of the body, Catherine Garrett reveals some of the social sources of recovery - the solution - which exist alongside the causes of the problem.