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Episode 489: Staying Power, Book Promotion, Platform, and ‘Slip,’ a Memoir-Plus with Mallary Tenore Tarpley
35 Plays13 minutes ago
"For many of us, myself included, it's easy to want to be on the New York Times bestseller list, or the USA Today bestseller list, and to try to get an amazing number of week-one sales, but it's important to remember that those lists are really hard to get on, and there can be this nice long tail in terms of the impact of a book where maybe it doesn't necessarily get a ton of sales in that first week or that first month. But over time, it continues to sell, right? And then you get these bumps, and you realize that, oh, this book has staying power," says Mallary Tenore Tarpley.
Mallary is here today for a double-feature Friday. She’s the author of Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery (Simon & Schuster/Simon Element). It’s pretty heavy shit, man. She developed a disordered relationship to food when her mother passed away when she was just 11 years old. Mallary spent years in treatment and the book blends her personal story with the ballast of science and outward-facing reporting, memoir-plus as it was pitched. We’ll call it Memoir Max.
Mallary has been on the hustle for Slip. She’s everywhere. She’s posting. She’s newslettering. She’s beating the drum. She’s an example of what a modern author must do in this age. I’d say take a look at what she’s doing and maybe cherry pick what works for you. But speaking from experience, really nobody is going to do it for you.
She graduated from Providence College and earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College, where she started Slip. She worked with my dear friend Maggie Messitt on it for a bit.
Mallary is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas where she teaches journalism classes. She started her career at The Poynter Institute where she would become the managing editor of the website, poynter.org. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Nieman Storyboard and she has a Substack, don’t we all, called Write at the Edge, at mallary.substack.com. You can also learn more about her at mallarytenoretarpley.com and follow her on LinkedIn or Instagram as well.
We talk a lot about
- Platform and publicity
- How she vetted a freelance publicist
- Staying power
- And some of her best memories working alongside Roy Peter Clark at Poynter
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Recommended
Transcript
Upcoming Events and Author Talks
00:00:00
Speaker
OACNF is the frontrunner, as you know, strides into the fall, and I have a couple events coming up in September. September 20th at the Coos Bay Public Library for an author talk at 2 p.m.
00:00:11
Speaker
September 21st, I'll be in Portland in conversation at the Oregon Historical Society at 2 p.m. And on September 27th, I will be a featured author alongside Ruby McConnell for the Florence Festival of Books. And in Florence, it's all day, but the conversation is at 4.30 p.m.
00:00:28
Speaker
I have a total of four little things lined up in Idaho the first week of October, but I'll clue you in into those as we get closer to those days. So stay clued into my newsletters and brendanamero.com.
00:00:40
Speaker
and Secondarily on Instagram at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. It wouldn't you know the call for submissions is open. The audio magazine is back. Codes is the theme.
00:00:51
Speaker
The Mandalorian and his kind live by a simple code. Always punctuated by this is the way. What
Submission Guidelines and Audience Engagement
00:00:58
Speaker
codes do you live by? What codes were you at one time or another told to live by? Has a code led you to the right path or the wrong?
00:01:06
Speaker
Essay should be no longer than 2,000 words, a 15-minute read. Bear in mind that in the end, these are audio essays. Write accordingly. Short sentences. Uncomplicated words.
00:01:17
Speaker
Not many syllables. Email submissions with codes in the subject line to creative nonfictionpodcast at gmail.com. Originally previously unpublished work only. Please, deadlines October 31st, 2025.
00:01:29
Speaker
twenty twenty five It's cash on the line from the O'Mara grant, so send me your best fully formed pieces and consider becoming a patron to help put money in the coffers that helps put money in the pockets of writers.
00:01:43
Speaker
We gotta have that burrito money. You need to write, you need to read, and you need to talk about reading and writing.
00:01:57
Speaker
So on this email chain for two signings I'm doing in Ketchum, Idaho, one of the guys was like, ah can you check your Amazon link to make sure it's okay? I said, I'll trust it's okay because I haven't looked at Amazon or Goodreads and that will lead me down a one-way road to Bummerville.
Introducing Mallory Tenori Tarpley and Her Work
00:02:14
Speaker
So then my friend Kim betrayed me. with a separate email that said, I'm gonna force good news on you. And it's a screenshot of 106 ratings on Amazon for an average of 4.6 and 228 ratings for an average of 4.4 on Goodreads.
00:02:31
Speaker
She said anything above 4.0 on Goodreads is really good. I think I owe a lot of that to you for rallying behind the book. Now, I'm still not going to go read any of them, but I guess the book is landing with people.
00:02:45
Speaker
It's hard for me to maybe admit that it might be good, and that's why it's getting good ratings. Now, therapy, is it is it too late to start? Mallory Tenori Tarpley is here today. Oh, by the way, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. I'm Brendan O'Mara.
00:03:03
Speaker
But then again, you knew that, right? Right? Again, Mallory Tenori Tarpley is here for a double feature Friday. I'm sorry i'm sorry i dump and I occasionally dump two episodes on you on a Friday.
00:03:17
Speaker
I realize that a flood of these podcasts probably overwhelms and stresses you out. And you're like, oh my God, how can I listen all this shit? Will he stop doing this? Fuck that guy. Just know that I'm twice as stressed trying to get through this backlog of interviews and honor the guests who came on the show in a somewhat timely manner.
00:03:37
Speaker
She's the author of Slip, Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. It's published by Simon & Schuster slash Simon Element, an imprint, something. It's pretty heavy shit, man.
00:03:49
Speaker
She developed a disordered relationship to food when her mother passed away from cancer when she was just 11 years old. Mallory spent years in treatment, and the book blends her personal story with the ballast of science and outward-facing reporting.
00:04:04
Speaker
It's a memoir plus,
Promotional Strategies and Listener Feedback
00:04:07
Speaker
as it was pitched. We'll call it Memoir Max. Show notes to this episode more at BrendanAmero.com. Hey, there you can peruse hot blogs, tasteful nudes, and sign up for my two very important newsletters, the flagship Rage Against the Algorithm and Pitch Club.
00:04:22
Speaker
Issue four, this with Cassidy Randall, dropped like it was hot. It's pretty great. Would love for Pitch Club to catch fire. I might be buying some ad space in the Sunday the slr Sunday long read newsletter put on by Jacob Feldman and Don Van Nata.
00:04:41
Speaker
Let's keep doing it. Maybe I'm going to be lining up some book pitches and agent pitches, radio pitches, doc film pitches. Maybe my pre-Fontaine proposal, maybe my next book proposal.
00:04:52
Speaker
If and when it sells, it'll sell. It has to sell. Yeah, it's going to sell. Pitch Club will never cost a dime. I'll never gatekeep like that.
00:05:03
Speaker
I'm not a monster. Someone pledged $25 and maybe I'll turn on pledges at some point. Kind of like Patreon, I guess.
00:05:13
Speaker
See, I don't charge for the pockets, but people put money in the coffers. like Kind of a dip jar kind of thing. Maybe I'll do that with the pledges on Substack. I don't know, but it's not this day. All I ask is for your permission because, really, platform is currency.
00:05:26
Speaker
Both are first of the month. No spam. So far as I can tell, you can't beat them. Also, hosted by first Patreon Ask Me Anything AMA last night. How did it go? I don't know.
00:05:37
Speaker
I'm tracking this intro before it happened. I am playing in two different temporal worlds, man. We'll just say it was awesome and well
Mallory's Career and Writing Influences
00:05:46
Speaker
attended. If you want to join the next one, visit patreon.com slash cnfpod to learn more.
00:05:52
Speaker
All right, one last thing. We got a new review over on Apple Podcasts. Love these. Anytime I get them, I read them. And this one is from Man in Progress. Four stars.
00:06:04
Speaker
Titled, Too Much. All the interjections in this show destroy the flow of the interviews, as well as any illusion of intimacy. Well, man in progress.
00:06:14
Speaker
I went through a phase where I was doing those interjections, those little asides to provide context or whatever. But I don't do them anymore. It's been a long time, so you must have been listening during a particular pocket of the show.
00:06:28
Speaker
But you're probably gone now. ah But if you stick around, they're not there anymore. So, cool. Okay, and enough of that housekeeping bullshit. You must hate it.
00:06:40
Speaker
But then I have to remind myself that not everyone listens to every episode. So I have to be very repetitive. and A lot of this is so goddamn repetitive to me. But like I said, yeah ah for some of you, you might only be hearing it for like the third or fourth time. then you zip away and maybe you don't listen again for 20 more of these episodes.
00:06:58
Speaker
There are some people out there. I don't know. like Tracy, you listen to most. Anyway. Mallory has been on the hustle, man, for Slip. She's everywhere. She's posting. She's newslettering. She's beating the drum.
00:07:11
Speaker
She's an example of what a modern author must do in this age. I'd say take a look at what she's doing and maybe cherry pick what works for you. ah But speaking from experience, really nobody's going to do it for you.
00:07:23
Speaker
You got to be your own advocate. You might have ah some resources in your corner, but by and large, 95% of it is on your ass. She graduated from Providence College and earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College.
00:07:38
Speaker
Creative nonfiction. Where have I heard that term? And that's where she started this manuscript for Slit. That would become Slit. She worked with my dear friend Maggie Messett on it for a bit.
00:07:49
Speaker
Now Mallory is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas where she teaches journalism classes. She started her career at the Poynter Institute where she would become the managing editor of the website, pointer.org.
00:08:03
Speaker
Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Neiman Storyboard, and she has a sub stack, don't we all? called Right at the Edge. It's a good play on words. Go check it out at mallory.substack.com.
00:08:17
Speaker
You can also learn more about her at mallorytenoritarpley.com and follow her on LinkedIn or Instagram as well. On this podcast, we talk about platform and publicity, how she vetted out a freelance publicist to supplement the publisher team.
00:08:34
Speaker
staying power in this line of work, and some of her best memories working alongside of Roy Peter Clark at Pointer. Stick around for a parting shot on the eating disorder I invented in college.
00:08:45
Speaker
I don't know why I'm going to share what I'm going to share, but it seems germane to this conversation. But it's up to you if you care to listen or not. Let's cue up the riff.
00:09:01
Speaker
The writing part is where the magic is for me. My students, the kids these days. You know, there's a difference between losing and being a loser. I either work on it or I allow it to torture me for a really long time. This is going have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:09:26
Speaker
It's always great to get insights of a writer like yourself of of those that nonlinear path, but also just there's never a wasted word, really. i mean, we can just kind of dovetail right into the conversation if that's OK with you.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, that totally works. Yeah, I love talking about this stuff. So, yeah, it reminds me of Danny Shapiro. Her last novel, Signal Fires, she said that it just stemmed from a novel she'd written that had just been sitting in a drawer for quite some time. And then she thought, huh, I need to revisit this. And so you never know kind of what's going to happen with those.
00:09:58
Speaker
and novels that get stuck in drawers. Oh, 100%. Like I remember, you know, it's some, it's so much of it comes down to luck and timing and luck plays into timing or timing plays into luck.
00:10:12
Speaker
I submitted this essay, know, 2015, 2016 to a barrel house. Cause it was kind of like a funny irreverent as a middle school essay. ah The Gentleman's Guide to Arousal-Free Slow Dancing was the name. It was about my eighth grade dinner dance.
00:10:29
Speaker
And ah you know they passed on it. But then Creative Nonfiction Magazine opened up like a contest for a theme called Joy. And I submitted it to that. i've always I had always wanted to be published there. And then this particular issue comes up and the theme matched up with my essay and they took it And so i was like tickled by that. But so it's just kind of a luck thing. Like I was thinking it would go in one direction and then happenstance, this other place opens up and they decided to take it and it was perfect. So it's just that it's that degree of perseverance and knowing that nothing is ever truly wasted.
00:11:03
Speaker
Exactly. I know. I think about just all the iterations of my book and just all the versions I wrote along the way. And I'm glad that they never saw the light of day because looking back on them now, they were not particularly well written, at least by my standards today, but they were all stepping stones and they all really helped pave a pathway forward for me.
00:11:24
Speaker
um And you can see glimmers of them in my actual book. So I agree that those words aren't wasted, even if you don't end up actually using them or repurposing them.
00:11:35
Speaker
So I need you to tell me your best Roy Peter Clark story. Oh, funny. oh my gosh. Well, there are a lot of them. Well, there's so many. eight I mean, I used to go with him to all these different establishments in St. Petersburg and he would often take me to lunch at Pizza Hut.
00:11:53
Speaker
So Pizza Hut is where we did a lot of our storyboarding and he would get out napkins and then he would start just sort of outlining stories on them or writing out different ideas And so we'd be splitting a deep dish ah pan pizza and talking about stories.
00:12:08
Speaker
Another time he knew that I really liked to sing and he always incorporates music into his teaching. And so one time he took me to a place called Biff Burger. where I did some karaoke of Carrie Underwood and Sane on stage ah to a big biker crowd.
00:12:23
Speaker
ah oh my God. And then he's in the audience playing the air guitar and ah just cheering me on And so it was always interesting just to see kind of like the the social life and the musical life and the writing life, like all somehow were always intertwining.
00:12:39
Speaker
But he and his wife were kind of like surrogate parents to me when I moved down there because I was fresh out of college and didn't know anybody else. So they really showed me around, which I loved. Oh, well, the the Providence College connection must have helped.
00:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, it definitely did. I met him first at a writer's conference because I kind of stalked him out. i was trying to look for other PC grads who had gone off to do journalism and of course came upon him and reached out to him via email and Saw he was going to be at a writer's conference in Connecticut. So then decided to register for it and met him there. And he encouraged me to apply to the Poynter Institute. So just kind of, yeah, went from there.
00:13:16
Speaker
I was set to go to PC. Really? Yeah, to play baseball there. And then ah in 1999, when I graduated high school, you know southeastern Massachusetts, so we have mass connection.
00:13:29
Speaker
that The following year, they cut their baseball program. In 2000, there was like a whole hullabaloo around that. It was a lot of like Title IX reshuffling. And yeah, they decided to cut their baseball program, like their historic program.
00:13:41
Speaker
And I was just like really bummed out because ah i had I was a shortstop and when a good friend of mine who I played summer ball with was a second baseman. He was going to go to Providence as well. So we here we were like this sort of double play tandem. You're going to go enroll, be a PC fryer and play some D1 ball. But then they cut the program. And it yeah, it was a it was a bummer because that that would have been a good fit for both of us. So, yeah, we we almost had another connection with Providence.
00:14:07
Speaker
I know that would have been so neat. PC and Goucher. And yeah, I was thinking that maybe you were from Massachusetts because you kept saying draw. And for the longest time, I said draw instead of drawer. And then when I moved to Texas, I realized nobody understood what I was saying.
00:14:22
Speaker
yeah Yeah, it comes out from time to time, ah yeah my Boston accent. And i watch it over and over again because it is such a pitch perfect Boston skit. It's the Casey Affleck Dunkin' Donuts SNL skit. it is He nails it. It is so perfect.
00:14:40
Speaker
Like, cut your nails for God's sake. And like when everyone, like the way he said four, like it it's just like for God's sake, like that is just like so pitch perfect Massachusetts right there. It's very subtle, but you get that right. I mean, you're, you're onto to something.
00:14:55
Speaker
Yeah, I know it's very true. I never really ah got the Boston accent because we were in the suburbs and my parents didn't really have strong accents, but I can definitely appreciate it and recognize it. Yeah.
00:15:07
Speaker
but When you had those um those those lunches with Peter, well, with Roy, um yeah know what as you're like a young burgeoning writer and journalist, and working with them, yeah what were those what did those conversations do to you?
00:15:23
Speaker
like What were you taking away? Yeah, so roy taught me that to be a better writer, you need to do three things. You need to write, you need to read, and you need to talk about reading and writing.
00:15:35
Speaker
And for me, he was really the person with whom I talked about reading and writing. So we would talk about books that we'd read. we would talk about just reading Chaucer when we were both at Providence College. We would talk about just the stories that I was working on for Pointer's website.
00:15:53
Speaker
And that was incredibly helpful to just be able to bounce story ideas off of him, to talk with him about different challenges that I was facing, whether it was while writing a lead or trying to figure out how to structure a story.
00:16:07
Speaker
And so that act of conversing about the written word really gave me just the freedom to not only be thinking about writing, but to actually be in conversation about it. And those conversations, I think, really helped me to improve because as we would talk, he would impart all this wisdom on me and he would be sharing all of his different tools around emphatic word order and getting the name of the dog, right? Always looking for different details when you're writing.
00:16:37
Speaker
um I remember one time I had shown him a piece of my writing and we were talking about it together. And I had this line in there that said something was firmly rooted. And he said, well, how else would it be rooted? He said, we don't need that adverb in there. And so from then on, I never used that phrase firmly rooted, but he would always help me to just question every word that I was using, making sure I wasn't excessively using adjectives or adverbs um and really just helping me to think about my writing as this living, living breathing entity that could always be improved upon.
00:17:13
Speaker
it's one of those things too, like coming up as journalists, you know, we're very cognizant of word count. And so, yeah, like throwing in those extra modifiers, it just helps blow up that word count when you're so desperate to get to it.
00:17:26
Speaker
um But yeah, it's one of those things. Yeah. You go through and you start to you start to see like an editor, read like an editor. And yeah, when you see something that's redundant, like that firmly rooted, of course, like, yeah, you can't really be not firmly rooted. And I guess you can in some very rare circumstances, but by and large, the metaphor is going to be like structurally sound.
00:17:45
Speaker
So yeah, it's one of those deals where it's one of those lessons you'll learn early on just through the sheer repetition of it all.
Building a Writing Platform
00:17:53
Speaker
Definitely. Yeah. And I felt really lucky to just have a mentor like that and someone who I could talk to about writing because I just went right into my first job at the Poynter Institute after graduating college. So I didn't study journalism in college, even though I was editor of the school newspaper and always practiced journalism and internships, but I didn't have a real formal education around it. So to be able to work in a place where those conversations were encouraged was really formative for me as a young writer.
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah. And yeah I remember like your name was familiar to me from ah you would moderate these pointer things where like Roy would spend an afternoon, like an hour kind of answering questions or something. And you were kind of the moderator on the side.
00:18:37
Speaker
ah This must have been like 2009, 2010, 2011, around there. ah So, yeah of course, like you've you've noted what you've learned from Roy, ah but being ah sort of a, you know, a wingman to those sessions and hearing the concerns of other writers and reporters, you know, what did you take away from that experience hearing the the community talk and you know into the pointer bullhorn or whatever? Yeah.
00:19:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, one thing that i really learned was that you always are trying to improve your craft no matter how many years you've been in the business. So I remember just thinking that we would bring in these seasoned journalists and I would often just wonder what I would have to contribute to the conversation because we had these folks from the New York Times and the Washington Post and NPR who would be coming in as guests to talk with Roy in these chats.
00:19:29
Speaker
And very often they would be asking for my input on something. And that made me think, huh, well, one, they want to continue to learn even though they've been in the business for 20 plus years.
00:19:40
Speaker
But two, maybe I actually have something to offer as a young journalist. And that was really refreshing for me. Also to be a younger journalist editing Roy Peter Clark and editing all these other journalism greats who worked at the Poynter Institute helped me realize that there could be this really interesting writer-editor relationship that wasn't sort of defined by age so much as an opportunity and willingness to learn. So I would always learn something new as I was editing these journalists' work.
00:20:10
Speaker
And in turn, they showed me that they were learning something from me because as a young editor, I was bringing a different perspective to the piece and the way that I read and edited it. And that inspired confidence in me to the point where at a very young age, i was probably 23, was starting to teach journalists who came to the Poynter Institute for training how to use social media as a reporting and writing tool because I was very much interested in social media as a young person, whereas a lot of other folks who had been in the industry for a while were quite skeptical of it.
00:20:44
Speaker
So being in that position to actually teach seasoned journalists ah was really quite helpful because again, it made me feel more confident in my ability, but it also helped me to just feel like I could be in a position where I was continuously learning and also teaching at the same time.
00:21:02
Speaker
I'm glad you brought up social media. That was something I wanted to talk to you about because you've been on you've been on the hustle for for Slip for ah for a while, like really building a foundation for and It's something I've like picked up on over the last several months.
00:21:16
Speaker
And you're like i mean you reached out to me at least six months ago, if not eight months ago. was a while ago. And, yeah, in the the degree to which that you're trying to build as much momentum as you can behind it. So just how are you thinking about it, you know, months and months, maybe even, you know, a full year, year and a half ahead of your pub date?
00:21:37
Speaker
So it's been interesting to try to develop my social media presence more. I've always been on social media and have tried to be an early adopter of it, but I really now have seen it as a way of building community and support around my work.
00:21:52
Speaker
That's been a little bit just different for me as a journalist to be in more of a promotional capacity where I'm trying to ask people on social media to pre-order my book and to ah listen to my podcast or just subscribe to my newsletter. But most of it has been really around book promotion.
00:22:12
Speaker
But I find that I'm really drawn to other authors who are doing spectacular job on social media. They're posting all the time and they're just generating kind of excitement around their book. And as I've seen other authors do that, I've seen in turn that their books have often become quite successful, partly because they've really put in that effort to Build momentum and interest and excitement. And so I've really thought about how can I do that for myself and for Slip so that I can not only promote the book, but really tell the story behind it.
00:22:47
Speaker
So I've tried to think about social media as a platform where I can really elevate the topics that I write about in the book and talk more about eating disorders and use social media as a way of amplifying my voice as an expert in that area.
00:23:02
Speaker
But also in social media, I've been trying to tell a little bit more about the backstory of the writing process, which I find fascinating as a journalist. And so I find also that other journalists are quite interested in that. Maybe not the general readership is, but I have these different segments of audiences on social media and I try to reach them in different ways.
00:23:23
Speaker
And for me, having a newsletter that offers weekly writing tips, as well as just my work as a professor feels like a way of giving back to the writing community.
00:23:35
Speaker
And it makes me feel a little less sheepish about being somewhat promotional on social media because I'm not just taking, I'm not just asking for something. I'm also giving in return. So that balance of that giving and taking changed freed me up to feel just a little bit more authentic when I'm you know posting and publicizing um the book.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah. And and whether we benefit from having like ah an in-house team to help publicize a book, you know, what questions should writers be asking of their PR team, even asking of themselves as they look to build that momentum?
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah. So it's really important to recognize that you may have an in-house publicity team and they may be amazing, but so much of the onus is on the author as well. And you very often have to do a lot of publicity yourself.
00:24:30
Speaker
Sometimes there are outlets that actually prefer to hear from the author as opposed to just getting a press release or an email from a publicist. And so I always encourage writers to really advocate for themselves and to say, hey, here are the podcasts that I would really love to be on Can you help me to reach out to them? Right. And then following up with the publicist a month or two later, depending on what your timeframe is and saying, have we heard anything from you these different podcasts?
00:25:00
Speaker
Similarly, doing that with newsletters, doing that with publications who you hope will review the book. I was very deliberate about having a detailed spreadsheet of all the different places that i would want to have the book pitched to.
00:25:15
Speaker
And I separated it out by media platform. And fortunately, my publicist was very good about going in and kind of updating who she had reached out to and when.
00:25:25
Speaker
But there was a certain point where I said, well, you're not hearing back from these folks. Is it okay if I reach out? And she said, yes, go for it. So in those cases, I then reached out and sometimes ended up getting yeses. So don't take silence as a no and also recognize that you can't just expect your publicist to do everything because your publicist is working with a lot of other authors. And so you as the author have to be really creative about thinking about who you want to reach out to.
00:25:54
Speaker
And also thinking about who are some of these tangential audiences that may not be the first people who come to mind when you think about your book, but who could still end up benefiting from reading it. So as I've thought about podcasts, for instance, I've certainly thought about wanting to speak on eating disorder conferences because that's the topic of my book.
Post-Publication Challenges and Marketing
00:26:14
Speaker
But I've also thought about what are all the different podcasts that talk about writing and editing? What are podcasts that talk about menopause? Because we know that eating disorders can often come into play with menopause.
00:26:27
Speaker
What about parenting podcasts? We know that parents are often wondering what are the warning signs around eating disorders? So really being creative in terms of the different ways in which the topic of your book can relate to other topics that um are related or tangential in some way Yeah, I would think even like endurance and running podcasts would be good for your book too because so many endurance athletes you know wrestle with disordered eating and everything. So yeah, just yeah i like your thinking around, yeah, there are these little, you you can really diversify the reach with your theme even though it might not like immediately feel germane, but it but it really does you know play a part into the holistic view of a publicity push.
00:27:14
Speaker
Yes, definitely. And I did decide to hire a freelance publicist ah because it felt just appropriate to me just to be able to get a little bit more support. And i mean, you hear about these PR agencies that are just astronomically expensive and mine was more reasonably priced for what I was looking for. But she's been incredibly helpful in getting me on podcasts because a lot of times with bigger five publishers, they're really only going after the big name folks, the big name publications, whereas you get a freelance publicist who may be more open to pitching some of these smaller podcasts or newsletters that may not have huge followings, but have dedicated followings. And so it certainly is a lot more work on the author's part if you get a freelance publicist who's a hustler and who gets lots of opportunities for you, because it means you're going to be on a ton of podcasts or answering a ton Q&As for newsletters.
00:28:11
Speaker
But if you're willing to invest that time and you have the bandwidth to do so, it can make a really big difference. And of course the book's not out yet in my case, so it's hard to know what that difference actually looks like. But I can tell that all this work that I'm doing um is hopefully building this momentum to the point where people will say, huh, I've seen that book in a lot of different places. Maybe I should actually order it or pick it up.
00:28:35
Speaker
How did you vet your freelance publicist? So I was kind of asking around, I certainly asked my literary agent who I really trust and love and asked for her thoughts on whether or not it would even make sense to hire a freelance publicist.
00:28:52
Speaker
And she had sent me just some different agencies. And then I just talked with a few other author friends as well, just to get a sense of whether or not they had gone in this direction.
00:29:03
Speaker
Most of them had not, but I also just decided that I wanted this and that I wanted to go with an individual, ah someone who sort of did this on their own as opposed to going one with one of the bigger agencies because typically those bigger agencies come with more dollar signs. ah So I went with a publicist whose newsletter I follow and who I know has a really good reputation in the field. She had worked previously at Big Five Publishing Houses And so I felt like I could trust her. I had led some of, or worked just on kind of doing some research into her and had attended some of her training. So I felt pretty confident given her reputation that she'd be a good person to go with.
00:29:45
Speaker
Yeah. And with um author platform, like yeah platform is so key. I've come to understand that it's, to me, it's more valuable than anything, especially the permission-based side of platform.
00:29:56
Speaker
A lot of authors are just discouraged by, ah The time it takes to build like a really fruitful one. Like i tell people about this podcast, like I started this thing in 2013. Like it's, it's an old podcast and it's taken, it's been a slow burn pod. It still is a slow burn pod. It's always going to be.
00:30:14
Speaker
Um, but like when I say it's been like a dozen year build, like that people are just like, Oh fuck. I want my platform to be robust and strong in three months. um So I don't know, just when when you're thinking about platform and a holistic approach to it, you know, what can authors and writers, you know, you know, learn from your experience and how how you approach it. So maybe they can approach it with a bit of a, you know, with some positivity and energy, because it really is. It's truly how, you know, most people are going to sell their books. You you need that built in audience.
00:30:49
Speaker
You do. And you can get it on different platforms. I find that I have different interactions with folks depending on the platform that I'm on. There are some folks who I've really connected with on LinkedIn.
00:31:00
Speaker
There are others who have really just connected with me on Instagram. And these are individuals who I don't really know, but who have seen my work and who have just pre-ordered the book and who are planning to ah join my book tour events.
00:31:14
Speaker
And so that's been really meaningful to me because I don't have a huge following. i don't have a massive platform, but I'm very engaged with the folks who do follow me on these different platforms and I post regularly. So people come to expect that from me. Whereas before I started all these publicity efforts, I would post here and there but I didn't have a real strategy around it. And it's not like I have a written strategy ah for how I approach social media, but I've been a lot more mindful about it and have experimented more. So I've posted a lot more Instagram stories, a lot more videos, and just trying to figure out what sticks, knowing that some stuff works and then other stuff that I think is going to be really successful.
00:31:58
Speaker
doesn't end up getting that many views. And so it's been a lot of trial and error. i also just signed up to kind of join Substack and created a newsletter last year. And that was helpful in the sense that I had turned to my manuscript and then felt this kind of emptiness because i realized, oh, I don't have my manuscript to work on anymore. So how do I keep up with this writing routine? so Soon after that, I started my newsletter, which was a great way to just keep that writing routine going.
00:32:28
Speaker
And initially I thought, oh I'm going to get a lot of subscribers. And I mean, like you said, it's been somewhat of a slow trickle and i have a lot of followers, ah you know, but in terms of subscribers, I have about 800, but those 800 folks do tend to read the newsletter. a lot of them comment. I can tell that it's having some sort of impact.
00:32:48
Speaker
And my hope is that that just continues to grow as more people recommend the newsletter, as more people get exposed to the book and my work. um So it's important to just remember that lot of times things are just this slow accumulation and then you figure out what works, what doesn't. And you hope that You're always moving in that direction of this sort of upward trajectory.
00:33:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think a good way to think about it, as depressing as it might feel in the moment, is to really think of it as like a 10 or a 15 or a 20 year arc of this. Not like, oh, I got to try to get 10,000 people on a list in...
00:33:27
Speaker
six months for this book. Otherwise it's going to fail. It's like, okay, you know, this one is a a step towards this big, this bigger arc. You got to see it as a long game and in such a quick hit, certainly algorithmically driven social media society, everything feels so instant.
00:33:43
Speaker
And But it's like, no, we got to we got to plant these trees and give them give them the time to grow. Because that tap, like you said, that those 800 people, like I guess to me, that's to me, that's a lot. But maybe on paper to an agent's like, oh it's only 800.
00:33:55
Speaker
But my but they're engaged. Like, give me 800 engaged people and they are going to be the evangeal evangelical evangelical for your work because they'll buy two or three copies. And and it's like, OK, that has the heft of someone with 20,000 because they're so engaged.
00:34:13
Speaker
Yes, exactly. And just as we're talking, it it makes me think about how this also translates to the actual book publication, because for many of us, myself included, it's easy to just want to be on the New York Times bestseller list or the USA Today bestseller list and to try to just get an amazing number of week one sales.
00:34:32
Speaker
But it's important to remember too that obviously those lists are really hard to get on. ah And there can be this really nice long tail in terms of the impact of a book where maybe It doesn't really necessarily get a ton of sales in that first week or that first month, but over time it continues to sell, right? And then you get these bumps and you realize that, oh, this book has staying power, right? And cumulatively over time, that can be really meaningful when you think about just the longer term impact of a book.
00:35:04
Speaker
You don't get that instant gratification of saying, oh, I got on this bestseller list or I just, I mean, I hit it out of the park with week one sales. But you can think about what does it mean to really just have the lifespan of this book continue right throughout the years.
00:35:22
Speaker
You kind of alluded to it with starting your sub stack after after your book was kind of done and you were kind of done with it for a while. And similarly with the front runner, like I was in a post book funk for a long time. Like it just was this weird vacuum, this weird space of um really unmoored and not knowing really what to do with myself.
00:35:44
Speaker
So how did you handle your your post ah post-submission, post-book blues? um you know You alluded to the sub-stack, but ah how ah how else did you metabolize that time to like kind of get your bearing again?
00:35:55
Speaker
he It was challenging because, again, i've i've felt like there was something missing because I'd been working on the manuscript for so long. But there were so many different kind of reviews and edits that the book went through that I didn't actually have a whole lot of time where I i wasn't working on the book, to be honest. I mean, I turned it in in June of 2024, and then my editor got back to me um within a month. And so during that month, I thought I was going to take a break from the book, but I ended up working on my
00:36:27
Speaker
author's questionnaire for the publisher and started to think about publicity and marketing and started to envision what the newsletter would look like. And then very quickly got my edits and started working through those.
00:36:39
Speaker
And then there was a series of copy edits and there was a kind of cold reader who had looked at it and I had to make some edits for that. I also had a sensitivity reader. i had a fact checker. I had all these different folks as well as early readers who were looking at the book. So I was still very much engaged in editing the book and working with the manuscript for even months after the fact. And we really didn't finish all these small edits until spring of 2025 or early 2025. So it was a good six months of just working through edits
00:37:17
Speaker
And these weren't substantial line edits, but it was a lot of just like little nitty gritty details that we were working through. And as a perfectionist, I kept going through and I mean, I had three different passes and had all these different opportunities to make little tiny edits. My ability to make those um just got smaller and smaller as as we got closer to publication. But I appreciated that my publisher was really willing to involve me in that part of the process.
00:37:42
Speaker
I remember my editor saying, you know, sometimes people don't even look at the second pass, right, or the third pass. But I just wanted to go through and say, okay, are there any remaining typos? But so I was very much still working through the book. And then...
00:37:55
Speaker
Once that editing process ended, then I pretty quickly went into full-on marketing and publicity mode. So maybe I should have given myself a little bit more of a buffer, or a little bit more of a break in between these different phases. But I feel like I've just lived and breathed this book for so long and it just is so important to me that it has never really felt like work.
00:38:15
Speaker
um Some people have said, oh, have you gotten tired of reading the book after all these edits? And I said, don't know if there's something wrong with me, but no, I'm not tired of reading it yet. And I'm still not, I'm rereading it now that I'm about to go on tour.
00:38:28
Speaker
So for me, I've just felt like I've just continuously been engaged with it. But it's been a little bit of a lighter lift. Certainly writing it was hard and heavy because of the subject matter.
00:38:40
Speaker
For sure. And you you brought up a sensitivity reader and a fact checker. When did you feel confident inviting that into the fold process? So I had a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which really enabled me to be able to hire some additional folks who could support me in the process.
00:38:59
Speaker
So I used that grant funding to hire a fact checker because it's crazy, but ah typically publishers do not have in-house fact checkers. They have copy editors. But as a journalist, I just really wanted this to be both rigorously reported and fact checked. So Hired a fact checker, hired a sensitivity reader, also hired a science advisor who could really look at the science in the book and make sure that I was writing about things accurately.
00:39:25
Speaker
So this was a clinician who was both an eating disorder psychiatrist and an expert in the neurobiology of eating disorders. So i had been talking with these individuals throughout the process and particularly the science advisor. She had looked at an earlier draft and had some really helpful revisions for me.
00:39:42
Speaker
And then once I finished my draft, which was the version that I sent to my publisher, At that point, I then had the fact checker, sensitivity reader, and the science advisor really look through that final version so that they could be looking at it at the same time that my publishing editor was looking at it. And then I could really kind of just work on those edits all at once.
00:40:07
Speaker
I think writers have different kind of processes for that in terms of when they choose to invite people into the process. But for me, I didn't want to be having to work through just a ton of different edits at various points of the process. It was easier for me to tackle them all at once.
00:40:23
Speaker
Cool. Yeah. And in this book too, like when you're saying you're inviting, know, science advisors, sensitivity readers, you know, fact checkers, you know, on the surface, you know, it's a memoir of your eating disorder and being in the middle place, that spectrum of recovery.
00:40:39
Speaker
and So you would think, okay, maybe it's it's merely merely a personal story, but it was very intentional on your part to really bring in a journalistic lens to this book. So when did you know you were you were doing something that was using your story as a springboard to then bolster with a lot of research?
00:40:59
Speaker
So I initially conceived of this project as being a literary memoir, and I envisioned that it would be a memoir that would look at my own life, and I would do some reporting, but that reporting would be mostly around my own life story.
Writing a Memoir: Balancing Narrative and Research
00:41:13
Speaker
So I would go back and interview medical doctors who treated me.
00:41:16
Speaker
I would interview my family members. And so when my agent and I sent my proposal to editors, that's how we pitched it as a literary memoir. And we started to get rejections. ah We got a lot of rejections, in fact, 17. And I felt certainly dejected, particularly when it's a memoir. It's hard not to take it personally because it is such a a personal endeavor and pursuit to write a memoir.
00:41:43
Speaker
But the feedback was not terribly consistent. Some people said that I just didn't have a big enough platform. ah Someone said they would have liked more social commentary. um Several people said that they just didn't think they could get the book beyond modest sales because they said memoir is really tough to sell.
00:42:01
Speaker
And I essentially just felt like these editors were trying to get at something that I couldn't quite understand. And so essentially we said, okay, we've gotten no's from all the editors. So we're going to have to just take a break right now.
00:42:17
Speaker
And around that same time, there was this term that was beginning to emerge, which was memoir plus this idea that big five publishers in particular were not really acquiring as many memoirs unless they're written by famous people or folks with huge platforms. And so to get a book deal for a memoir,
00:42:36
Speaker
um You had to kind of think more along the lines of memoir plus reportage or memoir plus investigation or memoir plus social commentary. So I began to think through what would my plus be. And I decided quite quickly that that plus would be reporting because I am a journalist by trade.
00:42:53
Speaker
So I ended up deciding that I wanted to interview folks with lived experience, but I didn't know really many people who had had eating disorders. So I decided to launch a survey and I ended up surveying over 700 people with lived experience from around the world.
00:43:11
Speaker
And I was able to then start interviewing some of these individuals. And I, at the same time, was reworking my proposal and reworking it to say that I would write a narrative nonfiction book that would blend personal narrative um with this reporting that I was doing.
00:43:27
Speaker
I didn't use the term memoir plus because at the time it was still somewhat nascent and and I was afraid to use memoir too much. So I gravitated toward narrative nonfiction. Sometimes you have to see what's really popular in terms of the verbiage in the publishing world at any given point in time.
00:43:43
Speaker
Now I refer to my book as a memoir because the average reader doesn't really know what narrative nonfiction is. So I call it a memoir now, but at the time I didn't. But I went back on proposal and submission.
00:43:54
Speaker
And this was one year after we'd gone on submission the first time around and still got more rejections, ah but finally got interest from ah Simon & Schuster imprint.
00:44:05
Speaker
um And I will say that, you know, along the way, there were some potential opportunities, but i ultimately passed on them. So for instance, at one point, an editor had said, well, we think that we could actually sell this book more if you were to co author it with an eating disorder expert with a clinician. And I just said,
00:44:24
Speaker
I don't want this book to be clinical, nor do I want to co-author it. So I'm going to just not do that. and So sometimes you have to be willing to pivot, right? But you also don't want to just kind of completely and disregard your vision for the book because you need to stay true to that. So I fortunately was able to go with an editor and publisher who really believed in this book, which was super important, but it took about 35 rejections to get to that point. Yeah.
00:44:53
Speaker
yeah that's a Yeah, that's crazy because when – and this is something you you worked on in your MFA too at Goucher. And when you're working so hard on these things, you'll almost take like any compromise to get to see it through, to see it published.
00:45:10
Speaker
And, you know, just because you're so many just like, yeah, I got to get this thing seen between two covers. But then you're really selling your vision short of it. So, yeah, sticking to your guns in that regard, following your gut, ah you know, it clearly paid off. But it's really hard to do in the moment.
00:45:28
Speaker
It is. It's really hard to do. But it's important, too, because if you're writing a book that doesn't align with your vision and it's not the book you want to write, it is going to be a slog and you're not going to ultimately be as proud of it.
00:45:42
Speaker
So for me, that willingness to pivot and include more reporting was really important because it still felt true to my vision for the book. I liked this idea of doing the additional reporting and i ultimately think it made for a much better book because I learned so much in the process of reporting on eating disorders. And I thought I was an expert on the topic as someone with lived experience, but it turns out that there was so much I didn't know.
00:46:08
Speaker
So to be able to bring that reporting aspect into the proposal when we went out on that second round of submissions was incredibly important. And it was that additional reporting that I think ultimately led me to getting a book deal.
00:46:22
Speaker
Yeah, the the way you braid it I think, is especially astute and you know and well done because we are we're grounded in your story, but then we're, i used that word earlier, bolstered by by this other stuff, by the surveys, by by tracking the trajectory of the research and the therapy of of it from the time that you were oh, we're 11 years old way and when this comes with the onset of this when you were so young to to where it is now. And I think youre your book tracking that arc as well was just a ah wise it was just a wise move. This way we get your story and then we take a little break and then we learn a bit more of the nuance and some of the granularity of the stuff and then we come back to you and it's this good give and take that keeps the momentum going and keeps you coming back to it.
00:47:13
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, I really had to think about the structure of the book and the way that I structured it is different from any other books that I've seen. So I didn't really have a roadmap in and terms of other books that I could look to for counsel, but i certainly got some inspiration from books like The Night of the Gun by David Carr and other books that bring together both personal narrative and reporting.
00:47:37
Speaker
But for me, I ultimately took this split chapter approach where the first half of each chapter is very personal. It's narrative driven. it really looks at my younger years and my struggles with the eating disorder and my pathway through recovery And then there is a visual element that kind of signals a break.
00:47:57
Speaker
And then it shifts to that reported part where I'm bringing in all of the different perspectives from folks with lived experience and all of the different interviews I did with researchers. And both halves of each chapter are unified by a central theme.
00:48:12
Speaker
So the chapter on treatment, for instance, in the first half, I'm delving deep into my first hospitalization for anorexia. And then in the second half, I'm looking at the evolution of care and how treatment has evolved since the late 90s when I was first hospitalized.
00:48:27
Speaker
And for me, that structural approach took a little while to figure out, but ultimately it gave me a lot of freedom as a writer because I was able to go really deep into the personal narrative and then really deep into the reporting.
00:48:41
Speaker
And it worked because my book really is equal parts narrative and reporting. a lot of times you have a book that's mostly one or the other, but this was really equally parts both.
00:48:51
Speaker
But the other value in that structural approach was that I was able to almost have my different selves be in conversation with each other. So it was almost as if my younger self could be in conversation with my present day self because the personal parts were largely written from the perspective of my younger self and the second parts were written more from the present day.
00:49:13
Speaker
um So I loved that kind of idea of the cells being in conversation with one another. um And I loved really being able to experiment with structure.
Authenticity and Personal Reflection in Writing
00:49:22
Speaker
And my hope is that it gives other writers who are doing this work some inspiration for how they may approach their own books.
00:49:29
Speaker
Well, speaking of yourselves being in conversation with each other, yeah part of what amazed me in the reading of it was that you have all these journals from like your whole life, really. And so you're able to really get into the mind of 11-, 12-, 13-year-old Mallory.
00:49:45
Speaker
And is when you yeah entered those texts, yeah who who do you see now from 30-year remove? Yeah. So those journals were like a goldmine. My father had found them in the attic ah when I was at Goucher College getting my MFA and beginning to really work on this book.
00:50:04
Speaker
And the timing was quite fortuitous because for years I had asked him if he could find the journals and he kept saying he couldn't find them. Maybe he just didn't want to because they were from a really hard time in our lives. but But I found them and they were incredibly painful to read because i kept just really detailed journals throughout all of the years that I was in treatment. And so it was hard to get through them. It felt like I was climbing this emotional Mount Everest. And I initially tried to read them all out loud so I could just record me reading them, but that proved to be too difficult. So I ended up silently reading with them and then just marking up the different passages that I wanted to consider including in the book.
00:50:45
Speaker
And I did include quite a few passages But it really helped me to get into my headspace of my younger self. It helped me to corroborate memory. And it also helped me to really recreate scenes because there were so many details in these journals that I had long since forgotten.
00:51:01
Speaker
Like there was this one moment where I was writing about this spa night that we had in the residential treatment facility where I lived for a year and a half. And in a journal entry about that, I had the name of the different nail polish colors that we were using. And I wrote that I was painting my nails with a Calypso coral nail polish. And I thought, there's no way I would have ever remembered that. But there it is in the journal, right? And so then I was able to put that on the page and really make that scene come to life more because I had all these vivid details.
00:51:33
Speaker
It was as if even then I knew that I would one day want to write about these experiences. So those journals really did feel like gifts to my present day self. And they also helped me to see just how far I've come and also how sick I was. So there was one passage I remember including in the book where I just essentially said, i don't deserve the light.
00:51:57
Speaker
And I remember I would sit in the dark literally and write some of these journal entries because I didn't think I was deserving of actual light. um And part of my recovery was figuring out how do you let the light back in?
00:52:09
Speaker
There was another ah journal entry in which I really just talked about how I missed my mom and I would write to my mom and then I would include her responses in a different color ink.
00:52:22
Speaker
And that for me was fascinating to look at what that was like because my eating disorder started after my mom died. And I actually included some of those passages of me writing to my mom in the book.
00:52:33
Speaker
So these journals were hugely helpful in terms of re-inhabiting my younger self. How did the light start to crack back in? So it really was when I was in residential treatment. I had been hospitalized five different times and was in this revolving door of treatment.
00:52:53
Speaker
And my doctors suggested that I needed a higher level of care. So I went to this residential treatment program in Arlington, Massachusetts, and was there for a year and a half.
00:53:05
Speaker
um Fortunately, the public school system and the Department of Mental Health covered the expenses, or else there's no way that my father, as director of housekeeping at a nursing home, would have been able to pay for so much care.
00:53:17
Speaker
But it was there that I began to reconnect with different parts of myself because really the eating disorder just begun to take over my whole identity to the point where i just didn't want to socialize. I didn't see myself as anything beyond the girl with anorexia.
00:53:34
Speaker
And so I needed to think about the ways in which I was special apart from my disorder and to think about who else am I outside of anorexia And how can I begin to see the eating disorder not as the a solution, but really as the problem?
00:53:50
Speaker
And ah big part of my recovery and letting that light back in was also learning to grieve my mother's death because a big part of the eating disorder was just a result of a lot of suppressed grief. And so finally in treatment, I was able to cry and scream and get mad and think about, ah why did my mother have to die? and so In what ways did i think that this eating disorder could help me to be closer to her? And in my recovery, how can I find other ways of maintaining that closeness without needing to rely on disordered behaviors?
00:54:23
Speaker
Yeah, to give people who haven't read it an idea of the the the degree to which you you didn't grieve. Like, you were in school the day after your mom passed away, and then you came home from school and were alone for two hours, and you know, by yourself, you know, with no support network. And then, you know, one part that really kind of ripped my heart out, too, was like you— You know, you didn't cry or emote and your father wanted to, but he wanted to be he was kind of mirroring you and you know, not wanting to break down because he saw how strong you appeared.
00:54:55
Speaker
and I was just like, oh, my God, this is this. yeah here Here was the missed opportunity to to to start that grieving process, which could have saved you like, you know, probably yeah know years and years and years of pain.
00:55:07
Speaker
Mm hmm. And that was a big part of my reporting process was going back and talking to my dad about that period. ah For a long time, I felt anger toward him for. not stepping in and for not telling me that I should cry.
00:55:21
Speaker
But as a parent, I found that I could empathize with him a little bit more at this point in my life. And I ended up talking with him and asking him these really tough questions around, why didn't you cry? Or why didn't you think it was weird that I wasn't crying? And we had this just really heartfelt series of conversations that were difficult to have, but ultimately it helped me to understand his perspective more And what I ended up doing in the book was I recreated that conversation as a dialogue. I didn't want to just write about that conversation. I wanted readers to actually hear my father's voice and to hear how the conversation played out.
00:55:57
Speaker
So dialogue ended up being a really helpful writing tool in that sense. Yeah. There's, ah you said, a yeah like, kind of a moment but moment ago where you couldn't, well, your identity was so, like, inextricably tied to anorexia.
00:56:11
Speaker
There's, and this is kind of common, but you referred to it kind of, like, as a friend. And it's, like, this thing that is, like, bound to you and in a way. like Maybe, like, just pull on that thread a little more how this thing, yeah how how it becomes to be seen as as a friend, malicious as it is.
00:56:28
Speaker
Yeah, so this is very common among people with eating disorders where they do tend to think about the disorder as a friend, even though in many ways it is a foe. But the eating disorder in some way, shape, or form serves a purpose, right? I mean, otherwise we wouldn't have fallen into the eating disorder. And for me, it it was a way to stay small and safe in the aftermath of my mother's death. And I thought that if I stayed the same size I was when my mom was alive, maybe I could somehow be closer to her.
00:56:58
Speaker
And for a time, it did help me to feel closer to her because as I think back on that period, my most accessible memories of my mother were of her sick in a hospital bed, unable to eat because she was so sick with cancer that she had literally lost her appetite.
00:57:14
Speaker
And when I went back and looked at her old medical records, she had been diagnosed as positive for anorexia. That is not anorexia or nervosa, which is what I struggled with, but positive for anorexia is just a clinical term that doctors use when someone has cancer, for instance, and they've lost their appetite because of it.
00:57:31
Speaker
ah But I remember her losing weight, being in the hospital, and then fast forward a year and a half, and I was sick with an anorexia of my own in the hospital. And I remember feeling closer to my mom from that hospital bed because I remembered her being there and the hospital felt like very familiar territory to me. So there was this sort of feeling that anorexia was giving me something.
00:57:54
Speaker
It also did give me a sense of control. i couldn't control what I put or what happened to my mom's body, but I could control what I put into mine. And so it felt like the anorexia was acting as a friend in some ways, but it also had taken away so much from me. And at a certain point,
00:58:13
Speaker
It was not lost on me that I had developed my eating disorder as a way to stay small. And this disorder ended up growing unbearably big. And I ended up feeling more out of control than ever.
00:58:26
Speaker
um So that's important to, I think, in recovery really reckon with what did the eating disorder give you and what did it ultimately take away? Yeah, there's a a part ah in my galley, 102 pages in where as you're starting to gain some of your weight back, you said the more I gained, the more distant I felt from both my mother and my disorder. So it was like in the healing came this, ah you I don't know, ah a vacancy or like a separation anxiety to these things that were bond you were bound to
00:59:00
Speaker
as you were getting healthier, like objectively healthier here, you were fearing you were going to lose a connection like these yeah to to your mom and the disorder itself.
00:59:12
Speaker
Right. Because recovery seems so daunting because I thought, well, if I recover, then I will no longer have these connections to my mom and I won't have my eating disorder at all either. So who am I going to be? Right. And so that question of identity really came into play there.
00:59:29
Speaker
Yeah. And um it's ah one part that it was, you know, it was early on. your Your mom had passed away and I thought it was kind of like what your dad did, like just in his, in his grief and just not knowing, you know, what to do with, you know, that with his daughter, like he subscribes you to 17 magazine.
00:59:46
Speaker
I was like, it was such like a cute, heartwarming gesture. It's just like, I'm picturing ah I know someone in their probably mid to late 30s, like trying to like, oh, my God, here's my 11 year old daughter. Like, what what can I do to help her out? he's like oh Maybe I'll get a subscription to this magazine and this will help. Like I as p could feel the love in that.
01:00:07
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. And that was really interesting too, because i think over time we tend to simplify narratives. And for the longest time I said, my mom's death caused my eating disorder. But then when I was getting my MFA at Goucher, I had a professor who said, is that really what caused it?
01:00:23
Speaker
And that question did prompt me to think about the other elements at play. And one of those elements was the Seventeen magazine. And I remember distinctly I was sitting in an MFA class and I started to Google the first issue of Seventeen that I ever got because I remember exactly when it was. It was two months after my mom had died.
01:00:42
Speaker
And I looked at this image of this magazine and the cover story was girls who exercise themselves to death. And I ended up on eBay just purchasing a copy of this particular issue as well as several others and read this story. And it was all about girls with eating disorders. It was about girls who compulsively exercised and didn't eat. And I thought,
01:01:05
Speaker
you know, that was probably my first exposure to eating disorders. And then I flipped to the back of the magazine and was immediately reminded of all the really pernicious ads. in the back of these teen magazines where they would advertise fat camps and weight loss strategies for young girls as young as seven years old. And to think about those influences yeah were was really just eye-opening for me as a writer. And it helped me to complicate the narrative.
01:01:33
Speaker
And that complicating of the narrative is not something I'd done before, but the form of the book and just the real estate I had to work with was so much more vast than any time that I'd written in the past because previously I'd really only written these short personal essays, but I had so much more room to roam and to really look at all these different elements that played into the eating disorder. And for me as a writer, that was really fascinating.
01:01:59
Speaker
And a lot of this book, it focuses on this idea of ah middle place where you're not like full recovery, but you're, you know, between full recovery and a relapse.
01:02:11
Speaker
And in between there is this wide spectrum of of healing and care and recovery. So just like take us to what the middle place is and how you've come to move within those boundaries.
Navigating Sensitive Topics and Vulnerability
01:02:24
Speaker
Yeah, so the middle place is not something that's really talked about at all ah in eating disorder literature, and yet it's so important. And I found that whenever I would read books about eating disorders, there was often this lack of a mirrored image because I didn't see my story reflected in those books because they were by and large written by people who were fully recovered.
01:02:44
Speaker
And so for a long time, I thought I was the only person in this gray space between acute sickness and full recovery. And once I started doing reporting for the book, and when I surveyed over these 700 plus people, 85% of them said, i can identify with this middle place. So I thought, huh, this place seems quite populous. And yet we're not talking about it. Why is that?
01:03:08
Speaker
um So in the book, I explore the why behind that, but I also really talk about this framework and the middle place is really a term I came up with. to describe the ongoingness of recovery from an eating disorder because while full recovery can be possible for some, we know that eating disorders can be chronic for many and many people end up of in this space where they are better but not all better. And as a writer, I was really intrigued by these questions of what does it mean to be better but not to be over your disorder? And what does it mean to live in this world knowing that your disorder remains a vulnerability?
01:03:48
Speaker
So part of why i I titled the book Slip is to recognize that slips are a normal part of the process. And yet, at least within the eating disorder field, they are so often stigmatized to the point where people don't want to talk about them.
01:04:01
Speaker
And the middle place is really about thinking about how you can normalize slips and look at slips not as grounds for failure, but as opportunities for growth. And that framing has been really helpful for me in terms of my own recovery, because it makes recovery seem like less of a perfectionistic ideal and more of an accessible reality. Yeah. And speaking of that vulnerability of the the middle place and who you're writing this book for, to what extent did you wrestle with the idea that maybe the book is going to be very triggering and to people?
01:04:39
Speaker
Mm-hmm. It's something I thought about a lot because i did not want this book to be a guidebook for people with eating disorders. There are certainly some books that have been criticized just as being too triggering or giving people really harmful ideas about how they can be better at their eating disorders.
01:04:55
Speaker
So I did not want that to be the case, and yet I didn't want to skirt over hard truths. So very often I would delve into some of the harmful behaviors that I engaged in But then in that latter half of each chapter where I was writing from my present-day perspective, I was then able to say, okay, that behavior led to these other kind of destructive thoughts or those landed me um in a really bad spot or those led to consequences in the treatment center.
01:05:29
Speaker
And I didn't want to have to do that when I was writing from the perspective of my younger self because I didn't want my adult self chiming in and saying, well, that wasn't good or that was bad. But in that second half of the chapter, I could more freely do that. So I tried to make those connections, not in sort of a didactic or prescriptive way, but in a more subtle way to show the repercussions of those really harmful behaviors that I had engaged in.
01:05:52
Speaker
I was also careful not to include numbers. So I never talked about how much I weighed at any given point in time. um And that was just something that i made a very conscious decision about.
01:06:03
Speaker
But I will say that what's triggering for one person may not be triggering for another. So for instance, if I had included my weight at various points, that may not have been as triggering for someone as some of the other details that I included are. so I think it's just important to recognize that our triggers are different for everyone. But if we are going into great detail about something that could be triggering, thinking about ways that we can creatively show the side effects or repercussions of those behaviors can be really important.
01:06:35
Speaker
It sounds weird saying well one of my favorite moments in the book is when your kids are reading the Berenstain Bears, like basically body shaming story and your reaction and like kind of like the horror of this because you're like seeing this as a potential inflection point on on your children and probably specifically your daughter.
01:06:57
Speaker
And i just that one's like struck out to me. I was like, holy shit, here you are at your your point in your journey. And then you see like this thing, and you know, innocent to them. But you could see the how pernicious it is. i don't know.
01:07:12
Speaker
Just like, you know, take us there and yeah to what the horror you were experiencing. Yeah. So the last chapter of the book is all about motherhood and also about the genetics of eating disorders. And it looks at why I am nervous about my kids potentially getting an eating disorder one day, not because of any behaviors we've exhibited, but just because of the genetics of it.
01:07:34
Speaker
But I talk about just how I have tried so hard to protect them from ever developing this disorder And at one point they were reading this Berenstain Bears book that was published in 1985, which was the year that I was born. And I very likely could have read it as a child because I loved the Berenstain Bears.
01:07:51
Speaker
But the title of this book was Too Much Junk Food. And my son had picked it up from the library unbeknownst to me And then I heard my daughter reading it to him on the couch. And it was talking about how the Berenstain bears had gotten too wide from side to side because they were eating too many treats.
01:08:08
Speaker
And to hear my daughter talking in this way just made my blood boil. And I wasn't angry at her, but I was angry at the messaging because it was so firmly, firmly rooted. There we go. It was so rooted. Yeah.
01:08:22
Speaker
And diet culture and fat phobia. And I thought, again, ah I'm sure I was exposed to that as a kid, but I didn't know any better than to think that there was something wrong with that message. And I very quickly stepped in and just pulled the book out of my daughter's hand. And I said, we're not reading that.
01:08:38
Speaker
And i hid it in the top shelf of my closet. And my kids were upset with me because I'd taken the book away and they didn't understand why. And later on that night, I apologized and I just explained that that book runs contrary to the messaging that I like to share with them, which is this idea that all foods fit and all bodies are worthy of respect, no matter how short or tall, no matter how big or small.
01:09:00
Speaker
And that in many ways is eating disorder prevention speak, but it also is just what I want my kids to learn and come to understand knowing that they are at greater risk than the average child.
01:09:13
Speaker
Oh, for sure. Well, Mallory, you know, kind of bringing it back to the the writing and in what it means to be a writer and stuff of that nature. um You know, what as we kind of bring this conversation down for a little landing, I like I've been like and getting a sense of some of the best maybe writing advice that you've either received or just hard one that you like to give people have given that platform. So just, you know, for you, what is some of the the better you know writing advice that you've experienced?
01:09:41
Speaker
Yeah. so for me, just thinking about this idea of taking risks and really being as honest, as brutally honest as possible is so important. And it's not been one particular person who has told me that, but it's just in reading different memoirs that I've been able to just get the sense that these folks are really being vulnerable on the page. and One person who does that really well is Suleika Jawad, who wrote Between Two Kingdoms. And she ah shared this quote once where she said, if you want to write a um good book, then write what others don't know about you. But if you want to write a really great book, then write what you don't want to know about yourself. And
01:10:26
Speaker
I just loved that advice because it made me think, huh, I need to do a lot of just reflection on what I am willing to share. And I really lay bare so much in this book that I've never shared publicly before. There were so many times where I'd write essays previously, but they would be rooted almost in just partial truths where I wasn't really telling the full story of where I'm actually at in my recovery.
01:10:52
Speaker
And often I would write those essays as if I were fully recovered or as though the eating disorder were a thing of the past. When it's not, it's still something I contend with. And so to write this book in a way that aligned my two selves, right, in a way that really authentically captured my story was so refreshing as a writer because – For so long, I had told people I was fully recovered, and yet I wasn't. And there was this misalignment between the narrative I shared publicly and the one that I lived out in private.
01:11:25
Speaker
Whereas this book really just is in alignment with who I really am. And for me, um that took a lot of reflection. It took a lot of
Influential Books and Closing Remarks
01:11:35
Speaker
vulnerability. but ultimately made for a much better book.
01:11:39
Speaker
Excellent. And yeah I think as you know, as someone who listens to the show occasionally, I like asking for a recommendation too for the for the listeners out there. And that's just anything that you're enjoying that you want to share with them. So I extend that to you, Mallory.
01:11:52
Speaker
Sure. So I really like the work of Megan O'Rourke. ah She's an editor at the Yale Review, and she's a poet and a memoirist. But I am now rereading her book, The Invisible Kingdom, which is about her struggles with autoimmune disorders.
01:12:08
Speaker
And both Between Two Kingdoms, from Sulayka Jawad and in The Invisible Kingdom, are nods to Susan Sontag's seminal work on illness as metaphor, where she talks about how we all inhabit a kingdom of the sick in the kingdom of the well. And so I'm always intrigued by just the invisibility of certain kingdoms, right? It aligns with my thinking around the middle place.
01:12:30
Speaker
But this book, The Invisible Kingdom, does a really beautiful job of blending the personal narrative with reporting. So it's been a real just beacon of light for me. And I'm rereading it now just to, again, jog my memory of what I loved about it so much.
01:12:45
Speaker
Excellent. Well, Mallory, I truly enjoyed Slip. I loved it. and and it was it was like i It's funny. It's such a heavy topic. I hate to say I was entertained and thought it was a great read, but it was, even though it's a heavy topic. I feel like I'm rooting for your pain or something. It was a great book. No, I totally get what you're saying. Thank you for the work and for putting it out there, and I wish you the best of luck with it.
01:13:15
Speaker
Thank you so much.
01:13:25
Speaker
Never gets old to me, man. Thanks to Mallory. Thanks to you, kind listener. See you never. And we can always we can always take more ratings and reviews of the podcast. Leaving kind reviews and ratings for the frontrunner on Amazon or Goodreads will certainly help.
01:13:41
Speaker
Consider signing up for Pitch Club on Substack. Welcome to pitchclub.substack.com and the flagship Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. You can also find the embed forms at brendanamara.com. Now, before I get into this, please don't listen to this as if I'm fat shaming anyone.
01:13:57
Speaker
Health is a spectrum. Bodies exist on
Body Image and Societal Pressures
01:14:00
Speaker
a spectrum. And just because you're objectively skinny doesn't mean you're healthy. And just because you might be a bit heavier doesn't mean you're unhealthy. Okay. So for like ever, I've had major issues with my body, body shape, body image.
01:14:14
Speaker
It was imprinted on me from a pretty young age and will likely need like a lot of therapy. to suss out, but who has the time? ah My mother could always be seen doing crunches and stuff between commercials of like MacGyver, Golden Girls, or whatever the hell you know when I was growing up. And and like ah like a lot of women, especially women of her age and her generation, most of her value or perceived value was from her looks.
01:14:42
Speaker
She was voted most attractive in her high school graduating class. and She graduated in the fifty s And every morning when I would wake up for school, there was some aerobics show on television. So I often was watching Denise Austin or Body by Jake and these aerobics classes on the beach, you know while I ate my Honey Nut Cheerios and raised on He-Man and Hulk Hogan.
01:15:09
Speaker
You know, despite being pretty athletic and coordinated, you know, I was never super lean. Like, I would go to the doctor, and he would always kind of, like, poke and prod at me, and my mom would try to defend me. you know, he's not fat, he's big-boned.
01:15:24
Speaker
Big-boned, I think that's a good title for ah for a memoir. I was always a little thick through the middle, despite wanting so desperately to have a chiseled abdomen, because I so desperately wanted girls to like me and notice me, and this was the way.
01:15:38
Speaker
And I thought the only way would be to look like a men's health cover bottle. you know One year, i wanted and received the AbWorks machine for Christmas. yeah It was this hinged thing with handles to do crunches. the kind of i I did a set, and I ran upstairs. It was Christmas Day. I did a set, ran upstairs, and asked my sister and mother, like, can you see the definition in my stomach? And they laughed.
01:16:06
Speaker
um This did nothing for my confidence. so To be clear, this obsession never manifested in the kind of maniacal devotion to actually like execute, to be like, I'm going to do whatever it takes to look like that, like true bulimia or anorexia nervosa, though it very well could have gone in that direction.
01:16:28
Speaker
yeah To this day, I've never quite achieved the physique I've ever dreamt of or long dreamed of. you know My appetites for beer and junk food and sleeping are just too strong. My relationship to, quote, good food and, quote, bad food was and is so messed up that I'm caught in this awful tension between what I, quote, should eat, what I do eat, and the shame that often elicits.
01:16:51
Speaker
If I know there are ah package of Oreos in the house and a cabinet somewhere, I can hear them talking to me. And I will eat them just to get them out of the house.
01:17:03
Speaker
Right now, there is a pint of ice cream in the freezer of non-dairy fish food. And it is ringing in my ears. And it's worse than tinnitus or tinnitus or whatever.
01:17:15
Speaker
Like I just know it's there. I can hear it talking to me. I once ate so much mac and cheese at a friend's wedding that I threw up because I have this scarcity mindset around food that I won't get mine.
01:17:28
Speaker
And I wasn't even drinking. I just ate so much food. My body had nowhere to put it except out of my fucking mouth. And I didn't grow up with five brothers who were like wrestling over the food. And if you didn't get yours, you were not going to eat.
01:17:42
Speaker
I was basically an only child. And i I would just eat so fast. My mom would often say like, why don't you slow down? Like enjoy your food, chew your food. But I was just like this peck man.
01:17:54
Speaker
And I just this mindset that if I don't c chug my food and get seconds as fast as possible, I won't ever feel sated. Like i even in college when I, you know, is say like three or four of my friends were there and we'd get the aircraft carrier, boneless chicken wings from the hangar in Amherst.
01:18:11
Speaker
Like I would just try to eat so many so fast. Like I might eat 10 as fast as I could to make sure that i like I got mine while maybe the others had like, i don't know, like three or four and were just like taking their time.
01:18:24
Speaker
Ugh. you know But on top of this, know, my friends, grew even growing up, they constantly made fun of how fat I was, even though I really wasn't that chubby. You know, they thought it was hilarious. I did not.
01:18:34
Speaker
Even though I could kick, like, all their asses on whatever field of play we were on, for the most part, except swimming. Jesse was long as a barracuda. Yeah, they'd laugh at me, poke at me.
01:18:45
Speaker
i probably invited it. to yeah They thought it was funny and how mad I'd get or how sad I'd get. Almost unilaterally, all my friends were leaner than I was too. So I was like an easy target in that regard.
01:18:58
Speaker
you know This is growing up in Massachusetts.
01:19:02
Speaker
In college, I was a janitor for one of the bakeries on campus, a Hamden Bakery, I think. And ah they often left dozens of glazed donut holes on the tables when their shifts were over for us to clean up one way or the other.
01:19:16
Speaker
Leftover. yeah They figured some vulture making $8 an hour would scarf them up. And I'd eat them like they were M&Ms, just popping them like pills, man, and feel the requisite shame.
01:19:28
Speaker
Then I got the wise idea that I would chew on them, feel that pillowy sweetness, and then spit them out in the trash can for minimal calorie bleed into my stomach. Yeah, my buddy John thought I was insane, but he was naturally lean, and the naturally lean with high metabolism don't usually get it.
01:19:46
Speaker
I called it pre-bulimia. Man, i was I was always seduced by ways to get that coveted six-pack or to chisel that body to look like a cover model. And i just i remember another you know a friend of our roommate, you know he just saw the way it was built, and I'm like 24 at the time. He's like, B.O. already has his dad bod. Look at that.
01:20:07
Speaker
And was just looking down, because I guess i and I have a big torso, and it projects a certain dad bod image, and I remember that just gutted me.
01:20:19
Speaker
he Shit like that just gutted me. I knew it was never possible, but the allure was always there. I never had the confidence to fully eschew it. And when I look in the mirror, I see Grimace or SpongeBob, just this malformed, massive, weirdly proportioned characters.
01:20:39
Speaker
and And here's where some of it comes from too. Like my father fat shamed everybody, especially women when he saw them. Or if he brought up so-and-so, he'd say, she put on some weight or he got heavy.
01:20:52
Speaker
yeah My sister, super lean, ah did not inherit my endomorphic bod, um says the same things. I doubt she even knows she does it. I don't even think my dad knows he does it. And, you know, and even my mom, she always kept these little notebooks of calorie counting and it's every bite of food, writing things down.
01:21:12
Speaker
And with with my sister, well one of my nieces, you know, i so like yeah one of my sister's daughters one year, she may have been seven or eight, I don't know, holiday season. So I'm starting to get a little thicker, I guess.
01:21:25
Speaker
She greeted me by repeatedly poking me in the stomach, kind of making like a squishy sound, which is like super inappropriate. She was, is, and will always be super skinny too. And objectively, and didn't look like the obesity B-roll footage you see on the news, ah but my torso is 90% of my body mass. That's just where it resides. And it's where I tend to hang on to excessive body weight.
01:21:51
Speaker
Now, both my parents are apples. different shaped apples, but apples nevertheless. And so it's only natural that I have this internalized fat phobia and I really hate it. It's, it's so stupid. You know, someone very close to me grew up much the same way. as She grew up similarly conditioned towards disordered eating and having to be the skinniest and the smallest and how people judge us by how big or how small or how wimpy or jacked we are.
01:22:17
Speaker
you know, sometimes when I see people i haven't seen in a while and they say, Oh, you look good. Like I get a little high. I get a little buzz. And if I see people I haven't seen in a while and they don't say anything, I think, well, fuck, they must think I'm a fucking slob.
01:22:33
Speaker
And now they're talking behind my back about I've let myself go. you know I hear my dad's voice saying, like, you put on some weight. As I wrote a few weeks ago, i'm quickly running out of fucks to give, as we all should, trying to extinguish those fucks.
01:22:48
Speaker
But this is a lingering fuck that is very hard for me to let go of because it runs so deep. In the culture, yes, but also just in my upbringing. The is, men rarely talk about this shit. This is usually the purview of the women's magazines I saw piled up in front of my mother of losing 30 pounds in a month and how to keep it off or get your pre-pregnancy body back and on and on.
01:23:10
Speaker
The covers of all these magazines are so doctored with lighting and Photoshop and people on the covers have cooks and nutritionists and more than likely are on some kind of PED or another.
01:23:21
Speaker
Like, fuck, even the bodybuilding magazines, they they show these roided out dudes, but they're often touting some supplement or protein powder as if it was that that made them jacked. Sure, they got jacked with like hard work. You need hard work. it's not The drugs don't make you big on their own, but it's also chemistry.
01:23:38
Speaker
It's such a drip. It's such a waste of headspace, especially when there's so much suffering and hunger and fascism and school shootings and other shootings. And it's like, you're concerned about how your belly looks in that t-shirt.
01:23:54
Speaker
I very rarely go swimming. I almost always wear a long sleeve shirt to the beach.
Health Motivation and Personal Reflections
01:23:59
Speaker
If such an outing occurs, it's, I can do better. I must. I know I need to lean down for my health. my My blood pressure is pretty high, and I want my knees and body at large to feel more limber and less achy.
01:24:13
Speaker
Studies show that excess body fat on the torso can lead to a host of gnarly things. And that's where all my excess mass is, as I already established.
01:24:23
Speaker
you know My concerns are far less cosmetic than they used to be, and yet it's still there. This is what Mallory's book really dredged up in me. So much of the literature she cited i could relate to with like with like dizzying synchronicity.
01:24:40
Speaker
Anyway, I figured I'd share that whether you cared for it or not. I know it's not in any way writing advice or shit like that, but sometimes sharing a sliver of my life away from the page is within the rules.
01:24:52
Speaker
And all the more why I put these blogs, such as they are, at the end of the program. So stay wild, see you in efforts. And if can't do, interview. See