PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Robert Radin is the director of citizenship and immigration services at a prominent social-service agency in Western Massachusetts. He is the author of the memoir Teaching English to Refugees. His work has appeared in various publications and has been recognized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essays.
In this unflinching memoir, Robert Radin describes a painful struggle with anorexia that begins with the diagnosis of a friend's sister. Interweaving his personal recollections with historical accounts of fasts, holy visions, hunger strikes, and force-feeding, he turns a lens on the role that hunger has played both in public and in private, not only in the realms of medicine and psychology but in art, culture, and religion. Ultimately, though, this is a strikingly intense and personal story framed within the larger context of an illness that continues to defy generalizations.--Leah Browning, author of Orchard City and In the Chair Museum Robert Radin's poignant, beautiful memoir tells the story of his quiet descent into anorexia with grace and sensitivity. Noche Triste is every bit as informative as Hilde Bruch's classic The Golden Cage. When Radin reveals the traumatic antecedents of his eating disorder, his voice is clear and brave.--Robert Brandt, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and co-founder of The FACE Program Robert Radin's Noche Triste goes straight to the heart of anorexia and refuses to look away. It's a heartfelt, fast-paced, often startling study of the disorder's paradoxes, and Radin's own passage through them. By disappearing you appear, he writes, and by appearing you disappear. I found it riveting.--Rosecrans Baldwin, author of Everything Now
