A body at the edge of language: writing anorexia, bulimia and recovering

This practice-led life writing project explores this writer-scholar's experience of her eating disorder through a series of poetic essays developed from material and somatic writing methods including ink-and-paper, found text, and movement. Through these particular methods, and the episodic acts of the writing itself, this PhD discovers a form of somatic life writing that both demonstrates and analyses the lived experience of this psycho-somatic disorder. This research project responds to the challenges of writing anorexia, bulimia and recovering, by developing material writing methods to negotiate self-erasure, narrative authority and embodied memory on the page. The PhD examines the symbiotic relation between writing and (not) eating in ways that are analogous, metaphoric and mutually affective. It draws on a range of writers and feminist materialist scholars to propose that when the tensions of eating disorder are transposed to language and navigated on the page, moments can be found where bodies and writing are constituted and de-constituted. In locating their life-affirming entanglement, this writing practice counteracts the erasure and containment of the condition.