The Body Tourist is a memoir set in the six years following my so-called recovery from anorexia. It is candid, sometimes comedic, and ultimately optimistic window into the mindset and the machinations of a mental illness whose tentacles reached deep into my life long after I was considered “cured.”
In 1981, I graduated from college with a BA in psychology. It had been a difficult venture that included an expulsion, a four-month institutionalization, and a multitude of transfers. By the time it was over, I was convinced I was cured, and that it was time to start curing others. I’m ready, I told my parents, my therapist, my friends—all of whom shook their heads in worry at my at my 95-pound, 5’9” frame. But I was undaunted. And I had landed a job as a counselor in a halfway house for drug and alcohol addicts. If anyone knew what it took to become a happy, functioning adult, it was me.
Or so I thought. As you might suspect, the burden of self-contempt, faulty logic, and interpersonal turmoil that are the character traits of depressive disorders and addictions do not miraculously disappear once medication and therapy have taken effect. Where, then, do these dangerous obsessions, such as the wish for obliteration (which often co-exists with the wish for immortality), go once a person sets foot on the road to recovery?
For me, they lived on beneath the radar of my supposed newfound health, disguising themselves in the falling-down houses I happily moved into and dangerous neighborhoods I somehow didn’t fear. They announced themselves in the deeply flawed men I professed to adore, the food rituals I thought were normal, and most profoundly, my inability to acknowledge my father’s illness and encroaching death.
While many writers have written candidly and eloquently about their struggles with depression, addictions, and eating disorders, those stories usually conclude once there is progress toward recovery. Beyond recovery—whether from addictions, illness, or even the death of a loved one or divorce—there is another story, one that is about how we re-join the world, and, in the living years that follow the darkness, pursue a life that is creative, engaged, and deeply felt in our bones. This is the territory of The Body Tourist.
Thanks to the following sites for giving The Body Tourist a shout-out!
4 Must-Read Female Authors for Fall
5 Hot Memoirs for Fall
Popsugar.com Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide
Sheknows.com Ultimate Holiday Gift Giving Guide
7 Super Reads for Holiday Travel (Workingmother.com)
14 Must-Read Memoirs for 2014 (Shape.com)
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Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs How do you find the world? For me, the question is two-fold. When my dog Theo lost his right eye, I noticed that he seemed unfazed by the fact that, when he looked one way, the world went missing, but when he looked the other way, he found it again. It was a reminder that it matters where we put our gaze.
“How do you find the world” also asks how we experience the world. Do we perceive it as welcoming? Agreeable? Frightening? Inaccessible? For many of us, it is all of these things and more, and can change from moment to moment, day to day, and year to year.
Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs is a collection of twenty years’ worth of my most popular Chattanooga Times Free Press columns The subject matter is daily life, but the columns bridge the gap between experience and insight, bringing the reader a sense of not only what happened, but why it matters.
Praise for Finding the World
Dana Shavin is a fantastic writer with a great sense of humor, who hates cold weather and loves dogs. What’s not to like? –Clay Bennett, Pulitzer Prize winning Editorial Cartoonist, Chattanooga Times Free Press
When I am not at my best, award-winning columnist Dana Shavin makes me so. Her book is uplifting, funny, and very how-did-you-know-I-was-feeling-that-too. Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs deserves standup applause. –Suzette Martinez Standring, award winning author, The Art of Column Writing and The Art of Opinion Writing