Hope and Other Luxuries

A Mother’s Journey Through a Daughter’s Anorexia

By: Clare B. Dunkle

Narrated by: Abby Craden

Clare Dunkle seemed to have an ideal life - two beautiful, high-achieving teenage daughters, a loving husband, and a satisfying and successful career as a children's book novelist. But it's when you let down your guard that the ax falls. Just after one daughter successfully conquered her depression, another daughter developed a life-threatening eating disorder.

Copublished with Elena Vanishing, the memoir of her daughter, this is the story - told in brave, beautifully written, and unflinchingly honest prose - of one family's fight against a deadly disease from an often ignored but important perspective: the mother of the anorexic.

©2015 Clare B. Dunkle (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Excellent literature, but be careful...

Beautiful work that is hard to stop listening too, yet somehow hard to finish. A lot of us with mental health issues might start getting more depressed ourselves knowing how horrible depression affects our loved ones. So proceed with caution.
I have to say I kind of rolled my eyes a bit when things would get so "off track" into the author's storytelling - at first, but then I just realized that's how she paints a narrative and how she coped with her own trauma at the time. Very fascinating, eye openning book that you can get lost in to some extent.

Great book!

I enjoyed this book a lot. I thought it was very interesting to listen to a mother’s perspective about daughter’s eating disorder. Clare has been through so much in her life and I believe she has made the best out of what she has. This is a great book for anyone who has interest in eating disorders or mental health and it’s relation to family structure!

loved it!

the way Clare writes is beautiful and touching. I could quote this book for days ❤️

Potent and Real

This was written as a companion book to Dunkle and her daughter, Elena's memoir, "Elena Vanishing." While "Elena Vanishing" brings you inside anorexia and gives voice to the struggle, Clare's story shows all the ways that a mental illness in the family affects everyone else.

Clare talks about the tension's and troubles beneath what looks like an ideal life, and also her process as a writer. It's fascinating to listen to her take the chaotic threads of real life, choose a voice and weave a narrative.

This is perfect listening for anyone who has been affected by anorexia, but even if you haven't, Dunkle is generous with her feelings and inner life. Dealing with a loved one's illness is terribly painful, you are powerless to make them try and to cure them yourself, so you have to find ways to help them and help yourself. Listening to Dunkle, you hear that she gets that.

Abby Craden gives a powerful performance letting through the vulnerability and the determination that live in Dunkle's character and making each voice for the rest of the family distinct and consistent.

Haunting and beautifully written

Clare B. Dunkle is a beautiful writer. This book is very hard to listen to because of the pain she went through trying to save Elena, her daughter who suffers from anorexia nervosa. Clare writes about her coping mechanisms, her writing career and her need to create order and make plans. She explains the torment of not knowing if her daughter is going to die, the turmoil it causes her and her family and the strength she and Elena both show. As a parent , it's heart breaking at times and sweet at times, but so well written.
Abby Craven did an incredible job narrating. Her lyrical voice was like music, a painfully beautiful song of a mother who would do anything for her daughter.
Happy listening!