Amy Frykholm

At the end of her junior year of college, Allison Rohan found herself at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and pelvic floor disorder. She had collapsed at a popular Wednesday night prayer service at her Christian liberal arts college. For several minutes, the people around her did not respond because they thought their very devout friend might be praying. The leader of the prayer service said, “Praise the Lord!” believing that she had been seized by the Holy Spirit. But then, when she didn’t move, someone shouted, “No, call an ambulance,” and Allison was rushed to the hospital. The doctors at the Mayo Clinic told her that if she didn’t change the way she was living, she would die.

For Allison, this was very confusing news. To the best of her ability, she had been doing everything she could to be good. She was pursuing a close relationship with God. She was maintaining her purity. She lived by the motto of a Christian folk group named Caedmon’s Call. She played their song, “This World,” over and over on her headphones: “This world has nothing for me...all I could want, but nothing that I need.” She was, in short, a good Christian girl. She followed all the rules and lived in this world, but was not of it. Her favorite word was “transcend.”

To get well, even in fact to live, Allison would have to start breaking the rules that she believed kept her safely in the arms of God. How could God want her to give in to her body’s desires? And if she gave in a little, what would prevent her from giving herself over completely to those desires? How could she remain pure, and isn’t purity what God demanded of her?

 While Allison was very sick, she was not exactly wrong. The circumstances that led from pursuing purity to anorexia nervosa were extreme in her case, but they are by no means unique or unusual. Allison’s illness was a direct outcome of her religious environment and a dire example of the toxic culture of religion and the body in which nearly every Protestant Christian in the United States lives. For the purposes of this book, it is a condition that I am calling “exile.”

The stories told in this book are of an extremely personal and private nature. I have changed all names and in some cases geographical and other details while adhering as strictly as possible to interview material.