Rowena’s mother, Sally, wore dream catcher earrings and had a faint blue tattoo on the inside of her wrist with markings I never deciphered.  She laughed easily and with grit, but she also withheld from everyone she met the most crucial part of herself.  Where Rowena was fleshy, even doughy in the face and heavy around the middle, Sally was bone—slight and lithe.  Rowena’s face was something like the surface of the moon; it had an ancient cast.  But Sally, even with the lines deepening around her eyes, had a child’s innocence.  Rowena often told her mother when it was time to go home; for breakfast, she spread jelly on her mother’s Wonder Bread.  She watched over her mother with otherworldly patience.  Once I saw her pat Sally’s hand and say, “It’s OK, Mom. We’ll make it.”

Rowena followed her mother through missions and trailer parks, dirty apartments in crumbling buildings and $100 a month boarding rooms. Once they lived briefly in an apartment that the previous tenant had abandoned because of credit card debt.  Sally met the building owner at a bar and slept with him a few times before he took them into the apartment to stay. Everything was exactly as the mysteriously disappeared woman had left it.  Clean, new furniture in pink and floral, figurines carefully placed on shelves, a glimmering new television with a screen bigger than Rowena had ever imagined possible, shiny metal on the kitchen table’s molded legs.  Rowena drew me a picture of this place in which the tiny apartment became a castle and around it a soft pink glow.  They stayed there only a few weeks.

In between these begged and borrowed shelters, they lived in Sally’s 1979 Oldsmobile with its velour seats that irritated bare skin and seemed to sweat in the summer all of their own accord.  It was a long car with a pale blue interior and panels that had rusted from sand and salt on winter roads.  Under the driver’s seat was a patch that had worn through completely, the ground visible beneath the gaping hole.  One of Sally’s boyfriends had covered it with plastic wrap and duct tape, but the air found its way in, and the car was almost always damp.  It smelled perpetually sour and decaying.

Rowena made her bed in the back with two faded sheets tacked together to make a sack, a pillowcase stuffed with sweatshirts and dusty blankets thrown on top.  Sally made her own bed in the front, fitting easily beneath the steering wheel.  In the trunk, they kept their few belongings: a garbage sack of clothes, Rowena’s drawing pencils, and a few plastic dishes.

They ate together in soup kitchens—white bread and hot dogs, spaghetti, Jell-O salads studded with canned pineapple, bags of expired vending machine potato chips.  In the mornings, they went to the day shelter first thing for donuts, and if the right person was working, Rowena got a little carton of milk.  A lunch or two might come directly out of a cereal box.  When Sally’s check came, they went to Sunshine Market and strolled the aisles making random choices—a package of hamburger buns, fruit leather, a can of pork and beans, a package of American cheese slices. 

Or on the day a tribal check came, Sally cashed it quickly and tucked the wad of bills into her jeans.  At Dillon’s she bought Rowena a hamburger, French fries, and ice cream.  Then while Rowena swiped at the ketchup on her plate with her finger and tried to see if she could spin herself all the way around on the stool, Sally went into the back of the shop and plunked quarters into the poker machines.  Sally and Rowena sometimes lived a few days in a row on the cheap lunch specials of gambling rooms.  When Sally disappeared into the back, she seemed to forget Rowena’s existence altogether, as though the underlit rooms, the flashing lights, the whir of the machine handles, cleansed her of her past.  The face of the screen became her own face; the pulse of the machine her own life-blood; the clink of the money was the sound of her own mechanical self in a propelled universe.

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.