Nadia Shivack was six when she started becoming "aware of food," designating it as possessing such extraordinary and magical properties that she wouldn't eat it. Her mother, a Holocaust survivor, exhibited a similar relationship to food in that she consumed just one small meal per day, and late in the evening.
By the time Shivack was in her teens, she'd been exposed to enough negative messages about food as well as harsh criticism from her mother regarding her body that she began to starve herself as well as binge and purge.
"I tried to eat normally, but I couldn't," Shivack explains in her book. "It was as if an alien force inside me drove me on."
When Shivack confided to her father what she'd been doing, he minimized her behavior, suggesting she "learn some self-control." She eventually grew so physically weak that she was forced to give up competitive swimming and gradually retreated from other activities she enjoyed. While she managed to finish high school and later college, her academic career was juxtaposed with stays at eating disorder clinics, free medication trials, psychotherapy, and plenty of binging and purging. Her graphic novel powerfully exhibits these struggles.
The Art of Inside Out
Shivack uses a variety of bright colors and pastels in her work, almost as if to indicate the presence of life buried beneath her illness. Most panels show her own body represented in some compromised format, whether curled in a fetal position, lying down, bald, oversized, or naked. There are also many neckless figures, their spherical heads attached to elongated arms and trunks. Expressionless, they seem to be reaching and stretching toward something, but are frozen in the act.
Shivack's paintings and drawings are done on several different surfaces, including paper napkins, which is no coincidence. The book's inside jacket says that Shivack did this intentionally "in order to keep the food in" after having eaten.
Each page candidly provides the reader with a seering glimpse into Shivack's mind and the barrage of self-criticism she endures on a daily basis. "I am so defective," one pink text balloon says. Another shaded in purple snarls, "You don't deserve to eat you greedy greedy pig!" For anyone who hasn't personally dealt with an eating disorder, such comments powerfully demonstrate some of the emotional distress that sufferers go through.
Eating Disorders and Art Therapy
Considerable research has been done on the benefits of art therapy in the treatment of eating disorders. In Art Therapy: A Handbook edited by Diane Waller, psychotherapist Mary-Jayne Rust explains in her essay "Art therapy in the treatment of women with eating disorders" how art provides sufferers with a medium outside of their body where they can release negative feelings and beliefs about both food and themselves. The making of art "becomes a container for unconscious material instead of [the] body," Rust says. It also "gives [sufferers] the chance to have an arena where [their] feelings may not be experienced as so destructive."
Shivack herself supports such a theory toward the end of her book. "I started drawing pictures after a friend sent me a box of Cray-Pas," she says. "I found that drawing after eating distracted and soothed me."
For more on art therapy and eating disorders, see Suite 101 writer Sara Schapmann's article "Treating Eating Disorders with Art."
Inside Out (Simon & Schuster, 2007), ISBN: 978-0-689-85216-9, 64 pages.
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