Review: "Slip" by Mallary Tenore Tarpley

Slip by Mallary Tenore Tarpley
Published August 2025 via Simon Element
★★★★

When Tarpley was eleven, her mother died—and Tarpley spiralled. What started as an effort to stop time turned into a long slog through anorexia, and even when she was well, "well" often felt tenuous.

My recovery has been messy and maddening, and it is not redemptive in the ways our society hopes illness narratives will be. On one end of the spectrum of how we talk about this disease, there is sickness. On the other, full recovery. I live my life in the in-between, in what I've come to call the middle place. It's the liminal space that many of us inhabit as we work our way toward wellness. And it's an alternative to black-and-white thinking that bifurcates the world into two halves without exploring the beautify in between. In the middle place, hope and hardship coexist, slips are expected, and progress is possible. (loc. 67*)

Tarpley is a journalist, and here she blends her own story with research into eating disorders, recovery, and that slippery and little-studied middle place. I'd hazard a non-scientific guess that a significant majority of people with eating disorders end up in this middle place, sometimes (often?) for years if not decades: well enough to function; well enough to "pass"; knowing at the same time that a small slip could send it all tumbling back down. Or it might not, and there's no real way to know ahead of time.

I'm here for the mix. As much as I love memoir, there's a depth here that would be hard to achieve from a single person's story. Tarpley is good about avoiding problematic details, but more to the point, she highlights places where research and treatment are just...lacking. In the eating-disorder field, there seem to be as many definitions of "full recovery" as there are studies about it. [...] Recovery rates, for instance, are shown to be anywhere from 57 to 94 percent for anorexia and 13 to 74 percent for bulimia. (Yes, you read that right.) (loc. 2426) There are a number of reasons for this, but if with just inconsistent definitions of recovery and wildly different study periods (can someone really be considered to have recovered from an eating disorder after just six months?), you lose the ability to effectively compare studies and treatments. Or consider this: When Dr. Maine was doing her dissertation on anorexia in the 1980s, she said there were three comically shortsighted criteria for recovery: weight restoration, return of menstruation, and (believe it or not) marriage. (loc. 3132) We've come a long way, but there's a ways yet to go.

A thoughtful and incisive look, and an excellent addition to the genre.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.