Review: "Light" by Nancy Y. Levine with Rachel Levine

Light by Nancy Y. Levine with Rachel Levine
Published August 2025 via Rootstock Publishing
★★★★

When Levine's daughter Rachel went off to college, Levine and her husband breathed a sigh of relief—they'd managed to raise both their kids in a way they could be proud of, and their kids were now out in the world. Their hardest parenting days were over—they thought. When Rachel came back from her study abroad trip thinner, they didn't worry...but when her weight dropped, and dropped some more, they did. And for some reason, none of their suggestions to help her gain weight seemed to be helping.

Light takes Levine and her family through Rachel's illness, including—eventually—a protracted stay at a residential treatment centre. This is Levine's story, not Rachel's, though Levine draws on Rachel's experience and journals as well. And it's an interesting telling: Levine describes really having no idea, when Rachel's anorexia/orthorexia started, how to deal with it or what to say; a lot of their early attempts at interventions were useless because Levine and her husband figured that Rachel could just be talked out of her eating disorder. Later, Levine started to get a sense of the impact of problematic family dynamics (not in a "this caused it" kind of way, to be clear, but in a "this makes for a more difficult environment in which to get well"). I struggled to read about some of those dynamics, to be honest; I grew up in a very healthy-eating household (e.g., to date I have had soda maybe half a dozen times in my life), but my parents never placed value judgements on body size or different eating habits, and...well, from my perspective, some of the comments Levine describes from a certain family member in particular are divorce material. It gets more complicated than that, as we eventually see that there are much broader family cycles at play, but, well. Some of it was tough to read.

This is a 3.5-star read for me, and while I eventually decided to round up, I almost rounded down because there are way too many numbers in here—it maybe makes sense when you consider that Levine is a nurse who is probably used to using all kinds of numbers as a way to evaluate health and paint a clinical picture, but she also describes, in the book, being told by other health professionals that they consciously avoided numbers (weight, calories; also, more generally, specifics about food intake) in treatment because they could be triggering. It makes those numbers an odd choice to include in the book, and while I think this could be a valuable read for people in Levine's position (i.e., parents struggling to help a child with an eating disorder, especially an adult child), I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for whom numbers can be difficult.

So—some reservations, but an interesting story told well. I think it's worth noting that Levine and her husband were (as she notes) in an extremely privileged position to be able to support their daughter financially through her treatment; it was not a small expense for them, but it would have been far, far out of reach for many (perhaps most). What must it feel like to have to tell a child that they cannot get sick again, because more treatment would be out of financial reach? A reminder of the many flaws of the US health care system.

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