Mallary Tenore Tarpley was just 11 years old when her mother died of breast cancer. As she and her father were coping with the loss, her father, feeling ill-equipped to steer his daughter through adolescence, bought Tarpley a subscription to Seventeen magazine. The move backfired. Tarpley found herself captured more by the photos of too-thin models than by potentially beneficial information about her body’s changes.
Soon after, as part of her seventh grade health class, Tarpley and her classmates were occasionally weighed by the school nurse in front of one another – “We were told our weight as if our numbers were grades” – and, during class, were lectured about “good food” versus “bad food.” Tarpley thus began eliminating foods, like the hamburgers and canned vegetables her dad regularly consumed, that were deemed unhealthy while lecturing her father about his choices.
“I’d tell him hamburgers have too much cholesterol,” she recalled, “without even knowing what cholesterol was.” She began restricting her portion sizes, believing that if she remained small she could somehow feel closer to her mother.
“I found that calorie counts gave me some semblance of control,” she told an overflow crowd at the Texas Book Festival on Sunday, while discussing her debut memoir, SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating-Disorder Recovery (Simon & Schuster, 2025). “I couldn’t control what happened to my mother’s body, but I could regulate what I put in mine.” She was eventually admitted to Boston Children’s Hospital with anorexia nervosa, the first of many hospitalizations. Within a matter of months, she was also diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Tarpley, now an assistant professor of journalism at UT, was a featured writer on a panel called “The Illusion of Better: An Exploration of Sickness and Self-Care.” Moderated by KUT healthcare reporter Olivia Aldridge, the panel explored how storytelling can serve as both mirror and bridge – reflecting private struggles while offering communal understanding. (The panel also included journalist Amy Larocca, author of How to Be Well, a critique of the multi-trillion-dollar wellness industry, who joined Tarpley in discussing the intersections between writing and mental health.)
For Tarpley, her journalistic work around restorative narratives – a genre that explores how people make meaningful pathways forward in the aftermath of trauma and illness – helped to gradually reframe her thinking about her eating disorder. “It enabled me to embrace the imperfections,” she said, “and it made recovery feel more attainable.”
SLIP combines poignant personal storytelling with immersive reporting and cutting-edge science to offer an unconventional framework for understanding eating disorder recovery. The book is far more than a traditional recovery memoir – it challenges our either-or understanding of illness and wellness.
Over the course of five years, Tarpley interviewed 175 people for the book – 75 of whom were doctors, medical professionals, and researchers – and, collaborating with eating disorder support groups on Facebook and other social media, she sent survey links that resulted in 724 additional responses. Blending memoir with investigative reporting gives the book unusual depth and authority.
The book’s most important contribution is naming a phenomenon many survivors know intimately: the middle place, a space between sickness and full recovery where slips are accepted as part of the process. Tarpley argues that we often have a limited and binary view of sickness narratives – we are sick, then we are well – with no intermediary stage. This all-or-nothing thinking, she demonstrates, oversimplifies the true nature of eating disorders and sets up unrealistic expectations that can paradoxically impede healing.
The middle place framework emphasizes that recovery from an eating disorder looks markedly different than recovery from drug or alcohol abuse, where abstinence is the goal. “With eating disorders, people must maintain a relationship with food,” Tarpley said, “making the recovery process inherently more complex.”
Tarpley’s courage in rejecting the tidy recovery narrative in favor of messy, honest truth-telling makes SLIP an enlightening read. By giving readers permission to live in the middle place, to accept progress without perfection, she offers something increasingly rare: genuine hope grounded in reality rather than fantasy.
“One of the biggest misconceptions is that the middle place is about settling for stagnancy, and it’s really not,” Tarpley explained. “It’s about being able to get up and keep moving forward.”
Credit: Tom Buckley
More than 85% of those Tarpley surveyed inhabit this middle place, she noted. And in some ways, the push for full recovery can actually leave some feeling defeated. “We know people with eating disorders often share the same temperament traits, and one of those traits is perfectionism,” she explained. “There’s a lot of black-and-white thinking, and that can be detrimental because it feels like, ‘Well, if full recovery is perfection, I’m never going to get there, so why even try?’”
One challenge, Tarpley said, is the medical community’s own struggle with how to interpret full recovery. “There are almost as many definitions as there are studies about it,” she noted. “By giving a name to the middle place, I’m hoping to expand the ways we talk about recovery and create more inclusive language that acknowledges the many people who are better than they once were but not ‘all better.’”
And SLIP helps to define what recovery can mean, written by someone brave enough to live that redefinition publicly. “I used to think I had to be fully recovered to actually get my book published,” Tarpley allowed. “But when I set out to write, I decided to tell a different story. I’m at the point in my recovery where the disorder doesn’t have total control over me the way it used to. And when I slip, I can get back up rather than letting every slip turn into a slide.”
