The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #126: Mallary Tenore Tarpley
"Though focused on eating disorders, SLIP is also about so much more: parenthood, grief, loss, and learning to embrace healing in all its forms."
Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 126th installment, featuring Mallary Tenore Tarpley, author of Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. - Sari Botton
P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and McCombs School of Business, where she teaches journalism and writing. A journalist by trade, her recent work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, and more. She is the author of the memoir, SLIP, which blends personal narrative and reportage to explore life in the middle of eating disorder recovery. Mallary received a prestigious grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support her writing and research for the book. She lives in the Austin area with her husband and two children. She also maintains a newsletter, Write at the Edge, featuring weekly writing tips.
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I’m 40 have been writing for as long as I can remember. I have journals dating back to age 6, and I started writing “books” when I was 8. My mom sent one of them away to a company that bound it and published it, and when she gifted me the book, I felt like a real-life author. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
My book is titled SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. It’s being published today—on Tuesday, August 5.
What number book is this for you?
It’s my first one!
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
My answer to this question changes depending on my audience. If talking with folks in the literary world, I’ll refer to SLIP as a narrative nonfiction book. When talking to a more general audience, I refer to it as a memoir that is equal parts personal narrative and reporting.
In many ways, SLIP is an example of “memoir+”—a term to describe a book that is memoir plus something else: reportage, investigation, science, social commentary, expert advice, etc.
One of my early readers described SLIP as an “explanatory memoir” that manages to offer up an extensive amount of research/reporting without sacrificing the warmth and intimacy of my personal narrative. “Explanatory memoir” isn’t a known category in literature, but I love that she described it this way because it validated my efforts to carve out something new with this book.
I’ve been conceiving of this book for as long as I can remember. Even when I was in treatment for anorexia as a young teenager, I kept meticulous journals. It was as though, even then, I knew I would one day want to write a book about my experiences. These journals (of which there are dozens) ended up being gifts to my present-day self when I wrote the book; they helped me corroborate memory and reinhabit my younger self.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
SLIP draws upon my own lived experience with anorexia, as well as insights from hundreds of clinicians, researchers, and folks with lived experience whom I interviewed and surveyed. My hope is that SLIP will make a meaningful contribution to our collective understanding of eating disorders and that it will spark conversations around what I call "the middle place" between acute sickness and full recovery. It's a space that so many people find themselves in as they work toward wellness. By titling the book SLIP, I want to remove the stigma and shame around the messy, imperfect nature of recovery. Though focused on eating disorders, SLIP is also about so much more: parenthood, grief, loss, and learning to embrace healing in all its forms.
What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
I’ve been conceiving of this book for as long as I can remember. Even when I was in treatment for anorexia as a young teenager, I kept meticulous journals. It was as though, even then, I knew I would one day want to write a book about my experiences. These journals (of which there are dozens) ended up being gifts to my present-day self when I wrote the book; they helped me corroborate memory and reinhabit my younger self.
During several points in my life, between my late teens and early thirties, I wrote several drafts of what I hoped would one day become my memoir. I’m glad these earlier iterations never saw the light of day, given how much I’ve grown as a writer since then, but I’m nevertheless grateful for the ways they helped lay the foundation for what my book would eventually become.
It wasn’t until I began a Master’s in Fine Arts program in 2020 that I really began to make meaningful progress on my book. Having built-in deadlines and faculty support empowered me to figure out which direction I wanted to take my book in and how I wanted to distinguish it from other eating disorder memoirs. For me, that distinction was in both the structure of the book and in its emphasis on the middle place.
While pursuing my MFA, I continued to juggle full-time work and childcare (all in the midst of the pandemic), so it wasn’t easy. But I’m so glad I ended up making time for the book—and thereby myself.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
Figuring out my book’s structure was the hardest part of the writing process, largely because the book is equal parts memoir and reportage.
After I got my book deal, I started out by taking what I call an “alternating chapter” approach in which I alternated between a personal chapter and a reported one. My editor, though, thought that this approach seemed a little disjointed.
She suggested I think of it differently by taking what I came to call a "split chapter approach." The first half of each chapter is deeply personal and written from the perspective of my younger self. The second half is deeply reported and written from the perspective of my present-day self. Both halves are united by a central theme and separated by a design element. The first half of my chapter on treatment, for instance, dives deep into my first hospitalization at Boston Children's Hospital in the late 1990s. The second half looks at the evolution of eating disorder care since then and brings in related research, as well as perspectives from clinicians and folks who were more recently hospitalized.
In many ways, this structure gave me freedom—to dive deep into the personal, and to then dive deep into all the reporting I had done. It also allowed space for my past self and present-day self to be in conversation with each other.
SLIP draws upon my own lived experience with anorexia, as well as insights from hundreds of clinicians, researchers, and folks with lived experience whom I interviewed and surveyed. My hope is that SLIP will make a meaningful contribution to our collective understanding of eating disorders and that it will spark conversations around what I call "the middle place" between acute sickness and full recovery.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
To write a memoir is to accept the reality that you will need to have hard conversations not just with yourself but with your family. I knew this when I set out to write SLIP, but I couldn’t begin to understand it fully until I began the reporting and writing process. I learned that writing about family members is an art that requires a healthy mix of self-reflection, patience, acceptance, and vulnerability. Depending on your relationship with your family, the process may be painful or healing. In some cases, it may be both.
I interviewed several family members for my book, and fortunately they were all willing to talk and be named. In one part of my book, I wrote about how I didn’t cry after my mother’s death. I thought I was supposed to be “strong,” and tears felt like weakness. I wondered why my father hadn’t seem concerned at the time, and for many years, I was afraid to ask him. The daughter in me wanted to protect him, but the memoirist in me longed for answers.
In eventual interviews, I came to better understand his perspective. I didn’t want to write about him in an unfair or biased way, so I considered what I could do to elevate his voice on the page. Rather than simply write about my interviews with him, I decided to use dialogue as a way of helping readers “hear” his side of his story. I followed it up with a bit of reflection that bridged my father’s perspective and mine. This approach made for a much stronger passage.
I let my father read the full manuscript ahead of time, and I was initially fearful of how he would react. He didn’t make any requests, though, and said that everything I wrote about him was true and fair. He also told me he loved the book. I think it really helped that I involved him in the interview process because it helped him feel seen and heard.
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work?
There are two books in particular: Suleika Joaud’s Between Two Kingdoms and Megan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom. Both books’ titles are a nod to Susan Sontag’s seminal work, Illness as Metaphor, in which she writes: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
I love how both Joaud and O’Rourke use Sontag’s work as inspiration to explore the messy middles of our life—the places we find ourselves in when struggling with chronic illnesses and disorders that don’t have an easy remedy or a definitive end. And I was especially drawn to the way that O’Rourke wove reporting into her book. I found her writing, and Joaud’s, to be a guiding light when working on SLIP.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
Don’t let the rejections stop you. I went out on submission two times over the course of a year-long period, and I got a total of 35 rejections. I used to feel sheepish talking about them, but I think it’s important to normalize rejections as being an expected part of the publishing process.
Memoir can be really tough to sell if you don’t have a huge platform and aren’t famous. You may have to pivot—by doing additional reporting, by making your memoir slightly more prescriptive than you imagined, by scaling back on or expanding upon certain themes, etc. Be ready and willing to pivot, but don’t sacrifice your vision for your book just for the sake of getting a book deal. You never want to resent the book you’re writing or wish you were writing a different one.
After all those rejections, I eventually found a publisher (Simon Element, a Simon & Schuster imprint) that really believed in my book and supported the approach I wanted to take with it. As the old adage goes, it only takes one yes to get a book deal. Persistence helps too.
What do you love about writing?
Writing helps me make sense of the world. Whenever I’m having trouble understanding the “why” of a life experience, writing empowers me to arrive at a greater sense of clarity.
To write a memoir is to accept the reality that you will need to have hard conversations not just with yourself but with your family. I knew this when I set out to write SLIP, but I couldn’t begin to understand it fully until I began the reporting and writing process. I learned that writing about family members is an art that requires a healthy mix of self-reflection, patience, acceptance, and vulnerability. Depending on your relationship with your family, the process may be painful or healing. In some cases, it may be both.
What frustrates you about writing?
I find it frustrating that I still get anxious when I initially sit down to write, whether I’m continuing where I left off the day before or starting a project anew. You’d think after all these years of writing that I would no longer get starting-line jitters, but I always do. It’s not all bad, though; in some ways, I think the act of pushing through the anxiety is what helps me persevere as a writer.
What about writing surprises you?
I’ve been writing all my life but I’ve still never gotten tired of it and have never stopped learning from the process.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?
Yes. I wake up insanely early (4 a.m.) to write. As a night owl, I used to write late at night. But once I got married and had kids, I had to change my routine.
When I began writing my book, I had to train myself to be a morning bird. Over time, I came to love the quiet solitude that early mornings afforded me; my children were still fast asleep, the house was still, and it was early enough that I wasn’t bombarded with incoming Slack messages and emails. Now my body is used to waking up early, so my early writing time has become a normal part of my daily routine.
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
I teach journalism and writing at the University of Texas at Austin, and I find that teaching informs my creative practice. Similarly, writing informs my teaching. I like to practice what I teach, so as a journalist by trade I still write freelance articles and essays for various publications.
I’m also a mom to a 7-year-old boy and a 9-year-old daughter. Motherhood has strengthened my writing in that it’s helped me reconnect with my inner child and write more effectively about my younger years. It has also inspired me to think about how I want them to remember me: as a mom who realized her lifelong dream of becoming an author. Just as they inspire me and my writing, I hope my writing can one day be an inspiration—and a lasting gift—for them.
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
I definitely want to write another nonfiction book. I’ve been incredibly busy publicizing SLIP and haven’t had as much creative bandwidth to think about my next book. But once the thrill of publication month subsides and I’m done with my book tour, I plan to start thinking about what’s next. I have a few loose ideas and am excited to start fleshing them out and seeing which one has the most potential.
(Speaking of my book tour, I hope readers will join me! You can find RSVP pages, and more details, here.)
Mallary's words resonate so deeply, especially the part about conceiving of the book long before writing it. That invisible beginning is so real. I also kept journals from a young age, long before I ever thought I’d write a book. Years later, when it came time to write my book, I returned to those pages. They weren’t just memories—they were artifacts. Memoir, I’ve learned, doesn’t begin when we sit down to write. It begins the moment we start telling ourselves the truth.
I read Mallory’s book early and it’s stunning. Happy Pub day!