Julie Joell Gregory (born May 16, 1969 in Columbus, Ohio) is an American author of Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood, an autobiographical account of the Münchausen syndrome by proxyabuse she suffered as a child.
Julie Gregory’s memoir, Sickened is a heart-wrenching story of a child affected by Munchausen by proxy and the deadly abuse she receives. Gregory does a spectacular job pulling an emotional response from the reader while granting the reader a complete understanding of MBP. Find out how UKEssays.com can help you! Sickened by Julie Gregory. Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood by Julie Gregory. August 20, 2014 by badkittyuno 1 Comment.
Personal history[edit]
According to Sickened, Gregory's mother frequently took her to various doctors, coaching her to act sicker than she was and exaggerating her symptoms, and demanding increasingly invasive procedures to diagnose the girl's imaginary illnesses. At home, her mother fed Gregory a diet based on foods a doctor had said Gregory should not have, administered prescription medicine erratically, sometimes in double doses, and filled her days with strenuous physical labor. According to Gregory, her mother even became upset when one doctor would not perform open heart surgery on her daughter. Also, in the book, Gregory mentions being told by her mother that matches were suckers to eat.
When Gregory finally realized what her mother was doing to her, she attempted to tell several people about the situation, but those she told either expressed disbelief or paid no attention. Only upon telling her work counselor, a professional bound to disclose allegations of abuse to authorities, was the abusive behavior of her parents finally realized by others.
In addition, My Father's Keeper recounts allegations of physical and emotional abuse inflicted by Gregory's father.
Film Appearances[edit]
Julie Gregory starred in the film I Didn’t Think You Didn’t Know I Wasn’t Dead and My New Advisor by Columbus, Ohio, independent filmmaker Jim Bihari.
External links[edit]
Sickened:
The true story of a lost childhood/The memoir of a Munchausen by proxy childhood
by Julie Gregory
I. The part where I talk about myself
Let’s open with an excerpt:
Truth is whatever your mind believes. And beliefs are erected by those who raise us. If someone shapes your mind into a distortion you have to find something that can give you the straight answer. (213)
The above elegantly summarizes the Gregory’s long and difficult recovery from her Munchausen by proxy (MBP) childhood. Sickened took me into a world about which I knew nothing. I had no idea what to expect from this memoir, because I had no idea what “Munchausen by proxy” meant. I realized a few pages in that I had encountered something resembling MBP in Gillian Flynn’s novel Sharp Objects (very good, and very disturbing. Makes Gone Girl look like Little House on the Prairie). But other than that, I knew nothing about the story Julie Gregory was about to share with me.
This book, like the one I just reviewed, Lucky, and like the one I might review next, When Rabbit Howls, was primarily an educational venture. I read Sickened and When Rabbit Howls back to back, and thus plummeted headlong into the realms of extreme child abuse. Up until this point I hadn’t encountered memoirs detailing such horrific physical, emotional, and sexual (in the case of Rabbit) abuse. And just like reading Sebold’s description of her rape in Lucky, these were not easy reads, and they were not intended to be.
I am grateful to memoirists of all subject matters for the courage it takes to share in this way. Memoir writing, especially of the “recovery” variety, gets criticized quite frequently for being an exercise in navel-gazing and an attempt to compete in the Olympics of pain. I think this criticism is sometimes valid and contains grains of truth (just finished reading Prozac Nation and some of Wurtzel’s recent essays…), but that doesn’t deter me from reading these kinds of books because they are the only way that I am ever going to learn about the unique experiences of people like Julie Gregory or Alice Sebold or Melody Moezzi in their own words. And reading about Elizabeth Wurtzel’s experience was worthwhile, even if I found her style and persona incredibly frustrating. I believe that everyone, even poor punching-bag of the internet Elizabeth Wurtzel, is entitled to write a memoir if they feel so inclined, narcissism, navel-gazing and “Generation Me” criticisms be damned. Storytelling is as old as we are, and the stories we know the best are the ones we lived. What is so bad about wanting to tell them?
Anyway, that digression has less to do with Julie Gregory’s book than it does with the fact that I just finished Prozac Nation and the general trend of criticizing “recovery” and mental health memoirs in general. To those who think these books are always and only exercises in self-pity and “look-at-what-a-unique-suffering-snowflake-I-am” I say: you are not required to read them.
II. Some brief info on Julie Gregory
From her website: “Julie is best described as an American memoirist, writing about hillbilly culture, dead end dirt roads and the pain found at the bottom of them. She uses black humor and vivid imagery to detail the adventures of her off beat family, who holed up in a trailer with an arsenal of guns at the bottom of a southern Ohio holler.” I can’t say this description really makes sense to me in light of Sickened, but this is straight from the horse’s website, so to speak, so I’m not really in a position to question it.
- Born Julie Joell Gregory, May 16, 1969 in Columbus, Ohio
- Bibliography
- Sickened (2003)
- My Father’s Keeper (2008)
- Fun random fact: Gregory starred in the independent film I Didn’t Think You Didn’t Know I Wasn’t Dead
- Has made numerous appearances around the world to generate awareness for MBP
III. Structure, style and a slight summary
The first part of the book is essentially a recounting of the various ways Julie was abused by both of her parents, including deliberate malnutrition, extreme manual labor, physical abuse, verbal abuse, emotional manipulation, and the constant trips to the doctor and unnecessary medical treatments associated with Munchausen by proxy. Munchausen by proxy goes back generations in Gregory’s family: she remembers her grandmother (it can be inferred that the grandmother inflicted MBP on Julie’s mother, who then perpetuated it into the next generation) deliberately and regularly causing car accidents, with young Julie in the car. Currents of abuse run strong in the Gregory family, and no one is safe. Reading about what Julie Gregory’s parents (and especially her mother) did to her recalled to my mind a line from Haldol and Hyacinths, when Moezzi reflects, after hearing stories from some of the women on the inpatient psych unit about the abuse they had suffered, that she was gaining “a deep appreciation for the potential morality of murder”.
To make things even worse, Julie’s mother takes in veterans and foster children as a way to make money and, while I don’t believe she inflicted MBP on them (that seemed to have been especially reserved for young Julie), she severely abused them in other ways. Some responses to the book, mostly from its Goodreads page, complain that there is actually very little MBP discussed and that the book is really more about non-MBP child abuse. I think it’s a little funny to criticize Gregory for not having experienced or not sharing “enough” MBP-related abuse to warrant giving her story that name, especially as all of the abuse was deeply interconnected. This critique verges on the nasty comparison-based kind of conversations that can turn into a pointless Olympics of Suffering, for which I have little patience.
I’ve also seen some responses to this book on Goodreads and elsewhere that criticize Gregory for not speaking up and telling the doctors the truth. I feel as though these people either did not read the same book I did, or do not have the faintest understanding of the psychological ramifications of childhood abuse. I’m not going to defend Gregory here, because she doesn’t need it. If you don’t understand why she didn’t “just say something”, please do some reading about the psychology of abused children. Direct disclosure from a child about abuse they are experiencing is incredibly rare and usually only occurs if someone trusted from the outside steps in and provides the right kind of support at the right time. Childhood abuse, especially of a physical and/or sexual nature, is typically carried in silence, sometimes forever.
Julie Gregory Author
I’ll stop with the preaching and let Gregory speak for herself. The excerpt below takes place in a doctors’ office and captures the inner conflict Julie experiences as she hears her mother lie: she knows her mother is lying, but she trusts her mother, and she has also been instructed, verbally and through abusive punishments, not to speak up:
As she runs down the symptoms, I know some of them aren’t all the way true. I sit on the edge of the exam table, my eyes fixed on my knees, but I feel the words rise into my throat, words to correct her, flooding my mouth, rushing to get out. They crash against one another and then pile into a dam of all the words I cannot say. (29-30)
Gregory also describes how she internalizes the symptoms her mother assigns her and begins to physically embody the role of sick child (she was also incredibly malnourished, and thus truly sick in that regard). She associates doctors’ visits and negative prognoses with her mother’s happiness and so wants to have all of the problems her mother says she does as a means to her mother’s love:
I envision myself growing paper thin. Mom lovingly takes care of me and does everything because I’m a frail but smiling child, riddled with a cancer you can’t see. I imagine my beautiful bald head, how cool my silk headscarf will look, knotted at the nape of my pale neck, trailing down my back. I am untouchable. No one ever makes fun of the cancer girl. And everybody is nice to her because they never know when she’s going to die. (63)
I loved reading Gregory’s descriptions of the times when she got to escape away on her horse, Barr. This was one of the only pleasures of her young life. Her mother, who had been a professional trick-rider intended for Julie to be a competitive barrel racer. Julie enjoyed a more companionable riding style:
…As soon as we were out of sight, I’d ease him to a stop in the woods. I’d stash the blanket and the saddle, the bridle and my stupid cowboy boots, and climb up on him bareback with the help of a tree stump…
Barr led us wherever he wanted to go, through the woods and the upper pastures where we wouldn’t see a soul. I trusted him. I rode in my underwear, my skinny legs dangling long over the ribs of his meaty belly, my ankles casting off the end of my lean shins into ballerina points… No need to talk. No need even to think.
Sometimes Barr would stop altogether, standing in an empty field. He’d cock one back hoof up and shift his weight to rest. I’d lean over his neck, sliding my legs up and over his rump, until I was stretched out long across his back, as warm as sand, my arms draped around his neck, my head falling against the slab of his withers. We’d stay like that, for a long, quiet time, drifting in and out in the suns’ warmth. And when Barr was ready to go, he’d shift his hoof back under him, hoisting us up a notch, and then take a baby step forward to rouse me. (149-150)
I was fascinated by Gregory’s description of her process of coming back into her body, becoming acquainted with it for the first time. She had to unlearn so much and re-pattern her entire sense of self, way of living, and perspective on her life. She buys an old farmhouse and lines the walls with old dance-studio mirrors. She is fascinated and engrossed by her own image, and uses this reflection to come back into herself and take back her body, mind, and identity. Below are several passages that document this incredible process:
…Within the walls of my farmhouse, I climb out of the protective shell, my arms slowly rise like a phoenix, and I dance, wail, fly around the room and then collapse, crying, in front of my mirrors. In the winter light that streams through the large windows, I start to see in the mirror what it is I really look like, instead of what I was trained from the womb to see. (203)
In addition to her hall of mirrors, she uses writing as a major tool in her recovery. After so many years of strictly enforced silence, the words pour out of her:
Some days I stay in bed all day, write, sleep. Sometimes I go out and come back, write, sleep. Sometimes I sleep when I write and sometimes I write when I sleep… When I sleep, I write perfectly formed text directly from a deep place, without the use of my hands or mouth, because something gets lost in the transmission. I see the text before me: exactly what I mean to convey, in its purest form—indents of paragraphs, brushstrokes of feeling. I am flushed with the beauty of it. When I wake, a flurry of words operates my hands, a backlog of words building inside, rushing to get out. (241)
As she recovers, she discovers a fount of rage within her that is often misdirected at strangers and bystanders. She recognizes this behavior as reminiscent of her mother, and knows that she must learn to control it:
My rage is unstoppable. It vomits out of me; I tear the head off of store clerks, telephone operators, anyone too slow to stop me. I am meticulous and merciless. They are all incompetent. They are all stupid. They are all worthless. I want to beat them with the flyswatter. I crash hours after my blinded frenzy with the insight of what I am doing: making someone pay, just like my mother made me pay… unleashing fury on any person to scrambled by the attack to call her on it. And now I want to make people feel bad, extract guilt with precision instruments and fillet another’s self confidence, just as I saw my mother do…I have got to stop. (218-9)
I don’t want to excerpt anything from the ending because it is suspenseful and satisfying. I’ll just leave you with this tantalizing quotation that comes as Gregory makes up her mind and settles on a long-overdue, righteous course of action:
I have got to be as crafty as my own Munchausen by proxy mother. (242)
IV. Let’s get clinical: What worked for Julie Gregory
- SHEN therapy, with which I was entirely unfamiliar before this book. Here is how Gregory describes it:
In SHEN therapy, you climb into a cloth bed that is slung up on a tabletop as a hammock. It’s suspended in a dim, peaceful room and the SHEN practitioner does a gentle placement of her hands just above the body, mostly hovering around the stomach, where nerves that run between your sternum and your pelvis lock emotional trauma. The SHEN practitioner then guides you into deep breathing, while she tries to unblock the emotions…Lying in the SHEN cocoon, I slip into a deep state…I am opening in ways that defy my skepticism…I have never felt safer. (219)
Books About Munchausen By Proxy
- Visualizations and talking-through of past events, in SHEN therapy and outside of it
- Writing, both journaling and for publication
- Talk therapy (not specified beyond that label): this had mixed results for Gregory. She writes that she often felt more like an educator than a client with some therapists because they knew so little about Munchausen by proxy.
- Spirituality:
And I have come back to God. The essence of God is everywhere. I know it when a ladybug lands on my wrist. Feel it in the teary intense gaze of an old man’s adoring eyes. Know it when the sky sis set ablaze by fiery colors when it seems as if I, in this harried world, am the only one truly watching. (243)
Sickened By Julie Gregory
.V. The part where I talk about myself again
I think I’ve rambled on enough. Sickened was a good read, and a quick one. If you’re curious about MBP, and can handle reading child abuse narratives, I recommend it.
Take a deep breath. Smile.
– Crazy