THE FASTING GIRL

Prolific magazine writer Stacey, whose praiseworthy debut (Consumed, 1997) examined America’s obsession with food, resurrects from Victorian medical annals the clamor and intrigue once surrounding a celebrated case.

Mollie Fancher, a pretty teenager invalided in a gruesome Brooklyn street accident in 1865, eventually claimed to have gone entirely without eating for more than a dozen years, much to the outrage of contemporary medical poobahs and the delight of her exploitative hometown newspapers. The reader is advised early on that the key to the mystery is how Mollie actually managed to eat on the sly—a question that remains unanswered. Still, other mysteries accrue thick and fast as Stacey shifts perspective and Mollie becomes a metaphor for feminine hysteria and all it comprised in the Victorian era. She was, after all, perhaps the first tabloid anorexic, not to mention any shrink’s potential life’s work with her claims of second sight (while professing total blindness), clairvoyance, and presentation of multiple personalities—not to mention the nine years she said had been erased from her memory. The author has diligently done her homework on all aspects of the case and is not about to jeopardize her investment by understating any of them: readers, who may feel they have bitten off more than they want to chew, must wait for a number of pithy digressions before Mollie’s case gets wrapped up. For example, St. Catherine of Siena’s well-documented (and ultimately fatal) fasts in search of God trigger an analysis of 14th-century female behavior leading to the devilishly provocative conclusion that the Medieval Church may have anointed a string of anorexics as saints. Contemporary personalities are introduced with what often seem dossiers too full relative to their peripheral impact, but, in the end, the zeitgeist has been fully illuminated while Mollie’s secret motives provide grist for psychiatric speculation.

Roots of neurosis dug from a darkened, long-ago room.