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Malnourished: A Memoir of Sisterhood and Hunger
FINALIST — 2020 PNWA Nancy Pearl Book Award for Memoir
Ritchie’s beautifully written and deeply felt story about “a family afraid to tell the truth” succeeds at last in sorting truth from lies as it demonstrates the strengths and vulnerabilities of survivors.
—Nancy Lord, former Alaska Writer Laureate, author of Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore and pH: A Novel
Elegant prose and intimate details elevate Cinthia Ritchie’s mental health memoir Malnourished to a requiem for her sister . . . Details of depression, anorexia and bulimia, and risky behaviors are relayed without reticence and in meticulous language that highlights the visual, auditory, and tactile experiences that are unique to these particular mental illnesses. It is honest in acknowledging that recovery is a process.
—Foreword Reviews
How do you begin to process your sister starving herself to death? For Cinthia Ritchie, writing about it was her method of coping, a means of searching for answers to long-unspoken questions.
After her sister died due to complications from an eating disorder, no one in Ritchie’s family knew how to talk about what had happened, so no one did. It was as if she died twice, once in real life and again in family memory.
In this stunning memoir, Ritchie traces the tragedy of her sister’s too-short life back to its beginning—their stepfather’s Pennsylvania farm, where both girls hungered for approval and affection during long, languid days and yearned for protection through endless, dark nights. She pierces the veins of her own life, along with its bones of truth and muscles of denial, interrogating the ways she likewise resisted the force of her own appetites.
Malnourished dives deep into what we dare not speak—secrets, obsessions, deviations—demonstrating in gripping, lyrical prose how the damage done early in one’s life colors the taste of everything to come. And how the mouth filled with blood and stones might finally yield to gasps of clear air, discovering the texture of open terrain, a roadmap of back trails leading to a kind of recovery.
Malnourished is a book for anyone who has ever experienced lack, and for anyone who has nevertheless loved.
The stakes are high in Cinthia Ritchie’s brave memoir Malnourished: A Memoir of Sisterhood and Hunger. Exploring one’s loss, grief, guilt, and love is dangerous; it can take one to the edge of the tolerable and into deep despair. But as Ritchie slowly and intentionally pulls back the curtains of her childhood, her vivid and compelling voice carries us through each thrust and parry ultimately bringing us closer and closer to the most unbearable of all, her sister’s death from anorexia starvation. It may be the case, as Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, that “we look for the sermon in the suicide,” but there is no sermon here. Instead, we get to experience in this achingly beautiful book the healing that comes from putting the narrative into words.
—Ronald Spatz, editor, Alaska Quarterly Review
Powered by a courageous appetite for understanding, Cinthia Ritchie’s Malnourished explores raw truths about love, identity, sisterhood, and survival, inviting readers to inhabit an ultimately resilient woman’s complex longings.
—Andromeda Romano-Lax, author of Plum Rains and The Spanish Bow
At times pure poetry, at times as searing as a lightning bolt, Malnourished is the kind of book that sticks with you long after you’ve read it. Told by the sister who survived, it is a haunting journey that forces the reader to confront the reality of abuse, society’s expectations for young women, and, ultimately, the strength it takes to escape the past. Quite simply, the unflinching honesty and the beauty of the writing left me breathless.
—Mary Emerick, author of The Geography of Water and Fire in the Heart: A Memoir of Friendship, Loss, and Wildfire
Cinthia Ritchie is a former journalist and a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her creative nonfiction has earned numerous honors including a Women’s National Book Association Nonfiction Award, a Tucson Festival of Books Nonfiction Prose Award, and notable mention in The Best American Essays 2013. She has been a finalist in the Cutbank Chapbook Contest and a semi-finalist in the Honeysuckle Press and Rose Metal Press Chapbook Contests. Ms. Ritchie received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Rasmuson Foundation, and the Alaska State Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Alaska Magazine, The Seattle Times, Sport Literate, The Best American Sports Writing, Water~Stone Review, Evening Street Review, bosque, Under the Sun,
Into the Void, Rattle, Memoir, and other publications. Her first novel
Dolls Behaving Badly released in 2013 through Hachette Book Group. She currently splits her time between Anchorage, Alaska, and Tucson, Arizona, where she spends a ridiculous amount of time running mountain trails with a dog named Seriously.