About this item
As heard on NPR's Diane Rehm Show!Clare Dunkle seemed to have an ideal life - two beautiful, high-achieving teenage daughters, a loving husband, and a satisfying and successful career as a children's book novelist. But it's when you let down your guard that the ax falls. Just after one daughter successfully conquered her depression, another daughter developed a life-threatening eating disorder. Co-published with Elena Vanishing, the memoir of her daughter, this is the story - told in brave, beautifully written, and unflinchingly honest prose - of one family's fight against a deadly disease, from an often ignored but important perspective: the mother of the anorexic.
About the Author
Clare B. Dunkle was born Clare Buckalew and grew up in Denton, Texas. She earned a B.A. in Russian with a minor in Latin from Trinity University in San Antonio and worked in Trinity University's library after earning her M.L.S. from Indiana University. For seven years, she and her family lived in the Rheinland Pfalz region of Germany not far from the Roman city of Trier. Her daughters attended a boarding school there and read her first four books as a series of letters from home.
Dunkle's debut novel, THE HOLLOW KINGDOM, won the Mythopoeic Award for Best Children's Fantasy Book in 2004. Her books have earned spots on a variety of "best book" and "core" lists, including three Bank Street nods, and her fiction has earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and The Horn Book. After a short stint back home in San Antonio, Texas, she again lives in Germany, where she writes dark fantasy and science fiction for teens. In her spare time, she reads Victorian ghost stories.
