Shortly after her sixth birthday, Rachel Aviv stopped eating. It had been Yom Kippur the week before, and members of her family had observed the traditional fast. Back at school, thrumming with leftover “religious energy”, she refused even the tiny portions her teacher put on her plate. “She looked at me carefully – I could feel her contemplating who I was, and her focus was exhilarating,” Aviv remembers.
She persisted through dizzy spells and dehydration, and in short order she was admitted to the Children’s Hospital of Michigan for “failure to eat”. In the anorexia unit, the threat of the “feeding tube” hung over every meal – though in her childlike imagination, this became a terrifying, Willy Wonka-esque device: “a huge tube, like a covered slide, that I would live inside”.
