What I Loved (54 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although this book is a work of fiction and its story and characters are imaginary, the numerous references to hysteria, eating disorders, and psychopathy are taken from a wide range of sources. Among them are Georges Didi-Huberman
's
Invention
de l'
hysterie
(Macula);
A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War
, volume 4, general editors Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, volume editor Michelle Perrot (Harvard University Press), in which I found the barking women of Josselin; Hilde Bruch's
Eating Disorders: Obesity
,
Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within
(Basic Books), which includes the story of the fat little boy who thinks his insides are made of jelly; and Rudolph
M. Bell's
Holy Anorexia
(University of Chicago Press), in which Bell gives an analysis of Catherine Benincasa's extreme fasting. The evolving terminology, checklists, general descriptions, and possible etiologies of what is now called psychopathy or antisocial personality were culled from several works:
The Roots of Crime
by Edward Glover, M.D. (International Universities Press); the third and fourth editions of the American Psychiatric Association's
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(DSM-HI and DSM-IV);
Abnormalities of the Personality: Within and Beyond the Realm of Treatment
by Michael H. Stone, M.D. (W. W. Norton and Co.);
lmpulsivity: Theory
,
Assessment
,
and Treatment
,
edited by Christopher D. Webster and Margaret A Jackson (Guilford Press);
Severe Personality Disorders
:
Psychotherapeutic Strategies
(Yale University Press) and
Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions
(Yale University Press), both by Otto F. Kernberg; the three volumes of John Bowlby's
Attachment and Loss
(Basic Books); Hervey Cleckley's
The Mask of Sanity,
fifth edition (Emily S. Cleckley); and the following books by D. W. Winnicott:
Deprivation and Delinquency
(Roudedge),
The Maturatioml Process and the Facilitating Environment
(Maresfield Library),
The Family and Individual Development
(Roudedge),
Holding and Interpretation
(Grove Press), and
Playing and Reality
(Roudedge).

I want to thank Ricky Jay for
Jay's Journal of Anomalies,
from which I borrowed the hunger artist Sacco, who starved for crowds in London, and the apocryphal story of Descartes's automaton. He was also kind enough to let me peek into several rare volumes in his private library that contained medical reports on the status of people who purported to subsist on nothing but air and odors.

I am also indebted to Dr. Finn Skarderud, both for his books and for his conversations with me about contemporary culture and eating disorders. The references in the novel to J. M. Barrie and Lord Byron, as well as the story of the bulimic patient who vomited into plastic bags and left them hidden in her mother's house, come from him. His books include:
Sultekutistemere
(Hunger Artists),
Sterk Svak: Handboken om spise for-styrrelser
(Strong Weak: A Handbook on Eating Disorders), and
Uro:
En
reise
i det
moderne
selvet
(Unrest: A Journey in the Modern Self).

Last, I am deeply grateful to my sister, Asti Hustvedt, for her original research and thoughts on hysteria. The ideas in Violet's dissertation closely resemble those in Asti's unpublished Ph.D. thesis, "Science Fictions: Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's
L'eve future
and Late-Nineteenth-Century Medical Constructions of Femininity" (New York University, 1996). I benefited too from the research she has done in the Salpêtrière Hospital archives for her forthcoming book,
Living Dolls,
to be published by Norton. I also want to thank her for her close reading of the novel and its references to hysteria and for her ongoing conversations with me about the mysteries of culture, medicine, and illness.