There are some things in this world to which, no matter how hard you try, you simply can’t relate. Well, I guess there are a whole lot of those things, but some hit closer to home than others. Not so many years ago a new term was introduced into the national lexicon – ”Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy”. Not unheard of in medical circles, it was an unknown quantity to the vast majority of the public. In essence, Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy (MBP) means causing a child to be or appear ill so as to garner attention and sympathy for the caregiver. It’s a form of child abuse so tangled in strange motives and adult pathology that I doubt anyone really understands it. I certainly can’t fathom such a thing, as I’m sure the huge, vast majority of parents can’t either. But it exists, and sometimes adult survivors of even the most terrible child abuse find the strength to come forward and tell their stories. This is exactly what Julie Gregory attempts in Sickened.

Sickened details the life of a young girl tormented by first her grandmother and then her mother. As a child, Julie was told ad nauseum how sickly she was, and endured round after round of doctor’s visits to “get to the bottom of it”. No diagnosis, or lack thereof, satisfied her mother – so began the search for another doctor, a better specialist, a more invasive test. Throughout this, Julie understood her place in this drama. Her job was to act sick. If she didn’t, there would be hell to pay from her mother. Through a combination of neglect, inappropriate medication and coercion, Julie became that which her mother craved, a sick child. Her self worth depended on her “illness” because that was the part of her valued by her mother. She knew somewhere that she wasn’t who her mother claimed her to be, but with a lifetime of manipulation, starvation, deprivation and abuse, eventually she didn’t know what was “normal”. She had never experienced it – she knew only what she had to do, and endure, to keep the peace – and her tenuous grasp on her mother’s “love”.

Sickened is the kind of memoir that screams, on the surface, catharsis. Julie herself recounts how writing becomes a form of therapy:

”When I do slip under, I whip out a pen and write myself back to the surface, using whatever material I can snatch up to capture the barrage……..I scribble my thoughts and tweak them with words from my new vocabulary.”

She seems to be using her ability to recount her life story as a way to get past it, to live her life as an adult, to move on. But surface impressions can be deceiving, as Julie Gregory most certainly knows after a lifetime of living both “surface” and reality. As the book proceeds, we’re enveloped in the tragedy that is Julie’s life. Each time she states that she is going to recount a good memory it is sullied in the end by some sort of nightmare outcome. There are no good memories; there is nothing good to be said about anyone in her life. She relates her tale of tragedy with little emotion, no humor and absolutely no compassion for anyone other than herself. After awhile, the memoir begins to scream a different message, twofold this time: revenge and pay attention to me.

Julie’s mother was still alive at the time of the publication of this story. She makes no bones about her intention to get back at her mother, to reveal her past in order to ostensibly prevent the woman from doing harm to any children in the future. She also regales us with muddied, nearly incomprehensible stories of her own “awakening”, her finding of her true self, her emergence from the life of a victim into that of a survivor. She talks of her “house of mirrors” and the dual and triple images she sees as she begins to heal the wounds created by a lifetime of abuse. These passages smack of pretension, of using twelve words where one would do, of an elaborate attempt to prove her worth as a legitimate writer. Yet they fail; only making her seem sad by revealing her desperate need to be “healing herself”. The portions of the book telling her story are relatively linear, though with some annoying lapses into flashback that make a timeline difficult to establish. The prose is simple, straightforward. Upon entering her “healing” section, that drops away, leaving painful metaphor and odd comparisons in its wake.

The end result of this memoir is really a little creepy. It starts off as a story of one woman’s struggle to document a lifetime of abuse, with some education about MBP thrown in for good measure. It ends as a self-serving and hate filled screed against not only the mother that abused her but virtually everyone she has ever encountered that dared disagree with her. Her contempt for those who don’t see the past, the present, or the future for that matter, in her way is universal. Julie is never wrong. She knows what children need. It is only in her presence that certain children become whole, without her they are once again thrown into a system that not only doesn’t understand their plight, but actively places them in great danger. But that time spent with Julie, that is the only happy time they know. Julie has unwittingly become some version of her mother. Not in any abusive sense, but in her unwillingness to question whether her own memory, her own motives, are perfect. At no time does she leave room for the possibility that all those around her that deny her version of events might have even the slightest bit of validity. She lived through hell, without a doubt, but that self-righteous indignation that anyone has the audacity to question her version of events smacks of the same kind of self absorption she so thoroughly documents in her mother.

The other major failing of Sickened is that it provides precious little information about MBP. Aside from her own anecdotal accounts of being abused, Julie does not really attempt to explain the current beliefs on the psychology behind the disorder. We get some brief snippets about her mother’s unhappy and certainly abused past, but no discussion whatsoever about the disorder in general. Normally this would not be an issue in a memoir, but the book makes clear that this author is considered an “expert” on MBP, and she runs a website devoted to protecting children from the evil system that insists on enslaving them in MBP homes. Again, only Julie Gregory is right, and only her side of any story is told. As an expert, I expect her to provide some form of discussion about MBP, rational and unbiased by her own past.

In the end, I got sort of a sad feeling from Sickened. It is without a doubt a tragic memoir of an ill-understood phenomenon, but the memoir itself sheds little light on that phenomenon. Rather, it seeks to punish those who did the author wrong, from her mother on down to the doctors and social workers who she feels did not do enough for her, while making Julie Gregory out to be the sole voice of reason in a world gone insane. I don’t really doubt her story, but I do feel uneasy about her motives in the telling, the honesty of her “recovery” and the seemingly desperate need to be seen and heard and validated that show through under that cathartic surface. Yes, this is a fast, absorbing read, but no, I can’t recommend it. Without the inclusion of some sort of unbiased discussion about MBP, Sickened feels only like a work of a vengeful and attention seeking adult, masquerading as a survivor (by which I mean I don’t think she’s recovered at all) of a syndrome about which she purports to be an expert. I expected to feel horror at the unfathomable actions taken against this child (which I did), but in the end I also felt used by the adult author in her attempts to seek her own form of justice.


Recommended: No