42 pages • 1 hour read
Clare B. Dunkle, Elena DunkleElena Vanishing
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
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BetaChapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of disordered eating (anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa) and mental illness (including psychosis).
Elena Dunkle wakes up in a hospital bed, panicked not because of the horrible pain in her stomach or where she is but because she worries that her nurse will see her as imperfect or pitiable. After he complains that she didn’t eat any of her lunch, the nurse tells Elena that she’s a beautiful girl who is destroying her life because of her diet. Elena hangs on to the word beautiful, wondering how much she weighs at present. She tells the nurse she’s fine even though she’s in pain. After the nurse leaves, Elena thinks about how he saw her looking awful, so she applies some makeup.
Chapter 2 Summary
Elena despises her psychiatrist most of the time because he tells her she has anorexia nervosa and wants to send her back to the United States to a psychiatric hospital. Elena currently lives in Germany, where her father works at a US Air Force base. She thinks of Germany as her home and has no desire to leave. The doctor tries to empathize with Elena by telling her he understands the need for perfection because his own daughter won’t talk to him since he divorced his wife. Elena throws the doctor’s admission back in his face, telling him that he’s using her as a replacement daughter figure. The doctor decides in that moment that he will be sending Elena to the US and lets her parents know.
Elena overhears the doctor arguing with a cardiologist, who says Elena’s heart is weak and that she has lost six pounds since coming to the hospital a week ago. Relief washes over Elena to hear that she has lost more weight. She believes there is no middle ground between overweight and thin, and she recognizes that the world treats thinner people differently than people who are overweight. Elena’s eating disorder began as stress that manifested as pain in her stomach and an inability to eat. Although she maintained her obligations, she grew thinner and stopped recognizing herself in the mirror. Elena lost trust in her reflection and started avoiding looking at herself. When the nurse brings in supper, Elena is reminded of the toast she had for breakfast and how it feels like it’s still sitting in her stomach. She throws up to get rid of the feeling and then lies down.
Chapter 3 Summary
Elena wakes up in the night hallucinating; she sees people in her room who aren’t there. A voice in her head tells her they must be dead. Suddenly, she is jolted back to reality by a nurse, who puts Elena on a gurney and takes her to a truck. Elena is transported to an airplane, and the whole experience feels unreal. Elena is strapped down and worries that someone will drop her; she dislikes being in such a vulnerable state.
Chapter 4 Summary
The next thing Elena remembers is waking up with a feeding tube down her throat. She thinks about how she is going to miss her senior year and floats in and out of consciousness as she worries about her appearance and whether she will ever go back to Germany. Elena recognizes that she is in an American ambulance now, because she volunteers in hospitals in Germany (preparing to become a nurse). She is taken to a hospital and is not sure what is real or imagined. Elena feels dizzy and weak and needs help making her way to the bathroom. She starts to feel like she’s living in a dollhouse and hears a doctor mention the word “dissociation.” She wonders how many calories she’s been fed in her sleep and why the nurses have to watch her eat. Elena manages to slip most of her food onto her lap and throw it out when the nurse isn’t looking, feeling like she’s won.
Later, Elena’s mother brings her some pudding and they share it, even though Elena hates the thought of eating something with so many calories. She can’t bear disappointing her mother. In the night, Elena is monitored by a nurse and her mother sleeps on a cot nearby. The nurse falls asleep, leaving Elena unsupervised. Elena manages to disconnect her feeding tube and then reverse it to empty her stomach into the sink and ensure that she doesn’t absorb the calories. Doing so makes Elena feel powerful and in control of herself, and she goes to bed feeling like she has a long battle ahead of her.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The way that Elena’s memoir begins is in stark contrast with how it ends. In the beginning, when Elena is in the midst of her eating disorder and in and out of hospitals constantly, Elena’s tone is angry and proud, and she is fully in denial of her life-threatening condition. This denial is demonstrated both directly, like when she says she doesn’t see herself as a “real anorexic,” and indirectly, like when she thinks to herself how the nurses “move on to someone who actually needs their help” (15). These moments highlight Elena’s inner turmoil and the disconnect between her physical reality and mental perception, revealing how the disorder distorts her sense of self.
Elena is in serious pain on a regular basis, experiences heart and bone problems, and is well below a healthy weight, but she continues to refuse to eat and insists that she has not yet obtained her desired state of perfection. Though implied to be misguided, Elena’s spunk and stamina are clear as she fights through her illness and acts of her own accord without much concern for how it might affect herself or others. Her main motivating factor, on the surface, is The Desire for Perfection and Total Self-Control. Elena is unaware of where this desire stems from or why it is so strong. This lack of understanding about the roots of her compulsions emphasizes the complexity of her condition, as it is not merely a superficial fixation but a deeply entrenched psychological struggle.
Elena also explains how she hates being pitied, which is an example of her negative perception of medical and psychiatric professionals. This disdain further isolates her, as it creates a barrier between her and those trying to support her recovery. Elena’s narrative has a consistent tendency to get lost in its own reflections, directly imitating how Elena felt lost in her own mind during this phase of her life: “The psychiatrist wants me to be the one to tell my secrets. He actually believes he can persuade me to do this. But I haven’t worked this hard this long at perfection just to throw it away. It’s an insult—that’s exactly what it is. He’s insulting my intelligence” (5). Elena’s perception of herself and others is skewed, and as a result, she is deeply mistrustful of almost everyone around her. This has a dire effect on The Patient-Practitioner Relationship, which prolongs Elena’s recovery.
As the above passage demonstrates, the narrative is unsparing in its depiction of the interpersonal difficulties arising from Elena’s condition. She is concerned only about food and her appearance, she thinks in absolutes, and she insults people who are trying to help her. Elena also loves to be admired and envied and thinks that people are jealous of her when (the memoir implies) they are more likely concerned for her. Elena’s first thought when she wakes up in the hospital is whether she has makeup on her face, and she rebels against attempts to feed her or get her help. The focus on herself (and her appearance) and misinterpretation of others’ intentions illustrate the isolating nature of her disorder, which fuels her antagonism toward the world.
Elena’s whole life is uprooted to the United States as a result of her illness, but she still doesn’t see it for what it is. Elena hardly remembers the experience of flying to the United States, asking herself, “Is this a movie? Is this real? Do I care what’s real?” (22). Her dissociative tendencies reflect the extent of her detachment from both her physical self and reality. The Physical and Psychological Experiences of Living with an Eating Disorder define virtually every aspect of Elena’s life and occupy every space in her mind. She talks about being full after three bites of pudding, and she refuses to eat even when her heart is weakening and the acid in her stomach is causing her pain. She comes up with drastic methods of avoiding consuming calories, like using her own feeding tube to expel the contents of her stomach. Still, Elena is nowhere near her lowest point, and her disorder will continue for years. This section of chapters ends with a sense of foreboding, knowing that Elena’s struggle has only begun.
