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.
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Elena Dunkle
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of disordered eating (anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa), self-harm, mental illness (including psychosis), rape, and pregnancy loss.
Elena Dunkle is the focus and narrator of Elena Vanishing, a memoir about The Physical and Psychological Experiences of Living with an Eating Disorder and the journey of recovery. In the beginning, Elena is self-obsessed and hyper-focused on The Desire for Perfection and Total Self-Control: “Perfection. That’s what I want people to see when they look at me. Nothing but perfection” (3). She hates being pitied and sees attempts to help her as forms of attacks or control. Privately (and sometimes aloud), Elena competes with the professionals, always trying to stay on top of their attempts to change her mind about food: “Hey, you big bad psychiatrists and bitchy nurses, I’m not your victim. I’m not some cute little girl who’s going to get yelled at and cry. You want to lock me up? Go right ahead! But you better want what you want as much as I do” (32). Her confrontational tone, communicated via her use of imperatives and short, punchy sentences, encapsulates her attitude toward treatment at this point.
Elena loves to be envied and thinks that everyone sees her thinness as something to strive for. Elena also believes that pain is a necessary part of attaining beauty, writing, “Pain doesn’t bother me. I’m not afraid. I’m used to living with pain” (3). By the time the memoir opens, Elena’s anorexia has become so severe that she is in and out of hospitals and treatment centers, barely eats at all, and is experiencing life-threatening symptoms, such as a weakened heart. Still, it takes years for Elena to realize what she is doing to herself and decide to get help. A voice in her mind constantly influences her thinking, making her believe that she must continue losing weight in order to achieve her goal of perfection. Elena has to reach the lowest point before she becomes willing to see her situation for what it is and begin climbing out of it.
Years into her eating disorder, it has become so much a part of Elena that she has in some sense adapted to it: “I no longer skip meals because a black hole nibbles away at my core, making me too upset to eat. I’m over that. I’ve conquered it. I’m winning” (127). She gets a tattoo to represent this fact, along with other tattoos that represent the various aspects of her personality and life. Before Elena finally finds a treatment center that works for her, she falls further into decline, losing track of her schooling, purging regularly, and distancing herself from her family. She has a miscarriage, which reveals the reality of the damage she is doing to her body.
Elena has always had the support of her family, but she often fought it, wanting to do everything on her own. Elena comes to realize how much her mother has done for her and finds clarity about her past traumas and how they affect her in the present. While Elena’s memoir doesn’t end with the “curing” of her disorder, it still ends on a note of hope: Elena becomes stronger, wiser, and more aware of her previous misguided perceptions of herself.
Clare B. Dunkle
Clare Dunkle is Elena’s mother and the primary family figure in her life. Dunkle is an American author of award-winning fiction for children and young adults, and Elena always admired her mother’s ability to craft imaginative stories. Dunkle helped Elena with her memoir by acting as the primary writer, while Elena was the main source of the memoir’s material.
In the memoir, Dunkle is there through every step of Elena’s illness. While her husband works, she flies across the country and the world to be with her daughter as she goes through various treatments to try and save her life. Nevertheless, Elena and her mother have a rocky relationship for several years, in part because Elena is ill, and in part because they never really had the chance to form a close bond. Dunkle almost died giving birth to Elena and had cancer when Elena was a young child. As a result, Elena learned to take care of herself, and when adolescence arrived, Elena developed an eating disorder that further distanced her from her mother. In recovery, Elena reflects on her relationship with her mother in a more objective way, realizing how much her mother did for her over the course of her illness:
As Mom navigates the dark streets, with their flowing currents of red taillights and white headlights, I think about the hours she’s spent with me in doctors’ offices over the years. I remember the weeks she spent by my hospital bed during that first horrible summer. I think of the months she spent in our orphanage room so I could stay at Clove House (257).
As Dunkle listens to Elena recite a poem to her that acknowledges her efforts, they cry together, signifying a shared understanding, a mutual forgiveness, and a willingness to move forward as a united front.
Valerie
Valerie is Elena’s older sister. She is an important figure in Elena’s life, and Elena’s relationship with Valerie evolves throughout the years of her eating disorder. Initially, Elena is in a place where she hasn’t forgiven Valerie for leaving her and the family home behind. Elena relied on her older sister and always saw her as a source of strength, so when Valerie began self-harming and rebelling against the family, Elena felt abandoned. At one point, Elena writes an essay about Valerie’s bedroom door because it stands in the house as a constant reminder of these feelings of abandonment. The door is always locked because neither Elena nor her parents want to face their frustration and grief: “Shadows flit over the empty bed, the empty chair, empty dresser, empty me. Memories are pungent here, like rotting oranges” (103). Eventually, Valerie reaches out to Elena, and Elena slowly allows Valerie back into her life, where she once again becomes a pillar of support and a source of reason.
