The Physics of Absence: The Anorexic Poetry of Laura Ingram

If someone else were paying me to write this, I might feel compelled to begin with something pithy and breathless: "Even as poet Laura Ingram's body vanishes, her body of work grows..."

It's a good thing that no one is writing over my shoulder.

I have the freedom to treat Laura as gently as I believe she deserves. (Though some say that what Laura "is doing to" her family and friends is monstrously selfish - that she is the quintessential I'll-never-grow-up anorexic, who stays sick so as to be cared for and worried over and thereby avoid the responsibilities of adulthood).

If the latter cruelties hold water, Laura is paying a heavy price for whatever imagined gains she has extracted from her disease.

The simple, medical fact of the matter is that Laura Ingram is dying.

The most recent update that I've been able to hunt down takes the form of a screenshot of a post from Laura's Facebook, which was uploaded to a female-only imageboard that exists almost exclusively to gossip about and bully people like Laura (many of whose users are mentally ill themselves).

In it, Laura's family has requested privacy as they mourn her decline.

She has been minimally conscious for months, they reveal, and her body is finally fading away after years of anorexic deprivation - a process that they describe as a relentless torture for Laura and the many who love her.

Though nothing and no one is sacred to them, the users of the aforementioned imageboard veer around Laura, who they refer to as "Skelly Laura."

They ridicule her for allegedly Photoshopping her pictures to make her stick-insect limbs appear even smaller. They mock her One Direction fandom and her "kawaii" aesthetic - accusing her, as I mentioned before, of being the "frail little anorexic princess."

Still, Laura escapes the vicious mockery that the "anons" or "nonnies" direct toward the "wannarexics" and the "BPDchans."

They rarely admit it, but they avoid criticizing Laura more harshly because many of them have eating disorders and subscribe to the same "pro-ana" hierarchy that they claim to despise, in which a long-term, restrictive eating disorder sufferer like Laura is the real deal, a diamond surrounded by the rough of messy bulimics and self-control-less BED sufferers and awkward-to-classify EDNOS / OSFED patients.

That, and they recognize that she is dying.

I am disturbed by how entertaining, creative, and witty their commentary is. I close the thread before I develop another bad habit.

***

Laura's poetry cleaves to the pastoral hills and clear streams of rural Virginia, where she was born and raised and has lived her entire life (apart from stints in treatment centers and the time that she spent at college).

In her writing, this red-blooded cliché of an environment is transformed into something more personal, with rougher edges and faded fabrics. Bible-thumping faith becomes as frail as the poet's "cirrhus" sternum; childhood memories at Tinker Creek are "Shushed between aspen and spruce."*

*Several of Laura's poems are available in their entirety here and here.

Ingram's poems are imbued with an impressionistic melancholy that comes, I believe, from a certain smallness of world; there is an understated touch of the Southern Gothic to them, as well.

That's not to say that Ingram doesn't escape her confines of body, community, and mental illness in her imagination, though.

In "Savant, Prodigy, Mutant, Weirdo," Ingram meditates on the Mars Rover singing Happy Birthday to itself each August 5th as she "orbits an arbitrary July" while listening to the Fray's How to Save a Life on loop.

In "Dwarf Planet," Ingram returns to her celestial theme, hailing the moon as her mother ("She is not sweet like Mary"; "The moon is no one’s wife—she is a white-knuckle, an empty hand").

Moons, Bibles, robots: All zero-calorie items.

It occurs to me, after reading several of her poems, that Laura never once discusses food, the need for which is so ingrained in us and so central to our daily routines that most writers can't help but mention it at least tangentially from time to time.

There is also, I notice, a perhaps curious absence of anger - from Laura herself as well as the loved ones who appear in her poetry (more on this later).

I wonder if Laura, on bedrest for months at a time due to her catastrophically low BMI, used her writing as a way to distract herself - from the endless, unsatiated hunger; from the body-checking, calorie-counting obsessions of her eating disorder; from her mortality - which, like the "objects in the rearview mirror" that she remembers in her poetry, is always closer than it appears.

"I do not know if God ever gives anything back," Ingram wonders in "Heaven's Hat Rack" and "Chopin's Heart in a Jar":

I do not know if God ever gives anything back

maybe the summer twilight

shadows kneeling down in the grass

I know how to kneel down in the grass

to be so still, and solemn as Sunday School

pray for a part of you preserved in amber

your voice, soaked in afterglow

enlarged against the glass—

"Chopin's Heart in a Jar" and "Heaven's Hat Rack" are dedicated to Paige Gong.

I have a hunch and search for an obituary. Sure enough, I find one from 2019 for a 26-year-old woman from Modesto, California, whose cause of death isn't mentioned (but I could hazard a guess).

There is no separation between this artist and her disease.

I wonder who will write a poem for Laura, when she passes - if she passes - if she doesn't get better.

***

As thoughtful and precise as Laura Ingram's poetry is, it is her confessional prose that reached me.

In "Severe and Enduring" (excerpt here), she recalls her treatment for the long-term, severe anorexia that earned her the "SEED" label sometimes applied to the most treatment-resistant of eating disorder patients.

In this piece, she recalls how she and 18 fellow patients are rigorously monitored at meals.

"Don’t think staff has forgotten how much peanut butter you can shove under those pretty little fingernails. Sleeves up, hair back, hands on the table-top," a staff member named Maria chides her. (The food-disappearing acts accomplished by anorexics are absolutely legendary; they can make food vanish, it seems, into anywhere in the world except their own stomachs).

Laura receives frequent letters from friends and family, who she fears will discover that there is nothing left to her beyond "stress fractures and semicolons."

"You're dying," Dr. Stu tells her at one point.

"I know," Laura responds ("It's my body; I destroy it," she tells her parents; "I have hungry," she explains to a nurse at another point in the piece - "This is just who I am.").

There is a vague sickness to Ingram's writing itself in "Severe and Enduring."

There are phrases that don't make sense (and not in a carefully chosen, creative way).

There is a disorder to her thoughts and memories, too.

I can imagine excerpts of her writing lined up under the exhibit title "Anorexic Decline" - like schizophrenic cat-painting progressions or collections of Virginia Woolf's more manic correspondence.

The saddest and most beautiful part of Laura's story, as she tells it, is her "bespectacled boyfriend," an armorer in the Navy who smells of cedar and motor oil.

In "Red Planet, With Exit Wounds" (link here), he wakes up early and kisses Laura on the forehead, whispering "Please eat today, sweetheart."

He "forgets" his keys and his wallet so that he can return for a last look at the lover who he knows is slipping away.

Laura feigns sleep so that she doesn't have to respond to his exhortation to eat.

In another passage, she remembers noticing that he no longer holds her hand in public. Instead, he walks behind her, with his hand on her back.

Laura learns that he does this because of how tiny she looks, "like some little kid with cancer." Her boyfriend, a year younger than her*, is afraid of being mistaken for a pedophile.

*As a tangent, I haven't been able to confirm Laura's birthdate, but I believe that the year was 1997.

He tells her to stop crying. As she remembers this, Laura offers one of the most honest and illuminating passages in the piece:

“Loving me isn’t creepy.” I said, but I already knew you too well. You’d never change your mind. You were right, and I was wrong, every time. Arguing my side only ever made you angry. You never put your hands on me, but every time you raised your voice, I was a little girl again, maybe seven, or even eight, holding my hands over my ears. Any time a man is angry, I am a little girl again, and if I make myself as small as possible, nobody will be able to hurt me.

Finally, there is some anger - even if it's not coming from Laura herself.

Finally, she begins to acknowledge where her eating disorder comes from.

At one point in "Severe and Enduring," Laura coins the phrase "the physics of absence."

Although she doesn't intend the phrase in this sense, once again, I'm struck by how much of the truth in her confessional writing has to do with what she doesn't say rather than what she does.

There must be some part of Laura that is incomprehensively, volcanically angry: With herself, for torturing her loved ones while starving herself to death; with the universe, for flipping the kill switch in her brain before she ever really got to live; with the b*tches on gossip forums and her angry father and the girls she went to treatment with who got better (and the ones who didn't, too).

I don't ever hear Laura voice this anger, but I'm not surprised: Feeling it and acknowledging it would likely be the prelude to recovery.

Of course, Laura is acutely aware of the torture that her disease visits upon her boyfriend, her family, and her friends.

In fact, one of her six collections of poetry is titled The Solitude of the Female Praying Mantis - paying homage to a species whose females often eat their male partners during or after mating. (I wonder if Laura is aware of the ironic fact that the females do this to obtain nutrients to nourish their offspring; anorexics of Laura's duration and severity never have their periods, and carrying a baby to term is out of the question).

Eventually, her only serious boyfriend ends their relationship despite prior talk of getting married.

"I hate you for what you did, and I miss you more than if you were dead," Laura declares.

He leaves her 11 voicemails. He tells her that he still loves her, that he will always love her, that he will take care of her as a friend.

But for someone who has already lost so much of herself (physically and metaphorically), losing half of what is left is unbearable.

"Leave," Laura eventually tells him during an attempt at reconciliation; "Go."

The man who has promised to stay by her side forever, who accepted her anorexia "as long as she was trying to get better," has finally abandoned her.

"You're not even a person anymore, just anorexia," he tells her.

I've had those exact words spoken to me by a boyfriend, except with "addiction" in place of "anorexia."

Ingram ends the passage with the immortal line: "Even if I see you again, I will never see you again."

This is one of the pictures that the imageboard users accuse Laura of Photoshopping to make herself appear "spoopier" (though that seems almost impossible, given how evidently ill she is). While it's true that the body dysmorphia that underlies anorexia can lead to this type of image manipulation even when it looks strange to the ordinary observer, I can't imagine why it matters if this dying woman altered the pic a bit - especially if it gave her just a single breath's break from her own brain torturing her.

***

I believe that what we say and do when we are confronted by mental illness of this severest sort says absolutely everything about who we are.

There is truth to some of what the imageboard users say. There is nothing desirable, artistic, aesthetic, or glamorous about one of the deadliest mental disorders - one that leads to total dependence, incoherence, incontinence.

It causes osteoporosis in young women in their twenties.

In its advanced stages, the disease causes the brain to shrink; the fad pads that keep the Eustachian tubes in our ears closed most of the time are devoured, which causes a whooshing and an echoing of the voice in one's head; in the final stages, the voice itself can fade to a croak or be lost altogether.

Laura Ingram would almost certainly be a better writer without her anorexia.

And yet her writing would be totally transformed, too.

In a moment of pure poetry, guru Ram Dass - once the Harvard professor Richard Alpert - reminded us that "We're all just walking each other home."

Sometimes, without warning or comprehensible cause, some of us start sprinting ahead of the pack.

I watched several friends die of addiction in their twenties, and it was not only tragic, but also fearsome and impressive to behold.

When mental illness hits forcefully enough, especially when it happens early on in life, it is not always possible, as the Fray lamented, to save someone's life.

Laura is surrounded by family and friends in the photos on her social media.

There was, at one point, a petition by her friends from college, who were trying to get the One Direction bandmembers to visit her to jump-start her recovery.

The friend who wrote the petition mentioned waiting to watch over Laura when she passed out on the university's campus before or after classes (sometimes for as long as an hour).

This "small girl with big glasses and even bigger ideas," as her online biographies style her, has many people who love her.

And there is something special - something quiet and especially considered, almost sacred, about what she has written.

One of Laura's collections is entitled Mirabilis.

If you've never heard of anorexia mirabilis, it refers to the "holy" or "miraculous" starvation that saints and commoners alike, almost all of whom were female, sometimes practiced. It was most commonly seen in Catholic nuns and other believers during the Middle Ages in Europe, but there is a long history of similar behavior in other cultures, too.

Some of these "fasting girls" claimed to be sustained by their faith (cough: sneak eaters), but many of them died from starvation.

The reactions were mixed. They were sometimes condemned for ego and too-extreme methods, but their restriction was also viewed as a sort of dark miracle - whether it came from God or not.

Again, there is something pure and contemplative, almost holy in Laura Ingram's prose and poetry.

She has had much time to do little else beyond observe, think, and write.

In a way, her disease has built a prison around her. She has disappeared into a tiny chamber - again, harkening back to the holy people who would allow themselves to be bricked up into tiny cells for the remainder of their lives, their communication with the outside world limited to a tiny slit to allow for conversation and passage of food and waste.

Ingram's confines have led to an eccentric and unique perspective, in which a Mars Rover singing Happy Birthday to itself is somehow juxtaposed with the poet starving to death in the Virginia backwoods.

Laura Ingram has, in some ways, become the ultimate confessional writer: She has followed the thing through to the very end.

Of course, we will hope for a miracle for her.

But miracles wouldn't be miracles if they happened very often, and Laura is far along, indeed.

Besides, even if we see her again, we will never see her again.