"I’m much more drawn to untidy, restorative narratives about people who are navigating messy middles"

SLIP author Mallary Tenore Tarpley on writing from the "middle place" between acute sickness and full recovery, reconnecting with her younger self, and learning to "write at the edges of the day"

Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. If you’ve found inspiration in the good creatures series, I think you’ll love my new book, The Good Mother Myth, about motherhood, ambition, and making art.

This is a good creatures interview, a series that explores the intersection of caregiving and creative practice. If you know (or are!) a good creature whose work we should feature, send me an email—you can just reply to this newsletter.

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Today’s interview is with Mallary Tenore Tarpley, author of the forthcoming book Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. What I especially appreciate about Mallary’s work is her definition of a “middle place” between acute sickness and full recovery. Mallary’s writing about eating disorder recovery, and I think her story will resonate with lots of people. It’s really my favorite kind of nonfiction—anchored in a compelling personal story, and enriched through really deep research and reporting. Below, we talk about how Mallary’s work as a journalist informs her teaching, why she’s drawn to stories about “messy middles,” and teaching herself to get up well before dawn so she could write her book.

Who do you care for?

At home, I care for my two children: my 7-year-old son Tucker and 9-year-old daughter Madelyn, who are bright spots in my life. (I also look after my 17-year-old cat Clara!) My husband and I both work full-time, and we support each other in our efforts to juggle work and parenting.

At work, I care for the many students I teach each semester as a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

What kind of creative work do you do?

As a journalist by trade, I write a lot of personal essays and articles about motherhood, loss, grief, eating disorders, and recovery. I often extract lessons learned from each piece and then bring these lessons into the classroom. In many ways, my writing informs my teaching, and my teaching informs my writing. I also share craft-related tips outside of the classroom, in my weekly newsletter, Write at the Edge. My goal with the newsletter is to help other writers brush up against, and then push past, the edge of what they think is possible.

Over the past several years, I’ve put most of my creative energy into my debut book, SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. The book draws upon my own lived experience with anorexia, as well as insights from hundreds of clinicians, researchers, and folks with lived experience whom I interviewed and surveyed.

In the book, I explore what I call “the middle place” — the liminal space between acute sickness and full recovery from an eating disorder. It’s a place that many of us find ourselves in as we work our way toward wellness, and yet it’s often stigmatized. Our society tends to prefer stories about protagonists who prevail and triumph over their disorders, but these narratives have never really appealed to me. As a writer, I’m much more drawn to untidy, restorative narratives about people who are navigating messy middles and experiencing meaningful moments of growth along the way. Telling these narratives fuels my creativity.

get your own copy of Mallary’s new book

Who provided a model for you in terms of combining caregiving and creativity?

When I first started writing my book, I was working full time, getting my Master’s in Fine Arts, and parenting my two children. Shortly after, the pandemic happened. In the midst of so much chaos, I wondered: How am I ever going to make time to continue working on this book?

Then one day, I happened upon an anecdote from Toni Morrison who said she had to “write at the edges of the day” as a single mother of two young children. Hearing this prompted me to consider how I could do the same. As a lifelong night owl, I started writing at night after my kids went to bed. I found, though, that I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning and then wouldn’t be able to fall asleep because the heavy topics I had just been writing about weighed me down. I decided to try out a different edge — the early morning — and I found that it worked.

Every morning, I woke up at 4 a.m. and wrote. I initially dreaded waking up before the sun, but I ultimately came to love the quiet solitude that early mornings afforded me. (A daily cup of ice coffee with sweet creamer and a piece of chocolate also helped!) At that time of day, my children were still fast asleep, and I wasn’t bombarded with incoming Slack messages and emails.

I could write more freely and then start my day knowing I had carved out time for my creative self. It also helped having a hard stop: every day I had to close my laptop at 5:45 a.m. to get myself and my kids ready for school and work. Knowing my time was limited forced me to make it as productive as possible.

Is there something specific you do to jumpstart creativity?

As a perfectionist, I used to try to end my early morning writing time with a really well-written sentence or paragraph. But I found that this strategy made the barrier to entry too high the following day. You can’t top that sentence from yesterday, my inner critic would say. Your next sentence needs to be even better.

This really stifled my creativity. To reignite it, I needed to change my approach. Rather than ending my writing time on a high note, I started ending it on a mid-range note. I would stop mid-sentence, or write a half-baked sentence, and then close my laptop. The next day, I’d have an easier entry point and could jump right into my writing. I liked starting each day knowing I had something to tinker with and improve upon. From there, the writing flowed more naturally.

Of course, there were some early mornings when I found myself at a standstill. Sometimes words would escape me, or I’d let a cluttered inbox steal my attention. On these days, I tried to at least put something down on the page in service of “touching” my project every day. Touching it each day (whether that meant writing 1,000 words or just 100) enabled me to maintain momentum toward a finished manuscript.

What are some ways care-giving fosters creativity and vice versa?

Being a mom has no doubt changed the way I think about writing my life story.

Prior to having kids, I wrote a lot about my mother, who died of metastatic breast cancer when I was 11. Her death was the trauma that triggered my eating disorder. Since becoming a mother, I’ve found that I’m much more in tune with my inner child, which has made it easier to write about my younger years.

Seeing my children grow up has prompted me to think back to when I was their age, and it has inspired me to find ways to reinhabit my younger self — by re-reading my childhood journals and revisiting places from my past, including the house where I grew up and the hospitals where I was treated for anorexia.

As my book nears publication, I’m struck by the fact that my own children are around the same age I was when my mother got sick with breast cancer. And I’m now 40 — the same age my mother was when she passed away.

To be putting my book out into the world at this moment in time feels like the ultimate way of honoring my mother’s memory and beginning this next phase of life that she never got to experience. I also hope my book will one day help my children better understand their maternal lineage. Anna Quindlen once said that “writing is the gift of your presence forever.” As a mother and memoirist, I hold that quote dear.

Mallary Tenore Tarpley is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and McCombs School of Business, where she teaches journalism and writing. A journalist by trade, her recent work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, and more. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir, SLIP, which blends personal narrative and reportage to explore life in the middle of eating disorder recovery. Mallary received a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support her writing and research for the book. She lives in the Austin area with her husband and two children.

You can find Mallary on Instagram @mallarytenoretarpley and on LinkedIn here. She also has a weekly Substack newsletter, Write at the Edge, which you can subscribe to here.

Mallary’s book is now available for pre-order and will be in stores on August 5. You can find out more about her book tour — which includes stops in Austin, Houston, Dallas, Boston, Providence, St. Petersburg, Santa Monica, New York City, and Chapel Hill — here. Each event is open to the public, and RSVPs are encouraged.

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🌟 this Friday, how to build community on the page on IRL 🌟

The Summer Fridays series—a weekly chat to spark your creative practice through the sludge of summer—has been so much fun. This Friday the 25th, I’ll be joined by Domenica Ruta 🧿, author of the new novel All the Mothers, and we’ll talk about writing community and creating community in your own three dimensional life.

We’ll be chatting via Substack Live at 9am pacific/noon eastern. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll get an email when we go live, or you should be able to find us in Substack. If you can’t make it, I’ll share the recording afterward. I’d love to see you there!

all the Summer Fridays info

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Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’m so glad you’re here.

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