Home : The Voice : December 2002  

Going with Truth Into The Wind

by Bard Young

Editors like me spend most of their time worrying over whether authors we’re editing will be overly offended if we point out this or that infelicitous wording or, worse, illiteracy. My work with Amanda Myers has been a labor of love, a labor anchored in the certainty that whatever comes of our mutual effort, it will be to the lasting good.

I first met Amanda about two years ago while she was spending her spring break with a group of Maryville College students riding their bikes across Tennessee. It’s an annual event that often brings them through Dickson where I live. Being a biker myself, I rode with the team for the leg ending in Dickson, where the group (about a dozen or so riders) spent the night in our parish hall. During that time, Amanda told me about her manuscript and of her interest in pursuing publication.

I wound up editing the manuscript, designing the book, and setting the pages in a story about her struggle with an eating disorder. Several members of our church sponsored the project by covering printing costs.

Maryville College hosted a signing for Amanda, and the college’s bookstore is making copies available to the Maryville community. In addition, Amanda has been asked to address a large, Knoxville-area eating-disorder education group, to discuss the book and her experience. All income from the book goes to a foundation she’s set up to support research on eating disorders.

Into The Wind has been adopted by a number of regional churches for their Sunday-school curricula, and we are sending sample copies to churches all over this region, especially in our presbytery. The target audience is junior- and senior-high youth, not only girls but—because, as the book makes clear, boys need to be aware of the symptoms and causes also.

What I found most impressive in studying the book is that I was moved greatly, for reasons I did not at first understand. I’m in my sixties and have never had an eating disorder. So why was I so moved by Amanda’s apparently foreign experience?

The single most important insight that Amanda urges on her reader is that her disorder (her addiction, as she calls it) functioned in her life precisely as all addictions function. In fact, the three cases in point she uses to illustrate her argument are all alcoholics, not anorexics. I finally realized why I was so moved: we all — all of us, every one of God’s children, every breathing soul — we all have our addictions. My addiction may not be to a harmful or illegal substance or to a behavioral pattern toward food, but I have my addictions, my patterns of behavior that I use, over and over, to flee my responsibilities. And I will deny I have them, if you ask. I will deny I have them if I ask myself. That’s why I wept on reading Amanda’s story. Into the Wind is my story, and your story, too.