But when it did, it would strike like lightning. The realization that the sickness lay in her mother, not in herself, would not come to Julie until adulthood. It also exposes the twisted bonds of terror and love that roped Julie's family together, including the love that made a child willing to sacrifice herself to win her mother's happiness. Punctuated with her actual medical records, it recreates the bizarre cocoon of her family's isolated double-wide trailer, their wild shopping sprees and gun-waving confrontations, the astonishing naivete of medical professionals and social workers.

This is a remarkable memoir that speaks in an original and distinctive Midwestern voice, rising to indelible scenes in prose of scathing beauty and fierce humor.

Many MBP children die, but she not only survived, she escaped the powerful orbit of her mother's madness and rebuilt her identity as a vibrant, healthy young woman. Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is the world's most hidden and dangerous form of child abuse, in which the caretaker, almost always the mother, invents or induces symptoms in her child because she craves the attention of medical professionals. Sickened from early childhood, the author was continually X-rayed, medicated, and operated on, in the vain pursuit of an illness that was created in her mother's mind. She checks her teeth for lipstick and, as the doctor enters, shoots the girl a warning glance. She's about to suggest open-heart surgery on her child to 'get to the bottom of this'. Her mother, on the other hand, seems curiously excited. It's four o'clock, and she hasn't been allowed to eat anything all day. Just twelve, she is tall, skinny, and weak. A young girl is perched on the cold chrome of yet another doctors examining table, missing yet another day of school.

Sickened by Julie Gregory