The Program: Christine S. O'Brien on Growing Up Hungry

In "Crave," Christine S. O'Brien tells the story of a childhood full of hunger, both for food and family stability. Her father was an explosively angry and highly successful ABC executive, and despite their luxurious New York life, her mom insisted her family follow a strict diet called "The Program," consisting mostly of celery juice and blended salads. "Crave" tells the story of Christine's journey of mental and physical hunger, and ultimately, her awakening.  

***

I am ten and standing in the doorway of my parents’ bedroom. My mother is lying in her evening clothes, a cream pantsuit and heels, her towering five-foot-eight frame prone like a felled tree on the hardwood floor of the hallway. It’s almost midnight. My father is crouched beside her, one hand on his bent thigh. Murtle, our latest live-in, is crouching, then standing, then crouching again. She is in her uniform, though it is half zipped, revealing the upper part of her bare back, and she is barefoot and not wearing stockings.

“Go back to bed, Christine,” my father says, barely glancing at me.

Murtle takes my arm and gently guides me away from my parents’ room, where I had been asleep in their bed, waiting for their return from a dinner party. She leads me through the door of my brothers’ rooms and into the playroom.

“The ambulance weel be coming,” Murtle says. Her voice is lilting and soft, though the pressure of her squeeze on my arm is firm. “Your mother weel be fine.”

From the playroom I peer through the crack in the door and into the dim hallway. Murtle and my father stand as men in jumpsuits lift my mother onto a gurney, then follow the men as they push it, its wheels rolling loudly on the bare wood, away down the hall.

* * *

It’s springtime and my mother, nine, walks through her father’s orchards with Topsy, her family’s Saint Bernard. Topsy touches the back of my mother’s leg with her cold nose. When her father brought the puppy home, she was tiny with oversize paws. Now, at three, she is big enough for my mother to ride. Though the farm is filled with dogs, her mother always keeps a small dog—there have been multiple Tippys, Jippys, Trixies, Skippys, Spottys, Fidos, and two Lassies, but Topsy is my mother’s favorite. The dog never leaves my mother’s side, even standing guard across her body as she plays in the sandbox.

My mother reaches out to pet Topsy with her left arm, crooked at the elbow, the result of a fall from a stepladder when she was fourteen months old. The doctor, who had been retrieved from a Sunday night church meeting, didn’t set the bone correctly. He also...

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