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View ProfilesPublished January 17, 2023 at 1:16 p.m. | Updated January 18, 2023 at 10:15 a.m.
Erika Nichols-Frazer's recently published memoir, Feed Me: A Story of Food, Love and Mental Illness, did not originally focus on food. The Stowe native had been working for close to a year on a manuscript about her long struggle with undiagnosed bipolar disorder when she landed a two-week summer residency at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson.
"I was sitting at my desk, buttering a piece of bread for lunch with those little Cabot pieces of butter in aluminum foil," Nichols-Frazer, 34, recounted in a phone interview from her Waitsfield home.
The butter prompted a Proustian moment that sent her back to a week she spent at a local hospital when she was 13. At the time, the five-foot, four-inch teenager barely weighed 80 pounds. Her parents, at their wits' end, had brought their daughter to the teen psychiatric ward hoping to jolt her out of an eating disorder.
Every meal was closely supervised by hospital staff. "They made me eat those little pats of butter," Nichols-Frazer recalled. "I remember trying to get away with eating a muffin or roll without the butter ... A nurse would watch me and insist that I eat every calorie on the plate."
The memory was a difficult one, but it prodded Nichols-Frazer to consider how food threaded through her life in both negative and positive ways and how learning to feed herself had contributed to her mental and physical wellness.
"Feed Me is all about sustenance and nourishing oneself ... in terms of taking care of your body as well as your mind," Nichols-Frazer explained by phone. "Everything kind of comes back to the idea of sharing food and creating food as part of the community — and how that has the capacity to heal oneself."
Nichols-Frazer, who works as a freelance editor and staff writer for the Valley Reporter, said writing has always helped her work through emotions and life events. "From a very young age, I would write journals. I would write poems. I would write to kind of make sense of things," she said. She earned a bachelor's degree in liberal arts with a concentration in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, N.Y., and a master's in fine arts from Bennington College.
It was at Bennington that Nichols-Frazer first spoke openly about her 2018 bipolar disorder diagnosis, which eventually enabled her to find effective treatment. It was gratifying, empowering and "a weight off my shoulders," she said, to discover that sharing her story helped people who'd had similar experiences.
"It took me a long time to get to a point where I was writing for the public about my own mental health," she said, "but I have found that to be a really important aspect of me coping with mental health issues."
From a very young age, Nichols-Frazer writes in Feed Me, "dark moods had already become familiar visitors, wrapping their heavy hands around my small body," but it was decades before she knew they were caused by bipolar disorder. One of the ways Nichols-Frazer coped was to control any aspect of her life that she could, including food. At age 9, motivated by the realization that she was consuming living creatures, she became a vegetarian, which "put me in control of something, however small," she writes.
As a young teen, she developed anorexia. The book starkly juxtaposes her excruciating need to control every calorie against food-filled visits to her aunts in New York City. They introduced her to puffy poori bread at Indian restaurants, spinach gnocchi in Gorgonzola sauce at a trendy Italian spot and grilled baby artichokes dipped in hollandaise. "Never had I tasted anything like it, the tang of the artichokes, the bright acidity of the rich sauce," she writes.
Her aunts, one of whom had been a professional chef, taught Nichols-Frazer how to make the finicky French sauce — lush with yolks and butter — and to poach eggs perfectly. That mastery at the stove helped the young woman start to build confidence and a positive sense of control over food.
"There was no one specific moment where food became something that could bring joy instead of just difficulty and pain," she told Seven Days, "but a huge part of that process was visiting my aunts."
To this day, Nichols-Frazer often makes eggs Benedict for herself and her husband with fresh eggs from their small flock of backyard hens. "It does kind of ruin other eggs for you," she remarked.
Another recipe in her regular rotation is a chunky vegetable and lentil soup that she describes making for friends in the book. "Cooking is what I do when I need to calm down, to give me something to focus on instead of my frantic thoughts," Nichols-Frazer writes. "The process of chopping and sautéing and stirring is cathartic, and feeding others gives me purpose."
Feed Me also illuminates the flip side of feeding loved ones — being fed by them. Nichols-Frazer describes returning home from one of her MFA residencies to find that her husband had cooked a favorite meal using many of the vegetables he cultivates in their backyard gardens. "The kitchen smelled like soy sauce and Dylan's delicious, soft fried rice," she writes.
But Nichols-Frazer was in a mental health crisis at the time. Frustrated by her husband's inability to provide the support she needed, she refused the meal, "reject[ing] Dylan's attempt to feed me, to care for me."
While it can be re-traumatizing to write about painful experiences, Nichols-Frazer acknowledged that a bigger challenge in crafting Feed Me was making public what had been largely private. In particular, she reveals unvarnished details of her mother's alcohol use and draws parallels with her own mental health struggles.
"This book is very honest about myself," Nichols-Frazer said, "and I felt like I had to be honest about my relationships with other people in my family."
Regarding her anorexia as a teen, Nichols-Frazer writes, "I didn't think I deserved food. I didn't think I deserved to exist." Later in the book, she observes of her mother: "She drinks to erase herself."
As Nichols-Frazer matures, she realizes she must grapple with her demons, even as her mother stubbornly resists discussing her drinking. "She doesn't know how to feed herself in the ways she needs," Nichols-Frazer writes with resignation.
Feed Me depicts the failure of Nichols-Frazer and her brother to persuade their mother to acknowledge her problem. The author said she believes her mother understands her daughter's need to share the full story.
"I explained to her that these are things that so many people and families deal with," Nichols-Frazer recounted. "It can save lives to be able to talk about and destigmatize a lot of addiction and mental health issues. It was a piece I felt like I had to lay bare — just tell the truth — because I do think that is how we heal."
The roughly chronological memoir is composed of 26 chapters grouped in three sections with culinary headings: Simmer, Boil and Rest. The final section's title refers to the recommended practice of resting cooked meat before slicing it, although Nichols-Frazer admitted she doesn't use that technique much as a longtime vegetarian. Her version of "rest," she said on the phone, came when, at age 29, she received her diagnosis and began to glimpse light at the end of a long tunnel.
For this reader, it was hard to detect that glimmer until the last few chapters — when, equipped with a medical explanation for the extreme swings of her bipolar disorder, Nichols-Frazer begins to find equilibrium with therapy and medications. Even as late as Chapter 23, she shares descriptions of the mania she endured, which evoke the sensation of being stalked by an insatiable beast intent on eating one alive.
It's violent. On fire. It's ravenous; it'll swallow you whole. It buzzes with ferocious energy. It's restless — can't stop moving, can't slow down. Volume up too loud. Thoughts pinballing, never landing or connecting or making sense. It's a desperate need to move, to take action without thought of consequence. It's a live wire, spitting sparks. It rattles you, strips you, overfills then empties you.
On Monday, January 30, at the Round Hearth Café & Marketplace in Stowe, Nichols-Frazer will give a reading and serve several dishes featured in Feed Me, including lentil soup, jalapeño mac and cheese, and grilled chicken salad. She will also bring chocolate chip cookies, her husband's favorite. They won't be broken or served on a shattered plate, as they appear on her book cover.
That image, Nichols-Frazer explained, was true to her story and how broken she felt at her lowest points. With the passage of time and treatment, she said, she can now see that, even though "I felt like I was breaking," surviving the depths "made me stronger."
If you need to talk to somebody about your mental health, help is available 24-7 by dialing 9-8-8 or texting VT to 741741. For more resources, visit mentalhealth.vermont.gov.
Nichols-Frazer reads and serves dishes featured in her book on Monday, January 30, 5 to 7 p.m., at Round Hearth Café & Marketplace in Stowe. Free.
The original print version of this article was headlined "Narrative Nourishment | A Waitsfield author explores the role of food in her quest for mental health"
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