All chapters on this site are copyright, 1997, by Jane Wanklin and no unlawful reproduction of them should take place

The first chapter opens with a quick scene from 1993, when I lay dying of starvation in the London Psychiatric Hospital. The chapter moves quickly on to describe my early childhood, birth of my brother, Bob (now called by his middle name of "Jim") and my first experience, at age four, with self-abuse. The second chapter deals with the years between 1962 and 1968, when our family lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia and we were all relatively happy. My parents' marriage was shaky but still going fairly strong, Bob and I had a lot of friends, but toward the time of grade seven, when I was put in a gifted children's class, I became very shy and withdrawn, feeling stupid compared to the extremely bright kids in that "Major Work Class", as it was called, and losing a lot of my previous confidence. I had been writing since the age of five and by age twelve had written a novel and many short stories. I seemed destined for a bright future, even with the lack of confidence. Then, in Chapter Three, we move in the summer of 1968, shortly after Robert Kennedy's assassination, which devastated me along with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.s death two months earlier, back to our hometown of London, Ontario. I hate it there, as the pace of life is much more accellerated and we live in a townhouse complex called "Berkshire Village" where my brother gets in with a bad crowd of hoodlum kids and I cower in my room and listen to Everly Brothers records. My life begins to fall apart around 1969 and I slash for the first time, after a visit to my best friend's home in Belle River. Understandably, my parents don't know why I am so unhappy, but I just despise my life and my frightening grade eight class, horribly overcrowded and unruly. Then we come to the part described in Chapter Four: The Shadow Girl, where I become seriously anorexic for the first time.