Spodziewałam się innego zakończenia, bardziej rozwiniętego, ale cała książka interesująca i napisana łatwym językiem.

Sickened is the autobiograpy of a woman who fell victim of her mother who suffered from the psychological disorder, Munchausen's by proxy, and her journey to as "normal" a life as possible.

Munchausen syndrome is when you make yourself sick to get attention. Munchausen by proxy is when you make someone else sick to get attention. It's what happened to the little girl in the sixth sense. In this memoir, the author shares her perspective of having lived through it.

Goodreads suggested this to me, perhaps because I gave such a high rating to Carolyn Jessop's memoir about living in Warren Jeff's society. But this is the third memoir that I've read now, and I don't think that I like this genre. Jessop's memoir had a story arc, there was rising tension and promises to the plot, but I don't find that here. In Sickened, you are given sad story after sad story about how terrible this woman's mother was. It read a lot like "A Child Called It," yet seemed even more voyeuristic, if that is possible. It is a disturbing book, which is probably what the author was aiming for, now I know how this disease might play out in my students, and to watch for it, but just when the story was getting interesting, "how is she going to deal with her mother?", the story stopped. I guess there is a sequel? As for me, just reading an encyclopedia article on this syndrome would have been enough. I skimmed after the 100th or so sad story. It was an awful life this woman lived, I'm glad she got out of it, and I'm glad she's helping others, and if you are an activist, this book is for you.

Wow this book was disturbing, yet I was unable to put it down. It drew me in fast and kept me riveted. It a memoir of a childhood lived with a muchausen by Proxy mom. Julie was carted to doctor after doctor, made sick with pills, all sorts of terrible things. There was also physical abuse. It was hard to read it spots. A very good book, one that I think more people should read, specially hospital/doctor staff. It really gives a deep look into what a person with muchausen by proxy is like, and what it is like to be the child the mother is making sick. I was left wondering if Julie was able to get tina out of the house. Great and disturbing read.

I haven’t thought about a book more than this one in a long time. Creepy and haunting, and the story really messes with your mind. Side note: For folks in the comments suggesting that this story couldn’t be true - I’m a psych nurse with a lot of pediatric experience, and experiences like the ones told in the story absolutely do happen, and the story absolutely rings true.

Read many years ago, just remember being really creeped out and well...sickened.

Two stars.



You'd think something with this much drama would manage to avoid being boring, but it wasn't the case.

Munchhausen's and Munchhausen's by Proxy are fascinating syndromes. One of my favorite novels has a great example, but it's kind of spoilerific: n  Sharp Objectsn

Unfortunately, Julie Gregory's story is not especially compelling. It reads more like a diary without the benefit of any adult perspective or introspection. It's very much "here's a list of things that happened - doctor's appointments, child abuse, tests, countless medications." The drama with her parents read more like episode of Jerry Springer. I understand her relationship with her parents directly tied into the medical side of things, but the crazy drama definitely overshadowed Julie's experiences with Munchhausen's by Proxy.

The language was so...over the top I guess is the best word? Embellished? It makes it hard to connect with the story at its core. There's only so much screaming and abuse you can read about before it all becomes a wave of blah. You have to care about the people and emotions involved, and I never got there.

I liked the inclusion of pictures of Julie's medical records, that was a nice touch. But ultimately, I wanted Sickened to be more interesting than it was.

I had to read this for a class in child abuse and neglect. Very disturbing, yet impossible to put down. It's a miracle the author is alive to tell her story.

This was another page turner. I simultaneously could not put it down while also wishing it would end due to all the trauma within the pages. I think this might be the most bizarre and terrifying recount of abuse I have read amongst my many memoirs.

Munchausen by proxy (MBP) was not the worst of the abuse that this writer suffered as a girl; the other physical abuse and especially the emotional abuse stuck me the most. The brutality of the facts of this story reminded me a bit of one of my favorite books: Blackbird by Jennifer Lauck. The circumstances were different for each child, but neither book is for the faint of heart; the background of the writer is horrendous, and it always amazes me what some people are able to survive and at least partially overcome. It took me a while to get into the book (partly because of the style) but once I did I didn’t want to put it down. What was especially disturbing and sickening for me was having to not only absorb Julie’s story, but those of her brother, the foster kids, the elderly men, and even her father, and even her mother. It was a difficult read.

Despite all life has waged against her, Julie Gregory has an empowered voice. Here, she details growing up with her mother's obsessed effort to contrive symptoms and illnesses for her, soliciting doctors for drastic and unnecessary tests and treatments. Gregory gives a candid and wise account of the manipulation and emotional abuse inherent in her mother's control and insightfully decodes the psychological ramifications of her victimization. While you get a thorough understanding of this manifestation of MBP, it is keenly apparent that the pathology of this family runs so much deeper. Gregory has a lyrical yet forthright style. She doesn't beg your pity in this pained account of a tortured and stolen childhood. And though I didn't get the sense that her aim was to impose any trite lessons in existentialism, you come to know that she is certainly stronger for all she has endured by the end of her story. As of 2003 when first published, she was bravely pursuing charges against her mother in an effort to remove from her custody the quasi-/common law adopted daughter that she'd claimed as her next victim. I'm quite interested to know what became of that.

The blurb and marketing for this book really imply that it’s about Munchausen by proxy, don’t they? Well, it mostly isn’t. It’s mostly about what a terrible person Sandy Gregory is, how abusive and how insane, plus an indictment of the author’s (also abusive) father. MBP isn’t mentioned until Gregory takes a community college psych class and concludes that the symptoms match her mother’s. She also diagnoses her father with paranoid schizophrenia; My Father’s Keeper, published a few years after this, has more on that.

Let me say frankly that I don’t like this “I checked Web MD” method of psychological evaluation. Because the book’s promotional materials emphasize that it includes real medical records, I expected something more definitive. The records do show that Gregory underwent certain procedures and accumulated a variety of strange little diagnoses; they don’t show that she was actually healthy or that she underwent unjustified operations. Kind of the opposite. I kept waiting for the big reveal that the mom was poisoning her or something, but we don’t get beyond a few episodes in which her parents—in grim, dramatic displays of abuse—make her eat disgusting things like matches and dirty tissues. Late in the book, Gregory suggests that her mother effectively starved her into a heart condition by feeding her sugary cereal and Ensure Plus. As someone who basically lived off Ensure during the first trimester of her pregnancy, I thought this was weird. Ensure Plus may taste gross and chalky, and it doesn’t compare to solids like steak and nachos, but it really is designed to replace meals and trigger weight gain—not starve you to premature death. How does this explain Gregory’s long-term ill health, or why she stayed sick after leaving home? For example, why does she “black out on the toilet” while living on her own? (Gregory says: “If everyone around you tells you you’re sick, if they keep testing you for what’s making you sick, do you think, when you’re thirteen, that you aren’t? You feel sick, right?” That makes sense, sure. But it doesn’t explain her symptoms as an adult. Her best explanation for that is that she based her later eating habits on how her mother fed her, which—again—I didn’t really follow.) This book is stuffed with descriptions of gruesome and diverse abuse, but I wondered why Gregory hasn’t included any documentation showing, e.g., the involvement of Child Protective Services, the bankruptcy, the repeated acts of fraud. She ends the book saying that she intends to report Sandy to CPS so that her adoptive children get taken away; she doesn’t say what happens. (Searching online, I read that the children were taken while CPS conducted a 90-day investigation, which ultimately concluded that no abuse occurred and returned them to the home.)

I happen to be reading another memoir of an abusive childhood right now, Educated, and the contrast began to impress me as I finished this book. Westover repeatedly checks her memories against other people’s and against her contemporaneous diary; the nature and trustworthiness of childhood memory (especially memories of trauma) are a major theme. There’s no such introspection here. Gregory’s certainty is lacerating. She even describes working for a medical facility and deliberately denying children appointments because she believes she sees in the kids’ eyes that their mothers have MBP. That creeped me out. And in the “About the Author” section, she bills herself as “an expert writer and spokesperson on Munchausen by proxy and an advocate in MBP cases.” I’m not questioning Gregory’s expertise, but for a syndrome that has (for example) hospital video surveillance of mothers suffocating their own children to trigger a code blue, I’m just disappointed not to see something more substantial and thoughtful here.

Last thing: Gregory throws in a couple bizarre asides that I found both distracting and unpleasant. Specifically, she describes (at needless length) how she entered a wet t-shirt contest to make $100. Then she justifies (at the same needless length) her decision to run away from home to go live with a man twice her age. She continues to describe herself as a “child” through her teens and into her 20s, and only in her 30s does she buy herself a bunch of mirrors and stare at her reflection because she’s finally realized that she’s physically “beautiful.” (She is mesmerized by her own attractiveness, e.g., “I catch a glimpse of myself while walking past a mirror and my face snaps into recognizing the beauty I see before me.”) At age 31, she relies on her mom for necessities, and “for the first time, she was my mom”—she even has to live with her mother again because she’s homeless. All these things could’ve been raw and relatable, but Gregory instead comes off as bitter rather than vulnerable, cagey rather than honest, and uncomfortably reductive. Because she mentions that her parents filed “unruly child” charges against her, complete with documentation (which, it’s implied at one point, may even include pictures of the wet t-shirt contest), the oddly defensive posture of these stories make me think that there’s exculpatory evidence out there that she’s trying to preempt. But who knows. In my brief internet research, I’ve seen posts by Gregory’s mother that passionately deny the allegations in this book, claiming that Gregory was not abused but was rather a wayward unwell kid. I can’t say those posts struck me as terribly credible, either. In the end, this just wasn’t the MBP story I anticipated.