Elena Vanishing

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of disordered eating (anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa) and mental illness (including psychosis).

Elena Dunkle wakes up in a hospital bed, panicked not because of the horrible pain in her stomach or where she is but because she worries that her nurse will see her as imperfect or pitiable. After he complains that she didn’t eat any of her lunch, the nurse tells Elena that she’s a beautiful girl who is destroying her life because of her diet. Elena hangs on to the word beautiful, wondering how much she weighs at present. She tells the nurse she’s fine even though she’s in pain. After the nurse leaves, Elena thinks about how he saw her looking awful, so she applies some makeup.

Elena despises her psychiatrist most of the time because he tells her she has anorexia nervosa and wants to send her back to the United States to a psychiatric hospital. Elena currently lives in Germany, where her father works at a US Air Force base. She thinks of Germany as her home and has no desire to leave. The doctor tries to empathize with Elena by telling her he understands the need for perfection because his own daughter won’t talk to him since he divorced his wife.