Carolyn DiPasquale's
WOW! WOMEN ON WRITING TOUR
OF
Reckless Grace
Fourteen-year-old Rachel guards a collection of secrets for ten years, journaling to vent her terror and loneliness.
Following Rachel's fatal overdose years later, her mother, Carolyn DiPasquale, stumbles upon her daughter's diaries. Shattered, she searches for answers, retracing her steps to figure out how parents and doctors missed three major mental illnesses.
What the single, working mother recalls is a far cry from what happens, as dramatically revealed in tandem chapters gleaned from Rachel's journals. While the mother sprints from task to task, the daughter details the baffling emergence and frightening progression of bulimia, diabulimia, and borderline personality disorder; her eventual substance abuse; and heart-wrenching reasons for not seeking help.
Despite her loss, DiPasquale hopes her story lights a path for victims of mental illness while awakening all readers.
Publisher: E.L. Marker
ISBN-10: 1947966550
ISBN-13: 978-1947966550
ASIN: B09W69TT11
Print length: 546 pages
Purchase a copy of Reckless Grace on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org. You can also add this to your GoodReads reading list.
Excerpt
January 24, 2000 – Age 15
I’m so scared. My blood sugars have been in the three and four hundreds. Yesterday I got so dizzy I almost passed out twice. Still feel dizzy and out of it. Can’t concentrate on anything. I’m aware I’m hurting myself. What scares me is I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m hospitalized. I don’t care about kidneys or retinas or amputation. All I care about is losing weight.
Sometimes this drives me so crazy I burst into tears and just want to end it. I swear I don’t go two minutes without thinking about food. I starve myself and then binge. It happens every day. I could never tell anyone how serious this is because then they might try to stop me.
July 28, 2004 – Age 20
I’ve always heard that eating disorders are related to control, but I’ve never stopped to consider whether my demons are control related. It makes sense I would have developed an ED at the time of my diabetes diagnosis. Suddenly, I had a chronic illness and wasn’t allowed to eat like everyone else. Naturally I rebelled. Now that I think about it, every recently diagnosed diabetic teenage girl would be at risk of an ED because all the ingredients are there. How unfair.
Because my diabetes cannot be fixed—there isn’t a fucking thing I can do about it—I am driven to control something else. The natural solution would be to accept it. I keep running, though, because I know if I were to stop, I would become just as obsessed with trying to manage diabetes as I am at trying to bury it. I would try to manage it yet always fall short. I cannot take care of my diabetes and be the right weight unless I starve myself…
You know what?
I’d rather have the ED any day over being fat. If this is the best middle ground there is—to take enough insulin to cover some food and throw up the rest—I guess I haven’t done too bad. Sure, it’s exhausting. Everything is, but at least I’m not getting fatter.
Or am I? I really must buy a scale.
About the Author:
Carolyn DiPasquale grew up in Franksville, Wisconsin, graduating from UW-Milwaukee with a double major in English and French. In 1983, she moved to Rhode Island where she raised three children while pursuing her Master’s in English at the University of Rhode Island. Over her career, she taught literature and composition at various New England colleges; worked as a technical writer at the Naval Underseas Warfare Center in Newport; and wrote winning grants as a volunteer for Turning Around Ministries, a Newport aftercare program for ex-offenders. She has been an active member of the Newport Round Table, a professional writing group (founded in 1995), since 2013.
DiPasquale currently lives in Richmond, Rhode Island where she has started working on a sequel to Reckless Grace. She has also ventured into writing children’s books. In her free time, she enjoys cooking and baking with healthy ingredients, hiking and trapshooting with her husband Phil, and volunteering at the New Hope Chapel food pantry in Carolina, Rhode Island.
Visit her website to follow her updates. You can also follow her on Instagram or Facebook.
Inspiration behind Reckless Grace
What made me write this memoir was my daughter Rachel’s extraordinary journals. Twenty volumes penned over ten years, her writing raw and exquisite. For a mother who had just lost her only daughter, stumbling upon this trove was a godsend, a gift. Rachel was guarded, and her death was abrupt. These diaries would finally let me in. They would reveal her secrets; andanswer my gnawing questions about her death. However, once I started reading and Rachel’s secrets began to surface, I knew they had to be shared. Other people, particularly parents of children with diabetes, would need to know about diabulimia. All parents would want to know how a girl with severe mental illness had slipped through the medical cracks. People would want to know how long and deeply she had suffered; and why she’d kept quiet for fourteen years. So, I really had no choice. I had to write this book. I was sitting on vital information.
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| Rachel and Matt |
RIP Rachel
Reckless Grace
First, I want to thank Carolyn DiPasquale, Wido Publishing and WOW! Women on Writing for providing me with this book so I may bring you this review.
WOW! Carolyn DiPasquale I commend you for being so brave in opening up and sharing your daughter’s extremely personal and powerful story with us. Reckless Grace is a very emotionally charged story where I found myself reaching for the tissues on a few occasions.
Steven Novak needs to be commended for his beautiful cover design on Reckless Grace.
Carolyn introduced us to her daughter Rachel by her extremely raw personal journal entries. It was here that we got a glimpse of the ups and downs of Rachel’s life. So many times I just wanted to jump into the story and give her a hug for all that whe was dealing with!
Putting myself into Carolyn’s shoes I can’t imagine how painful it must have been to read the truth of all the pain and suffering that her child was going through. Like with Rachel I also wanted to give Carolyn comforting hugs.
Carolyn did a brilliant job researching and educating her readers on some very important health and mental issues that were addressed in this book. For me personally I found a lot of what she learned to be very fascinating.
There was a very important discussion between Rachel and Carolyn that tugged so hard on my heart strings I couldn’t stop tearing up! I could see each other's reasoning from both sides and was torn!
In Reckless Grace you will find pictures of Grace and her paintings that she created.
Reckless Grace is a book you are going to want to put on your tbr list as it is a must read book!
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