I had no idea what to expect from this memoir, because I had no idea what “Munchausen by proxy” meant. Sickened took me into a world about which I knew nothing. The above elegantly summarizes the Gregory’s long and difficult recovery from her Munchausen by proxy (MBP) childhood. If someone shapes your mind into a distortion you have to find something that can give you the straight answer. And beliefs are erected by those who raise us. I don’t know what makes a person do to a child what Gregory’s mother did, but I am grateful that Gregory made it through and was able to write about it.Sickened: The true story of a lost childhood/ The memoir of a Munchausen by proxy childhood by Julie Gregory I. But you’ll also be inspired, as Gregory was able to disengage herself from the destructive lives her parents were leading and she even gets the chance to save a young girl from the same fate, when she realizes her mother is doing to a foster child what she’d done to her. Even aside from the utter insanity that Gregory’s mother put her through, the ill effects on her health and psyche, her home life in general left much to be desired. Sickened will infuriate you, as a parent (I mean, I can only assume, having no children of my own) and, hell, as a person.

How absolutely, just, NORMAL my own childhood was, and I send up a quick thank you to God, The Universe, or Whoever for giving me parents who weren’t suffering from mental illness or addiction, who took care of me and nurtured me not because OOPS they had a kid, but because they loved me and it was the right thing to do. Whenever I read stories like this, memoirs from people whose parents completely fucked up their childhoods, I reflect on how easy I’ve had it. Gregory really WAS sick a lot of the time, but not because of any illness other than her mother’s. Often her mother would withhold food or give her medicine she didn’t need. Her mother dragged her from doctor to doctor, hospital to hospital, insisting that she was deathly ill.

(Remember Mischa Barton’s story in The Sixth Sense? THAT.) Gregory’s mother suffered from a disease called Munchausen by Proxy, a form of child abuse in which a parent or caregiver pretends their child is ill, sometimes inducing illness themselves, in order to get attention from doctors. Sickened is the memoir of a woman named Julie Gregory, whose childhood was stolen away by her mother and countless doctors, doctors who never realized that something was very, very wrong.

I remember quite a lot about it which I’m assuming means this book was pretty great. I read Sickened a hundred million years ago, you guys, that is how far behind I am on my reviews.

Julie gregory munchausen by proxy