It also exposes the twisted bonds of terror and love that roped Julie's family together-including the love that made a child willing to sacrifice herself to win her mother's happiness.

Punctuated with Julie's actual medical records, Sickened re-creates the bizarre cocoon of her family's isolated double-wide trailer, their wild shopping sprees and gun-waving confrontations, the astonishing naïveté of medical professionals and social workers.

Many MBP children die, but Julie Gregory not only survived, she escaped the powerful orbit of her mother's madness and rebuilt her identity as a vibrant, healthy young woman. Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is the world's most hidden and dangerous form of child abuse, in which the caretaker-almost always the mother-invents or induces symptoms in her child because she craves the attention of medical professionals. From early childhood, Julie Gregory was continually X-rayed, medicated, and operated on-in the vain pursuit of an illness that was created in her mother's mind. She checks her teeth for lipstick and, as the doctor enters, shoots the girl a warning glance. She's about to suggest open-heart surgery on her child to get to the bottom of this. Her mother, on the other hand, seems curiously excited. It's four o'clock, and she hasn't been allowed to eat anything all day. Just twelve, she's tall, skinny, and weak. A young girl is perched on the cold chrome of yet another doctor's examining table, missing yet another day of school.

In addition, Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood recounts allegations of physical and emotional abuse inflicted by Gregory's father, as well as other types of abuse.A remarkable memoir that speaks in an original and distinctive Midwestern voice, rising to indelible scenes in prose of scathing beauty and fierce humor. They thought Julie was making up stories for attention, and had her go to 'imagination counseling' to try and tame the crazy stories of her parents. When Julie finally realized what her mom was doing to her, she tried telling some people about what her mom did, but no one listened. Also, in the book Gregory mentions being told that matches were suckers to eat. According to Gregory, her mother even became upset when one doctor wouldn't perform open heart surgery on her daughter. At home, her mother fed Gregory a nutritionally inadequate diet (based on foods a doctor had said Gregory shouldn't have), administered prescription medicine erratically, sometimes in double doses, and filled her days with strenuous physical labor. According to Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood, Gregory's mother frequently took her to various doctors, coaching her to act sicker than she was and exaggerating her symptoms, and demanding increasingly invasive procedures to diagnose the girl's imaginary illnesses.

Sickened memoir