My mother and I have just done an interview for the Daily Mail on my anorexia and her role during my illness and my recovery. The journalist was especially interested in what my mother said to me on the phone one day just before she and her partner moved house: ‘You are welcome at our new house, but your anorexia isn't.' It's funny how, despite this distinction between myself and my anorexia being the key to what she said, the stand-alone completely ignores it, reading ‘Emily's mother told her she wasn't welcome at the family home while she was in the grip of anorexia. So did tough love work?' As my mother also says, she never thought of it as ‘tough love' - she'd simply run out of ideas, and got sick of my wraithlike presence, and was determined not to have it invading the new home she was about to make with her partner. I, as the anorexic, of course couldn't see the distinction: to me a rejection of my anorexia was a rejection of me, because I couldn't distinguish between them.