The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery

During the Victorian age-a time when even respectable newspapers had a tabloid edge-some of the world's most renowned and controversial celebrities were women who could allegedly abstain from eating for months or even years at a time. In The Fasting Girl, acclaimed journalist Michelle Stacey tells the story of Mollie Fancher, a young Brooklyn woman who became "the most famous sick person in the world" because of her claim to have lived for more than a decade without food.

Lauded by Entertainment Weekly as one of the top ten books of 2002 and compared by the Chicago Tribune to Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, this elegantly written, compulsively readable cultural history intertwines topics as diverse as eating disorders, Charles Darwin, and the nature of entertainment and celebrity. "Mystic, hysteric, anorexic, or freak, Mollie Fancher was only one thing for sure: a hunger artist who played her audience for decades," wrote The Village Voice. "It took a probing writer like Stacey to give her a riveting second run."