David has contributed many excellent, provocative writings and first-person accounts for people struggling with anorexia/bulimia (a/b), their loved ones, and the practitioners who work with them. Biting the Hand that Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia, co-authored with Rick Maisel and Ali Borden, draws from the authors’ decade-and-a-half collaboration with ‘insiders,’ offering fresh answers to life and death questions such as: “How does a/b seduce and terrorize girls and women? Why is a/b successful in encouraging girls and women to unwittingly embrace their would-be murderer? How can such a murderer be exposed and thwarted?”
In 1997, Dean Lobovits, and Jennifer Freeman joined David to co-create the Archives of resistance: Anti-anorexia/Anti-bulimia, which disseminates hope and offers further readings, poems, and art for personal and professional use.
And here are three more favorites:
1- A Polemics Of Life And Death by David Epston & Rick Maisel was published in (2009), Malson, H. and Burns, M., Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/orders, London, Routledge
2- Bearing Witness is based on the Plenary Address to the Australian & New Zealand Academy of Eating Disorders, Adelaide, 20th October 2006). This piece was published in Epston, D. (2008), Down Under and Up Over: Travels with Narrative Therapy, Warrington, United Kingdom; Association of Family Therapy(UK).
3- Unsuffering: “Are you ‘unsuffering’ your life through your thoughts and deeds? Should we introduce ‘unsuffer’ into the discourse of anti-anorexia/anti-bulimia (anti-a/b)? And the world at large? I am very intrigued by such a prospect…are you?”….Read more of this conversation that mostly took place between 26/05/07 and 22/08/2007 between Julie King and David Epston.
Julie King had suffered from anorexia/bulimia for over thirty years. However, her daughter was hospitalized on 40 occasions with her life in peril between the ages of 14-18. I was engaged in an email conversation with Julie over several years to assist her in her attempts to save her daughter’s life and in fact her own. Her daughter has not returned to hospital for the last 2 years and currently is living away from home in a relationship and attending one of the best Art Schools in Melbourne, Australia. She has never been happier than she is now. Julie has re-enrolled to complete her Masters degree in Psychology which she had to abandon over this period of time.