Roy Peter Clark ’70 praises SLIP, the first book by Mallary Tenore Tarpley ’07
By Roy Peter Clark ’70, ’17Hon.
I know there are many ways in which alumni can help new graduates succeed in life and in their careers, but I will testify that this is not a one-way street. I would not be the teacher, writer, and friend that I think I am without the energy and resilience and sense of family shared with me by Mallary Tenore Tarpley.
I graduated from PC in 1970, Mallary in 2007. She often describes me as her mentor, a title that makes me feel both honored and unworthy, as the learning over two decades now has been reciprocal.
It is a lovely coincidence that Mallary and I have books coming out in the same season. Hers, titled SLIP, is a painful but hopeful personal history of living with an eating disorder, blended with the testimony of experts she has interviewed. I predict it will open eyes and save many lives in the years to come.
Mine is titled Writing Tools for the College Admissions Essay, a detailed guide for students who need to write the personal essay to get into schools like Providence, Notre Dame, and Brown.
(Oh, it just occurred to me that Pope Leo may have written such an essay to get into Villanova. Wonder if I can get my hands on it!)
I met Mal at a National Writers Conference in Hartford, Connecticut. She was a junior at PC, an editor for The Cowl, and knew my work as a writing coach for students, journalists, editors, and other public writers.
She was scheduled to become editor-in-chief her senior year and wanted to build a relationship between two Friars that might help her launch a career as a professional journalist. Both of us remember our conversation in a hotel lobby with fully garbed firefighters clearing ballrooms to inspect smoke coming from an elevator shaft.
I am the father of three daughters and coached a girl’s soccer team for 10 years, and nothing about Mallary’s demeanor seemed unusual to me. She was friendly with bright eyes and a receptive smile. In her questions, and in her vision for a college newspaper, she showed all the high standards that would impress Rev. Brian J. Shanley, O.P. ’80, then president of the college.
Little did I know that I was in the presence of a young woman who, at the age of 11, had suffered the death of her mother from cancer, a loss that would send her into the depths of an eating disorder that one nurse would describe as the worst she had ever seen, and that would require months of hospitalization.
Imagine a young Catholic girl who worried that the unleavened bread of the communion host had too many calories; who scrubbed kitchen counters to make sure no calories were hiding there; who held her breath when she passed a bakery, frightened of calories floating in the air.
These are the kinds of heartbreaking stories revealed in SLIP. Through personal narrative and research, Mallary leads readers to the constructive, if controversial, conclusion that it is possible for those suffering from eating disorders to find a “middle ground” between disease and full recovery.
In her writing and in her daily life, Mallary rejects the American cultural attitudes about body image and eating, especially any binary thinking that there are only two ways to eat, one that is healthy, and one that leads to illness. She argues powerfully that there is a Middle Way. The standard view of anorexia is that you are either sick or you are cured. But in the history of disease, there are often treatments that are not cures. You can work your way to a healthier way, knowing that if you slip, you can try again.
In the years after Mallary’s graduation from PC, her journey became attached to my own. I helped her get a summer internship at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, the school for journalists where I have worked since 1977. She was hired as a reporter for Poynter’s website, and worked her way up to become the managing editor. The Clarks got to know the Tenore family, we attended Mallary’s wedding to Troy Tarpley, and my wife, Karen, and I became the proud godparents of their first child, Madelyn.
When it came to mentoring in the digital age, it would be Mallary who mentored me. She and her young colleagues at Poynter lifted me above the limitations of my analogic world view and showed me how my influence could be spread through websites and social media. Before I knew it, I had 15,000 followers on Twitter. I wrote a book about how to write short in the digital age. And while I was helping her, she was lobbying her PC contacts to offer me an honorary degree in 2017. I had a piano brought to stage in the Dunkin’ Donuts Center and got to play a Beatles song during my commencement speech. (My biggest gig ever!)
Three years ago, Mallary earned an MFA in non-fiction narrative from Goucher College. At a still young age, she has donned the mantle, not only of author, but of writing teacher, one of the most skillful and influential at the University of Texas at Austin. Eight of her writing students at UT volunteered to help me with my recent book, sharing the admissions essays that helped them get into the college of their choice.
One of the pleasures of being an old teacher is viewing the arc of a student’s career, the way that my great PC teachers (Fortin, Delasanta, Barbour, Grace, Thompson, Cunningham) got to view mine.
