For the Love of Nancy: Tracey Gold’s Anorexia Movie

A hazard of the message movie is that disparate audiences can take very different lessons from it. My wife was already anorexic by the time she arrived in middle school, where one of her teachers played For the Love of Nancy on videocassette during free periods, presumably in an attempt to reach at-risk students. She recalled this recently after spotting the DVD on my desk. “Did you learn anything from it or were you hostile to its message?” I asked, suspecting I already knew the answer. A sheepish smile tugged at her lips after a moment’s reflection: “I learned you can hide food in walls,” she replied with a laugh.

That is most assuredly not the wisdom screenwriters Nigel and Carol Evan McKeand sought to impart with Nancy, about a family’s struggle to save its daughter from an eating disorder. But what they hoped to accomplish wasn’t entirely clear to me, either. We never get close enough to 18-year-old Nancy Walsh (Tracey Gold) to understand who she was prior to her illness, and even once she’s in the throes of it, we watch the terrible proceedings from a curious emotional remove. Then there’s the brazenness of Gold’s casting itself. She was still early in her own recovery from anorexia in 1994, which raises uncomfortable questions viewers must answer for themselves about responsibility and sensationalism.

Nancy is already over-exercising and stressed about entering college by the time we meet her, something parents Tom (William Devane) and Sally (Jill Clayburgh) haven’t noticed. Brothers Tommy (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and Patrick (Cameron Bancroft) are more perceptive, but Tommy reluctantly tells her she looks great, a lie their parents cling to even after it’s clear she has a problem. “People say we’re starting to look alike,” Sally, a rail-thin perfectionist, confides in Tom. Despite the loudness of those warning bells, she is only subtextually implicated in Nancy’s issues.

Viewers who are eager to understand what triggered Nancy’s descent into hell aren’t given much to work with—she’s as confused as everyone else, explaining “It’s like this war going on in my head all the time and I don’t know how to stop it.” The characters who are fastest to recognize the danger she’s in are among those with the fewest lines, like Sally’s concerned friend Phyllis (Marie Stillin), who pleads with her during a sweaty gym session to consider the possibility that her daughter is unwell. It is Sally’s brother (Michael MacRae), a recovering alcoholic, who is the first to suggest a residential treatment program, accurately warning her “Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve got it under control. Because if it isn’t stopped, she could die.”

Nancy’s depiction of residential treatment is sanitized in some respects (laughably, in her first stint there, Nancy is the sole patient with disruptive behavioral problems) and the obscene cost of treatment is never mentioned, along with other difficulties patients encounter in accessing care. But it’s accurate in its portrayal of Nancy’s desperate behavior in lockdown. When she isn’t hiding food in walls or running in place beside her bed, she’s poking holes in IV tubes to thwart the delivery of nutrients. There is even the threat of a legal battle against her parents, seeing as she’s 18 and doesn’t want to be in treatment, but that hastily-assembled subplot consumes perhaps five minutes of the movie.

It’s in treatment that the Walshes meet Dr. Partana (Garwin Sanford), who oversees Nancy’s care and expertly deflects one of Sally’s “Why is she doing this?!” rants with a well-practiced “First of all, Nancy is not doing this to you or to Mr. Walsh. She’s doing it to herself.” For the Love of Nancy could’ve used a bit more of that straight talk. Despite the seriousness of its subject matter, this is a wishy-washy film that’s not entirely sure of the points it wants to make. It squanders a good performance by Gold in an underwritten role, and a great one by Clayburgh, fully recovered from the execrable Fear Stalk. And it marked the second time director Paul Schneider took on a story about a young woman’s complicated relationship with her body—the other being Babycakes—and did nothing interesting with it.

Keep scrolling for my take on life with a recovering ED patient, along with books my wife recommends for patients and their families. And if you’re interested in the depiction of weight loss on TV throughout the ages, I previously reviewed “Before and After,” a Patty Duke telefilm with one of the weirdest Betty White appearances you’ll ever see.

Streaming and DVD availability

For the Love of Nancy is available on DVD and occasionally pops up on YouTube.

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… But wait, there’s more!

I once mentioned here in passing that my wife has struggled with an eating disorder since childhood, but “struggled” doesn’t accurately convey what her fight has entailed. Our relationship of nearly a decade is uneventful in the typical TV movie ways: neither of us has ever feared the other was secretly homicidal, and she’s probably more likely to compete in the Iditarod or save Santa and his elves from an explosion than philander. But her eating disorder is always with us, even when it’s quiet, making us in some ways an uneasy marriage of three.

While she has been in recovery or remission throughout the time I’ve known her, neither of us would claim she is fully recovered; we understand it can be a lifelong process. In premarital counseling, we likened it to drug or alcohol addiction. All are often rooted in a morass of genetic and environmental factors. Like addictions to drugs or alcohol, eating disorders are destructive both physically and emotionally, leaving trauma, secrecy and shame—sometimes the very triggers that created the problem to start with—in their wake.

It can be difficult not to “give up” on an addict. There are times you question, as the partner of someone with an eating disorder, whether their commitment to the safety and familiarity of their illness and all its dark rituals is stronger than their commitment to you. In our case, I’m already well aware that there have been times when its grip was stronger than her allegiance to herself. But this inelegant preamble is not intended to suggest anorexia and bulimia rob you of any hope for a better future. Every patient has the potential to recover and thrive in unimaginable ways.

It’s a horrible burden, having to fight so hard for your survival. But to anyone who reads this in the middle of their own struggle, I can tell you something your illness never will (because, let’s be clear, your illness is an assh*le that lies nonstop about everything): You’re worth it. You are absolutely worth it. If you need some extra help along the way, here are a few books my wife recommends to ED patients and their loved ones: Goodbye Ed, Hello Me, by Jenni Schaefer; Eating in the Light of the Moon, by Anita Johnston, PhD; and When Food is Love, by Geneen Roth.