As far back into her childhood as Julie Gregory can remember, her mother, a former trick rider and knife-thrower's target, lugged her to one doctor after another, voicing her daughter's complaints, from lethargy to irregular heartbeat to stomach troubles. One after another, the doctors found little basis for a diagnosis, but that didn't prevent them from ordering elaborate tests and prescribing various medications. The bookstore shelves are full of inspiring stories of parents battling the medical establishment for the benefit of their sick children, but Gregory's Sickened tells a lone frightening tale from the other side of that looking glass. Her mother employed a combination of toxic substances, unnecessary medication, and powerful suggestion to make Gregory sick, and to justify an insatiable maternal-martyr complex brought on by her own childhood abuse and neglect. Munchausen By Proxy is a rare but dramatic syndrome in which an adult's pathological need for attention and vindication leads to the deliberate, systematic, and ongoing poisoning of a dependent. While the classic cases often result in newspaper stories about a long-suffering, dedicated parent, or even the collection of charitable contributions for a gravely ill child, Gregory narrates a situation skewed so far, on so many axes, that the MBP behavior might not be its craziest feature. With a father willing to make his daughter eat used Kleenex for an imaginary crime, a double-wide trailer full of sedated war veterans, and foster children that the biological kids are ordered to discipline with a flyswatter, Gregory's childhood reads like a collection of John Irving quirks minus the humor and redemptive wisdom. Like the best memoirs of extraordinary childhoods, her story reveals the overwhelming presumption of normalcy that prevents children from achieving autonomy and fleeing abuse. As Gregory moves into young adulthood, however, her own feelings and motivations become murkier. The final chapters of Sickened relate a confusing string of court cases, desperate flights, and unexplained reconciliation that coalesces into the book's worst excesses of therapeutic poetry. Because Gregory seeks to portray a child's grasp on reality, as warped and undermined by an environment where fantasy mattered most, she hurts her cause by making it difficult for the reader to distinguish between fact and fancy in her adult life. In 20 years, perhaps she'll revisit this territory with the benefit of distance, mapping her journey out of her mother's clutches as memorably as she charts the territory within it.