Suky Sedgwick: The year our grandfather died, Edie was thirteen. She had just started boarding school at the Katharine Branson School near San Francisco. Being away from the ranch turned out to be a terrible wrench for Edie. When she went to the school, she told me she had nightmares about Mummy. Crying. Just crying about Mummy a lot, I don’t know why.

Saucie Sedgwick: Suddenly Edie was taken out of school. I heard all sorts of rumors when she was brought home—that she had mononucleosis, even that my mother thought she was getting leukemia. That would have been absurd, because my mother must have known what the real trouble was. Edie had anorexia. In our family there were two styles of eating. One was to eat special foods, which my mother did because of all her allergies. Edie ate special foods at all hours of the day and night; even her white rat, named Hunca Munca, had to have special food. The other style was to eat enormously—which my father did. In a way, my father was a model for Edie, because he would eat such quantities, then he would burn it off with his exercises and swimming and riding. But Edie vomited it up. She would sit down to a very special meal which she herself would carefully choose and eat helping after helping of, course after course, excusing herself during the meal to go and be sick, to throw up what she had eaten so she could eat more. But nothing reached her stomach, or very little did.

Suky Sedgwick: I used to assist on those feasts. She used to call it “pigging.” “I’ve got to go pig now.” Eating and stuffing and stuffing and eating and then throwing up.