Lucy Daniels reads from 'Walking with Moonshine' Sunday

In times of adversity, the body poses a question: fight or flight? Award-winning Raleigh author, psychologist and activist Lucy Daniels chose to fight, even when her body itself proved to be the threat.

During a reading at Flyleaf Books Sunday, Daniels painted a detailed portrait of her life not only as a woman dealing with anorexia nervosa, but as a woman of great courage.

Her new book, “Walking with Moonshine,” a collection of short autobiographical, fictional and journalistic styled stories ranges across the span of her life, detailing her journey from childhood up until almost her 80s. In dealing with her own emotional struggles, Daniels has inspired a community as a pillar of strength by not only discussing her experiences, but also by creating spaces to help others, just as she was helped so many years ago.

The daughter of Jonathan Daniels, former News & Observer owner and editor-in-chief, and the granddaughter of Josephus Daniels, former Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson, Lucy Daniels was no stranger to the world of writing. In fact, Daniels grew up in an environment many writers can only imagine.

“When she was a child living in Washington, D.C., her father was working for FDR, and (three time Pulitzer prize-winning author) Carl Sandburg used to come to their house and read her bedtime stories,” said Daniels’s publicist Cindy Campbell. “I guarantee that nobody alive in North Carolina, or probably in the country, had bedtime stories read to them by Carl Sandburg. She’s just full of stories like that.”

Daniels took after her family as she proved to be prolific at writing as well; her first story was published in Seventeen magazine when she was 15 years old. From there, however, Daniels’s anorexia began to overwhelm her, and she was hospitalized for the first time.

A year later when she was 16 years old, Daniels found herself hospitalized again — this time for five years. It was during this time that she wrote her first novel, “Caleb, My Son.” At the age of 22, with the education status of a high school dropout, and the title of former mental patient, Daniels won the prestigious title of Guggenheim fellow for her debut novel. She was the youngest person ever to receive the award.

Her second novel, “High on a Hill,” was about life in a mental hospital, and it was the last book that she wrote for 30 years.

“Well, in that time, I decided that I wasn’t a writer. I just felt like my writing wasn’t good, and I wasn’t a writer,” Daniels said. “And that’s also when I was raising my children alone, and going back to college as a mother, and also to try and make myself good as a psychologist.”

Psychology, which Daniels took interest in after her hospitalization and while she was in college, became a very prominent subject in her life after her divorce, leaving her to find a way to support her four children. She went to college and graduate school after undergoing psychotherapy at age 40, and earned her doctorate in 1977.

She has since been committed to helping people of all ages find the treatment they need in dealing with emotional issues. In 1989, she started the Lucy Daniels Foundation, a non-profit organization that delves into the relationship between psychoanalysis and creativity, and the Lucy Daniels Center, a community clinic in Cary with a focus on children that uses psychoanalysis to help treat emotional issues.

“What distinguishes the Lucy Daniels Center, and has distinguished Lucy’s life, is that it is not a program that seeks quick fixes that aren’t real or easy answers that aren’t real answers, or medications that are temporary or symptomatic treatments that don’t address the whole of the person and their difficulties.” said Donald Rosenblitt, executive and clinical director of the Lucy Daniels Center. “Medications certainly have their time and place, but we seek, when possible, to find a more meaningful solution to a child’s situation.”

In addition, a documentary film, “In So Many Words,” was released about her life earlier in April, and was produced by Oscar-short listed Elisabeth Haviland James. It can be seen at the Cucalorous Film Festival in Wilmington Nov. 13-17 or at the North Carolina Museum of Art on Feb. 9, 2014 before copies are able to be purchased later next year.

“(Lucy) is a woman who has never stopped confronting the emotional issues that have resulted from her childhood experience and has confronted them in the most authentic and most fullest and deepest way possible by a rigorous and honest exploration of who she is,” Rosenblitt said.

“This is a rare level of authenticity in addressing a life and seeking to make the very best of it, regardless of the difficulties that might have been caused by unhappy circumstance.”

Still, Daniels is not one to throw around her accomplishments, but simply to acknowledge them and move on, dealing with the issues at hand as she has done for so long.

“I did not overcome (anorexia nervosa). I am a recovering anorexic,” she said. “The interesting thing is the destructive way that I was dealing with food when I was young has ended up being very healthy –– I count calories and I eat healthy food –– but I think my anorexia is like other people’s problems: We don’t get over them. What we can do is learn to deal with them better.”

arts@dailytarheel.com