Dana is originally from Atlanta, Georgia. After college, she moved to Tifton, Georgia to work in a halfway house for recovering addicts. A year later she returned to school for a graduate degree in clinical psychology. Dana worked for 15 years as a therapist, a behavior specialist with developmentally disabled adults, and as a psychological examiner.

The Body Tourist is a memoir set in the six years following Shavin’s so-called recovery from anorexia. It is a candid, darkly funny, and ultimately optimistic window into the mindset and the machinations of a mental illness whose tentacles reached deep into her life long after she was considered “cured.” After college–a tricky educational adventure that included one expulsion, one hospitalization for anorexia, and three transfers to three colleges (one of which Shavin attended twice, but not consecutively)– she moved to Tifton, Georgia to work in a halfway house for recovering addicts. I’m ready, she told her parents, her therapist, her friends—all of whom shook their heads in horror at her 95-pound frame. But she was undaunted. And she had landed a job as a counselor in a halfway house for drug and alcohol addicts. If anyone knew what it took to become a happy, functioning adult, she did. Or so she thought. As you might suspect, the burden of self-contempt, faulty logic, and interpersonal turmoil that are the character traits of depressive disorders and addictions do not miraculously disappear once medication and therapy have taken effect. Where, then, do these dangerous obsessions, such as the wish for obliteration (which often co-exists with the wish for immortality), go once a person sets foot on the road to recovery? For Shavin, they lived on beneath the radar of her supposed newfound health, disguising themselves in the falling-down houses she happily moved into and dangerous neighborhoods she somehow didn’t fear. They announced themselves in the deeply flawed men she professed to adore, the food rituals she thought were normal, the ordinary sex she could not have, and most profoundly, in her inability to acknowledge her father’s illness and encroaching death. While many writers have written candidly and eloquently about their struggles with depression, addictions, and eating disorders, those stories usually conclude once there is progress toward recovery. Beyond recovery—whether from addictions, illness, or even the death of a loved one or divorce—there is another story, one that is about how we re-join the world, and, in the living years that follow the darkness, pursue a life that is creative, engaged, and deeply felt in our bones. This is the territory of The Body Tourist.