On a night in July 2005, Madison author and editor Harriet Brown sat on the end of her 14-year-old daughter's bed, holding a milkshake. The shake was made of Haagen-Dazs ice cream and milk, and it wasn't a nice motherly gesture on a hot night. It was a matter of life and death.

"Here's your milkshake," Brown said.

In a shrill voice Brown could hardly recognize, her daughter said, "You're trying to make me fat. I'm a fat pig. I'm so fat."

At the time Brown's daughter was 4-foot-11 and weighed 71 pounds.

That scene -- harrowing and heartbreaking -- served as the lead for an extraordinary article Brown wrote on her family's struggle with her daughter's anorexia. It appeared in the New York Times Magazine in November 2006.

Now that article has led to something extraordinary in itself: Brown, until recently the editor of Wisconsin Trails magazine, has sold to HarperCollins a memoir that will tell the tale in greater depth. It will also provide a breathtaking payday for a gifted writer whose earlier books found critical but not financial success. Brown's advance for the memoir, tentatively titled "Brave Girl Eating," is $250,000.

Yet the memoir, make no mistake, is about much more than money. "My goals for the book," she noted last week, "are no less than to change the way eating disorders are treated in this country. Nothing ambitious or anything."

Brown grew up in Pennsauken, N.J., worked at magazines in New York City, and has been in Madison for 16 years now, though that will soon change. In August, Brown will begin a tenure track job at Syracuse University, teaching magazine journalism.

I first spoke with Brown in 1998, when her book "The Goodbye Window" was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. For that she spent a year inside the Red Caboose Day Care Center on Williamson Street, where her daughters were enrolled.

"I just wanted to answer the burning question I had as a parent," she told me at the time. "What happens when you walk away? I think every parent would like to be a fly on the wall for a day."

Subsequent books included "Madison Walks," a guide to the city's best strolls, and "Mr. Wrong," an anthology of pieces, edited by Brown, by writers who fell for the wrong guy.

In 2005, when Brown received a residency fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center -- basically a few weeks to write, distraction free -- she figured she would try to finish either a book of poems or a mystery novel with a Madison setting she was working on.

Instead, Brown found herself setting down what became the New York Times piece on her daughter, whom she called Kitty in the article, and the family 's struggle with her anorexia.

"It was the hardest writing I've ever done," Brown said last week. There were a lot of tears, but it was also cathartic. Brown could pour out her frustration over how when Kitty was diagnosed with anorexia, there was no road map for recovery as there would have been with something like diabetes.

"No one could tell us exactly how to make our daughter well," Brown wrote. There were inpatient clinics charging $1,000-plus a day, but even at those rates the recovery statistics were not encouraging.

Brown could, and did, also write about how through research she learned of a family-based treatment, often called the Maudsley approach after a hospital in London, that she eventually embraced. It involves the parents directly in the recovery, or re-feeding, process, and is not without controversy.

"We didn't know if it was, objectively speaking, the best choice," Brown wrote. "But anything was better than watching Kitty disappear, ounce by ounce, obscured by the creature who spoke with her voice and looked out through her eyes."

It was a long, hard process -- you might say you would need a book to describe it -- but Kitty slowly began to eat and gain weight. In another column just last month in the New York Times, Brown noted that Kitty is now "a healthy 17-year-old who shows no sign of relapse."

The original magazine piece didn't only bring book interest. Brown was overwhelmed by the hundreds and hundreds of responses she received from parents who were living a similar nightmare. More than one said "reading this piece helped us save our child's life." Brown knows of anorexia clinics that now routinely hand out reprints of her Times Magazine story. "That makes me feel good," she said.

Brown said she realizes the Maudsley approach may not be for every family, but she wants everyone to at least know it's out there. Her book is tentatively scheduled for spring 2010 publication. Look for Kitty to contribute an afterword.