Enough of these petty emotions. Begone with ye, avast!
I recently picked up a book called Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson. I really liked Speak, so I've always given her other books a chance, although they tend to be gloomy, depressing, and overall disappointing in comparison. Not that Speak is a barrel of laughs, but at least it has a happy ending. Most of her endings tend to be ambiguous, which I don't love. She writes about teenage issues, such as: rape, internet bullying, college rejections, and the subject of Wintergirls: eating disorders.
Wintergirls was far and away the most terrifying book I have ever read, and to put this in perspective, I've read books like First They Killed My Father, The Bell Jar, and Night. (Which one was read for pleasure? See if you can guess! The answer will be revealed at the end of the post!) This book is about an anorexic girl (high school senior) whose friend who was also anorexic, dies. The main character has been institutionalized multiple times (it's not clear exactly how many) and she still isn't better. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why she wants to be anorexic. She keeps thinking about how hungry she is and how badly she wants to eat, and it doesn't seem to be a body image thing, because she knows she's thin already. As far as I can tell, she is obsessed with cleanliness, because she talks herself out of eating breakfast by thinking about how clean she is inside when she wakes up.
This book is chock-full of disturbing imagery. For example, the girl has to be weighed every week (technically every day, but her family is too busy), and she wears the same yellow bathrobe for the weighing. Her stepmother doesn't know that this bathrobe has quarters sewn into the hemline and pockets. For some reason, that image is impossible to shake. Then, later, she weighs herself on her own scale, which is really fancy and can't be duped, and she weighs 99 pounds.
99 pounds.
Then she talks about how her ultimate goal is 90 pounds.
"At 90 pounds, I will soar," she thinks.
I think the reason that this disturbed me so much is because I know a surprisingly large group of people that have had eating disorders, and it's troublesome to think that they might have thought these kinds of thoughts. It also bothers me that girls who do not have eating disorders and never have occasionally talk about how people think they do. These conversations get braggy very quickly, and it's bizarre; they start out with the girls talking about how they could never have eating disorders, then degenerate into a kind of contest. "My mother thought I did," they'll say, or "the school nurse." "My teachers." This contest is multifaceted; you can score points for how many people thought you were bulimic, how many thought you were anorexic, and who these people were. Bonus points if it's someone in the medical community.
This is very cynical. I know that these girls (and I say girls just because I've never heard boys do it, but for all I know, they could be) aren't thinking about this in terms of a contest or even anything to win, exactly. But it makes you feel sort of good about yourself, in a weird way.
It's only recounting the stories that makes people feel good. When someone really thinks you're unhealthy, your first instinct isn't pride or modesty or anything like that. It's shock, disgust, anger, hurt. Often anger.
The moral of this post is: don't read Wintergirls if you know someone who has or had an eating disorder, if you don't like teen angst, or if you enjoy feeling happy. I didn't even finish it and it deeply unnerved me. A downside to a visual mind is that pictures are harder to erase than words, and Laurie Halse Anderson has quite a way with imagery.
ANSWER: Trick question! I started reading First They Killed My Father for pleasure when I was nine, on a car trip, then put it down and picked it back up seven years later, the summer before senior year. The Bell Jar I just picked up for funsies. That was poor planning on my part.
As far as I'm concerned, Night is the ideal length for a book about genocide, because the beauty of concise writing is that you remember the whole book, not just random snippets. Still, it was no joy ride. I had to read that the summer before freshman year, and in my summer reading essay, I had nothing to say about it.
3 comments:
I always find it interesting how portrayals of eating disorders in media are inevitably used for inspiration by people who have eating disorders. I bet a hundred girls tried that quarters thing after reading about it. I doubt any were dissuaded from anorexia by the book - I doubt that's even possible.
You know, that's what Dana said, too. It sounds terrible, but I really think that eating disorder literature just encourages those already afflicted. People that don't have eating disorders don't need to be dissuaded. They already know it's a bad thing.
Yeesh. I'll stay away.
You mentioned that you couldn't understand why the main character wants to be anorexic. From my experiences, it's not a question of want. It's a question of need and of addiction. More than anything else, I think that eating disorders parallel substance addiction, because there is a pull back to the disordered habits again and again. It becomes a control issue, a fixation on controlling everything (which is of course horribly paradoxical). Then again, there is also a degree of psychosis apparent in eating disorders, which makes it impossible to determine whether someone with an eating disorder consciously wants to have it.
What does disturb me, however, is the huge population of people without eating disorders that glorify them and say that they want to have them. These people have no signs of psychosis, but they are duped by peers and the media into believing that those with a mental illness are lucky and that the habits of anorexia and bulimia are a desirable course of action. You talked about this, too, and to me, that is one of the most disturbing facets of modern day society. What is the world coming to if people truly want to become sick and want to have the deadliest mental disorder?
Man, that was wordy. I'm sorry; the whole thing hits close to home and I can't help but try to help people understand how horrifying and dangerous eating disorders are. I'll shut up now. ;)
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