Wintergirls
by Laurie Halse Anderson
Review by Alex P
This is the most accurate depiction of a restrictive eating disorder I have come across in a book. Many try and fail to tell our stories, dramatizing it, making it a vain illness in the pursuit of aesthetics by insecure girls who ‘just want to be skinny’. This book gets it. The endless need of self-destruction that lives in your bones; the certainty that if I can just get the number lower, smaller, I can erase myself; I can disappear and wilt until I am nothing more than dust. The constant obsession that never stops until your heart rips away from your chest wall. The euphoric control that comes with the decay of your body is not for the faint of heart. It is not something easily written about by people who watch from the outside. I don’t know if Laurie herself struggled with the same demon, but she certainly has written someone who does. Though the main character Lia is worlds apart from myself, I saw her life through my own eyes. This book may be graphic for a lot of people, and there will be those who think it glorifying the mental illness with the highest death rate. And it does. But it is also a profound source of solace for those of us who have been there. Who have survived. Or who are still there, in some form or another. It may also give those who have never dealt with this kind of beast a glimmer of insight into what it’s like. And, maybe, it might just help someone understand the person in their life who is struggling. Read this book, it’s good.
