And I think Anderson does an amazing job of helping someone like me, who has no real frame of reference, understand even slightly better what people like Lia experience on a day-to-day basis. Wintergirls takes a look at almost all of them. This is a complicated subject, because like anything dealing with human behaviour, biology, and neurology, there are a host of physical, mental, and social factors at play here. How is this anything but the slowest form of suicide? But it’s so much more complex than that. How can this possibly end in anything except her death? I find myself thinking.

Lia acknowledges the paradox of her thinking, admits that if she hits her goal of 90 lbs she’s only going to press on to 85, then to 80, then to 75-the “danger zone”-and that nothing except “0” will ever ultimately satisfy her. Anderson takes aim at this idea, but instead of confronting it head-on, she presents it from within. While people who perform gender as male also suffer from eating disorders, disproportionately women in our society receive the messages telling them to be skinny.

The most I can remember reading about eating disorders was probably in Unspeakable Things, wherein Laurie Penny talks about the way medical professionals “treating” her eating disorder also coerced her into performing their vision of a feminine gender role. Trigger warning (both book and review) for discussions of eating disorders, suicide/death.īy way of disclaimer, I know next to nothing about anorexia or other eating disorders. I guess it effectively communicates the state of Lia’s mind, and while such tricks haven’t worked for me in the past, it works here in tandem with Anderson’s careful characterization and the duplicity that Lia presents to the outside world. For some reason, though, it seized me here and didn’t let me go.

Normally I dislike gimmicky or unconventional experiments in narrative style, even when they attempt to bring verisimilitude to a narrator’s stream of consciousness.

Laurie Halse Anderson’s writing is highly stylized in Wintergirls I mistook the cover copy’s description of her writing as “lyrical” as being metaphorical, but it’s more accurate than not. This was a difficult book to read, and not just because of its subject matter.

Wintergirls novel