Word of warning: if you have an eating disorder, I'd urge you to stay away from this book. Wintergirls is almost entirely about spiralling deeper and deeper into the obsession, misery and deadly danger of anorexia. And you already know full well what that's like, don't you? You don't really need another anorexic to measure up against, always coming up fat, or another source of ideas to keep you locked in a tiny, cold life that will take and take and take from you until there's nothing left to ta

Word of warning: if you have an eating disorder, I'd urge you to stay away from this book. Wintergirls is almost entirely about spiralling deeper and deeper into the obsession, misery and deadly danger of anorexia. And you already know full well what that's like, don't you? You don't really need another anorexic to measure up against, always coming up fat, or another source of ideas to keep you locked in a tiny, cold life that will take and take and take from you until there's nothing left to take. Let's just be honest here. Your ED is fucking crazy, and that's exactly what this book will do to you.



I can imagine that this book could help people without EDs understand what it's like to have one. Anderson is an amazing author, and she vividly captures the intensity and horror of anorexia. Even so, it's a regrettable and fairly huge omission to ignore the fact that most EDS do not occur in a vacuum, and are usually accompanied by some combination of comorbid mental illnesses, trauma and deeply dysfunctional family dynamics. This oversight speaks to how largely misunderstood EDs are, as does the fact that the top-rated review for this book describes Lia as spoiled and incomprehensible. I felt and thought many things when I read that, but what I will say here is that sometimes I wish that I had lived the kind of life that allowed me to believe that anorexia was a silly matter of bad attitude as opposed to a mental illness born out of intense suffering. If you're privileged enough to believe the former, it's your responsibility to overcome that ignorance for the sake of the people who are not as lucky as you.



My main issue with Wintergirls though, is essentially what I stated in the beginning of this review: Anderson focuses almost exclusively on the horrible suffering that accompanies anorexia, without paying much attention to the kind of narrative about EDs that would truly help people suffering from them. It would have meant so much to me, when I was sick, to read an account of recovery that told me that the horrible things I believed would not always feel true, that I would not always struggle and relapse and struggle again. I wish I had known that treatment would be terrifying and painful, but there would be peace like nothing I'd known before in finally starting to let go of everything that was killing me. I wish I'd known that I needed to talk to my therapists about the deep-down shit, the stuff that was fucking agonizing to even think about telling anyone else about. I wish I'd known that the alleviation of my suffering did not have to be justified by a wheelchair or feeding tube - that all it took was a tiny part of me deciding that I'd had enough. I wish I'd known that some of the other patients would be back on their bullshit the moment staff turned away, but that my own bullshit was more than enough for me to focus on.



More than anything, I wish I had known that "recovery" would one day mean more than gaining weight and following a meal plan that I hated. It would mean going to bed with a full stomach and finding comfort in that, instead of defeat. It would mean being happier with a tummy and stretch marks than I ever was with a thigh gap and countable ribs. It would mean actually, truly loving myself and believing that I deserved better, instead of thinking that that whole "self-love" thing was fine for other people, just not walking and talking vermin like me.



There are autobiographical accounts of recovery like that, and maybe I should just focus on those instead of giving a low rating to a book that ignores that side of things, I don't know. But if you write a story that fixates upon, capitalizes upon depicting the suffering caused by eating disorders, I can't help but feel that you have something of an obligation to provide your reader with an equally accurate depiction of what the journey towards recovery is like. Maybe that's not fair, or maybe it's my own experience overshadowing reason. Maybe for some people it's as simple as Lia's experience -"Whoops, I almost died...guess I better take treatment seriously this time." But for many of us, it's a lot messier and more complicated than that, and that fact is so rarely explored.