Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher
Stick Figure by Lori Gottlieb
Bitter Ice: A Memoir of Love, Food and Obsession by Barbara Kent Lawrence
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Only Wasted had any redeeming literary qualities, and it is the one I would recommend to anyone curious about the psychology of eating disorders (curious to see a case study, rather than read a text book). It demonstrates quite effectively (so much so that it could cause an anorexic relapse, some reviewer say, and recommend it with caution) how easy it is to be seduced by irrationality or, more accurately, seduced by your own, special breed of rationality.
Was reading eating disorder memoirs for reasons of my own and usually like being helped to understand how another mind thinks, but Bitter Ice [the memoir of the wife of a man who had anorexia] was awful.
By which I mean terribly written.
But that’s not all.
The narrator came off as so weak and courageless; staying in an awful, joyless marriage for almost 30 years, and saying at one point that a husband should be stronger than his wife, and a few other careless gendered remarks, and some garbage about waiting until her kids were out of school, and miming the shackles of patriarchy nearly to perfection.
I know that the raw, unhappy truth of a memoir can have power, but this was just masochistic. The admissions of personal failure were too frequent, repetitive and devoid of the pathos necessary to inspire sympathy (crucial to the narrator’s immunity to reader annoyance). I was an annoyed reader.
Every once in a while I find it salutary to finish a really awful book. It cheers me up, somehow, that this really terrible book was published, and its author considered capable. It is bolstering in this curious way, without making me too despairing of the system that allowed it to see the light of the market. It’s not her fault I could spot her two-bit metaphors 8-40 pages away.
I also find it interesting (if simultaneously annoying) to read something written in a perspective I really couldn’t get my mind around without some explicit assistance and explanation. The extreme lengths of this woman’s timidity and inaction, blindness and denial in the face of fear and stress and shit totally hitting the fan live…it’s like reverse inspiration.
Have until now read memoirs/biographies almost exclusively by authors and poets, however, and so she was, perhaps, doomed from the start.
The best part of the book (it was a library book) was finding a homemade bookmark in childish writing in it that read ‘To: Melissa From: Megan ::heart:: A book mark for the best sister ::heart::
Bet Melissa was sad to lose that one.
Next up: lexicographer memoirs…are there any?
Posted by madwit17 



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The Lightning Thief