The first thing I want to say about this book which is incredibly important – DO NOT read it if you have ever experienced/are experiencing an eating disorder or have had unusually obsessive thoughts about needing to control your weight. This book is certainly not for you. Trust me. It is very detailed in its descriptions regarding eating disorders and has a strong potential to trigger or worsen a person’s harmful relationship with food.
In fact herein lies my first criticism of the book. There is not an adequate trigger warning at the beginning – we are only told ‘this book is hard to read.’ How the author came to make such a vital omission considering she herself has struggled with an eating disorder and obviously knows the things that kindle the compulsions and how suggestible the minds of sufferers can be, is bewildering. And that is not snowflake talk. Words carry great power. She has written powerfully here and the fact that she was drawing on her own experiences make it very realistic. A warning is definitely needed.
That aside, I found it laid to rest the fogginess for me as to how someone’s thoughts can become so distorted that they literally cannot see the real ‘them’ and end up on a pathway where they are literally starving themselves to death.
Jane, the eighteen year old protagonist, experiences events and situations over a period of years that create the perfect storm for anorexia. We are subjected to the inner workings of her mind, her torments and the conduct and cruelty of others, including the effect of thoughtless speech. It often feels like we are reading her diary or looking over her shoulder as if through a go pro camera.
Prepare to be upset and angry for her. As in tears. I can’t count how many times this book made me well up but it did over and over. I feel that it wires itself into those little vulnerabilities that we all have at times and illuminates them so that we recognise the feelings that she describes.
The character herself is well portrayed. Likeable, but far from perfect. Her issues feed a secrecy and a darkness in her that divide her from her loved ones and serve as a growing barrier between herself and normal life. Her externalisation, her constant fixation on her appearance and that of others I found frustrating but with the backdrop of the rest of her character and life events, this mentality became understandable.
I felt that the inner dialogue of Jane was a very realistic birds eye view into mental health issues of any kind. Also, as a mental health practitioner myself, I found the treatment and interactions she experienced from professionals to be pretty much spot on. As such, these areas of the book could well be helpful for others – including detailing the resetting of positive thought pathways, journaling and the slowing down of the thought processes to challenge critical inner dialogue.
Overall it is a book about recovery and the journey she must attempt to get there. I felt the author had a strong intention to inform the reader; she basically took an issue deeply personal and relevant to her and wrapped a story around it. And you can feel that – that it comes from a deep well of personal experience. I suspect, as she hints at, at the start of the book, that it was painful to write, which is why she adds some softeners in there to help her and her readers cope – such as the fairytale family which many sufferers are not fortunate enough to have or the perfect circle of female friends or the handsome and deeply caring male nurse who is thrown in as a love interest.
Some readers have praised her for her gritty handling of the storyline but I’m afraid if it was me, I’d have gone much darker with it. Not everyone has a support network like that and any problems she suffered within that sphere were minor at best; not realistic. There always seemed to be someone there to coddle her or rescue her, which unfortunately is a rarity for most in life.
It is certainly a book I would recommend, regardless of the difficult subject. It is not flowery in its writing style or descriptors; for a New York Times bestselling author there were formatting and spelling errors more often than one would expect too. But it is the way she gets under your skin with it that makes it glow. There is not a single surprise in the plot anywhere. Nothing juicy. It’s just a straight forward ‘I’m gonna rip your heart out and make you buy a new box of kleenex’ story.
Frankly, I’m keeping it in my library for a rainy day and when I need to remember other people have problems too and that words need to be wielded carefully. But for now, I will need something lighter to follow that up. If you have any recommendations for such a read or a book you would like to see me review, then shoot me an email or add a comment below.
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