I wrote it once before, and I will state it again here: anorexia does NOT pop up out of nowhere when someone wants to lose weight to impress a guy or after someone makes a remark in the sense of 'you could/should lose some weight'. Having a sister suffering from this terrible disorder, this is one subject I unwantingly got very educated on and I'm very serious about.
Anorexia starts with a deeply rooted problem: there is a lack of self-esteem, a sense of not belonging or not being normal, the need for control on something/anything and the believe that she is never good enough. Often, anorexics are very ambitious and perfectionists. The main character in this book is none of this all. Two people make a remark about her weight, making her decide to lose weight. She goes ahead and eventually loses control.
Like many novels, it starts with harmless dieting turning into calorie counting, vomiting after 'a bad day', laxatives because vomiting could alarm others, an intervention and then a remarkable road to recovery. This book is all that, and forgets about everything inbetween. Real anorexia, the full-blown eating disorder, also deals with extreme restlessness (more than just exercising, anorexics feel the need to ALWAYS move), hiding food, manipulating weighing moments and social isolation that goes beyond cancelling a dinner appointment. These things are all missing in this book.
Recovering from anorexia takes more than an intervention or a wake-up call. Professional help is needed, and a strong family and group of friends help, but an anorexic cannot recover alone. It takes active participation and motivation from them and they have to remind themselves every minute that life actually gets better when they eat and ignore the voice that tells them they are ugly and fat when they do eat. This book made it all seem so easy.
I would give the book zero stars if I could, because it portrayed such an unrealistic view of such a devastating disorder. There is nothing simple about anorexia, or recovering from it. The author claims the book is based on inteviews with anorexics. I don't know the quality of these interviews or how much of their experiences she's actually used for her novel, but somewhere Farkas is lacking. Did she filter out all the non-sensational stuff? I do understand that it must be difficult to understand for people who haven't experienced anorexia from up close, but maybe the author could have picked another subject to write about, instead of dumbing it down to something like this.
My sister is still fighting every day and I feel the need to read whatever I can on the subject, just to look for something, anything to teach me more on how else to help her. Reading this book was a waste of my time and it will be a waste of yours too if you do decide to give this a shot. There's much better literature out there on the subject of anorexia. I'll be happy to direct you to it, if you're interested.
~Zooey Iding