Biting Anorexia

I picked this book up for $1 at a remainder shop and boy, am I glad I didn’t pay much more.  It’s not that Lucy Howard-Taylor is a bad writer – I don’t think, truly, that she is – it’s just that this is a bad book.  There are parts where Lucy’s writing talent shines through – particularly in the poetry sections – but those are overshadowed by the inane teenage whinging and lack of real narrative cohesion.

“I am writing from the bedroom: my solitary life punctuated by annoying family members.  They just won’t leave me alone.”

The only reason I read the whole thing was because I wanted to review it – otherwise I probably would have stopped before I was even halfway through.

The first part of the book takes place when Lucy is in high school and is a series of short memories interspersed with diary entries.  Later at university she continues to provide diary-like entries.  Here is where I think Lucy really let herself down: by including diary entries from when she was a teenager.  A lot of girls keep a diary when they’re a teenager.  I had one too and let me tell you, it is very embarrassing and something I would hesitate to show my partner let alone have published.  I can understand that she wanted to show what it was like, what she was really thinking at the time, but a bit of distance and editing will come a long way.  As a teenager you obsess over stupid things, things that in the long run don’t matter.  We didn’t need to hear about all these things.  For instance, she falls in love with someone she meets over the internet, but this eventually fails – we aren’t exactly told why.  This little story didn’t add anything to the overall narrative, and the book probably would have been better if it was taken out.  There didn’t really seem to be any real ramifications – it was just something that was happening in her life at the time.

The fact that we weren’t really told what happened is another thing that irked me.  At once Lucy is open about her eating disorder and reveals very personal things about herself.  Yet at the same time, she guards her privacy.  The decision to reveal some things but not others is very frustrating.  For example, would it really matter if she told us the names of her friends? I don’t think so.  We can probably work out who they are from the names in the acknowledgements anyway.  How about using pseudonyms instead?  It gets very confusing reading A– did this and L– did that all the time.  It further contributes to the lack of characterisation and narrative.

If I met Lucy, I would probably suggest she read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.  She seems like a smart girl, and some of her poetry and prose is very beautiful, but she doesn’t know how to write a satisfying non-fiction piece.  I read Portia de Rossi’s Unbearable Lightness – also about anorexia – which is a much better work.  In de Rossi’s book, we get a sense at the end that the character has gone on a journey, and we are given reasons why.  Instead we are left to guess at Lucy’s motivations, and it’s never really explained what helped her to move on and what happens to her love interests.  For example, at the end of the book, Lucy gives advice to readers who have an eating disorder, yet merely two pages prior she is still going on about how she considers herself ‘a flob’ (which I guess means fat).  Further, during the last chapter I was still getting new information about the character and thinking, oh, so that’s how she helped herself recover.  Or, that’s interesting, she never mentioned walking around the block a million times.  The final chapter is not the place where one should be revealing new information about a character.  Because like it or not, Lucy is the character in her own book, and she has not given herself a proper character arch.

The poetry in the book is really the best part.  I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better had she written the entire narrative through poems.  She seems to be able to convey a lot more that way.  It would also enable her to keep her privacy without feeling like she’s divulging too much to the reader.

“The darkness is sulking.

I poke it with my pen.

It cringes and crawls into a corner

Leaving greasy grey footprints.

Letters cuddle the nib and glue as one

Into crooked meaning;

Lone words

That dissolve in leaden circles

Lob into shadow and seldom return.

But

Sometimes,

… they do

Another jab,

Another prod,

Another wheezing pink pit.

A stab in the back

A blinding fissure in black –

… I win.”

The rich, privileged girl (one from the north shore of Sydney who went to a private girls school and studied arts/law at Sydney University, mind you) with an eating disorder can’t really get any more clichéd. I found there were a few sections in the book that sound rather pretentious.  For example, having an author’s note at the back explaining that ‘anoretic’ is the proper noun is, to me, like assuming that the reader is dumber than she is.  Personally if I didn’t know what a word meant, I would probably look it up, but it’s almost here in a defensive manner – no, it’s not a typo, it’s the correct usage.  If she was worried about how she would look as a writer, that is the least of her worries.

I can only review this book from the perspective of somebody who isn’t a teenager with an eating disorder, so I cannot say whether it truly achieves its purpose: helping those with anorexia/bulimia to overcome their disorder.  I’d say the last few pages of the chapter ‘The Light’ is where it is most effective as she actually speaks about how she recovers.  It’s too bad she wasn’t able to intersperse this throughout the book.

Unfortunately, I probably wouldn’t recommend this book.  If I wanted to recommend a book about anorexia, I would suggest Portia de Rossi’s Unbearable Lightness.  If Lucy were to write a book on poetry, I suspect that it would be fantastic.