In a review of Kelsey Osgood’s memoir How to Disappear Completely, Alice Gregory continues the conversation about how to discuss anorexia without unintentionally glamorizing the disorder:
When it comes to writing about anorexia, the only truly radical move, as far as I can tell, would be to show clearly just how profoundly boring it is—not sad or prurient or overdetermined. The very premise is an unappealing one: we’d like to believe that such unhinged myopia would have psychological roots in trauma or in some sinister personal history, but usually it doesn’t. “If you can starve with some consistency, all you need is two weeks,” Osgood writes. Her point is that anorexia is often little more than a kind of self-inflicted tautology: the act of starving is what allows you to starve. It’s true, but a voluntarily isolated person choosing not to eat until she’s addicted to not eating doesn’t make for a very good story.
I don’t know what a deliberately boring book about anorexia would look like. The closest Osgood gets is when she writes, “I used to sit in trigonometry class and calculate my intake obsessively in the margins of my notebook, each time coming up with the same answer, each time dismissing my mathematics as unreliable.” That is a much more accurate description of the disease than anything involving clavicles or frozen yogurt or sexual abuse or the fear of feeding tubes. If we really wanted to protect our supposedly susceptible youth, we’d paint anorexics as they are: slowly suicidal obsessives who avoid other people and expend ninety-five per cent of their mental energy counting the calories in green vegetables. We wouldn’t see them as worth reading about at all.
Previous Dish on the subject here.
The Dish 