Heavy stuff. It took a lot of effort to finish this book. Some passages were so bleak, the tone so dark, relief from the weight of the book through the inclusion of even a slightly lighter episode so nonexistent, that I often had to set it aside after only reading a few pages. A true depiction of the main character and her situation almost demands this set-up, though – this is, after all, a first person narrative of a twice-institutionalized teenage anorexic who is dealing with a fractured home life and horrific death of a bulimic former best friend. I ended up feeling proud of myself for sticking by the main character, Lia, through her explanation of the various messes of her life, such as the haunting after-life interactions with her dead friend, her guilt for not answering her friend’s phone calls on the night of her death, and her anxiety about her family finding out she still isn’t eating the amounts required after her last hospital stay. The writing is vivid and compelling in its way – Lia’s descriptions of food was sickly interesting because always, always, food was depicted as a relentless and cruel enemy. I was struck by one description in the first chapter, in which Lia, while putting a plate in the dishwasher she said that she wished she could fold herself into the dishwater, tuck herself between the plate and the utensils. I appreciated what Anderson was alluding to – Lia wanting to be even thinner, of course, but it being secondary to being “clean”, wiped free of her life and its disastrous arch toward more darkness and mess.
I guess, that after all was said and done, even after the rays of hope at the end of the story, I appreciated the book more than I liked it. I enjoyed Speak, another Laurie Halse Anderson book, more…though, like Wintergirls, I don’t know that “enjoyed” is quite the right word either!
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