Hello Everyone!
I had to review a book of prose for my Creative Writing class this semester and I chose to read Wintergirl by Laurie Halse Anderson. I know that this review is a little more academic than most of my reviews, but I thought that you all would still enjoy reading it.
Ever since I read Speak in my freshman year of high school, I have wanted to read another work by Laurie Halse Anderson. Speak honestly discussed themes like rape culture, mental health and the high school experience, and also served as my introduction to Laurie Halse Anderson’s haunting style of storytelling and the genre of realistic fiction. Since I would like to write a novel in the realistic fiction genre in the future, I thought it would be beneficial to read a work of realistic fiction as my book of prose. In addition, Wintergirls has been sitting on my bookshelf, unread, for a couple years and this assignment seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally read it. While I do believe that Wintergirls has a couple of significant flaws, the novel as a whole functions as an illuminating and unsettling look into the detrimental nature of eating disorders.
Personally, I have never suffered from an eating disorder. However, it was easy for me to understand Lia’s mindset. Specifically, it was easy to understand the difference between the thoughts of an individual with an eating disorder and the thoughts of the eating disorder itself. I attribute this ease of accessibility and understanding to Laurie Halse Anderson’s writing style. Anderson incorporates a wide variety of writing techniques in Wintergirls to immerse the reader into Lia’s ethos. One I found particularly interesting was the way in which Laurie Halse Anderson crosses out several of Lia’s thoughts. One passage of the novel which serves as a perfect example of this technique is from page 330. “My traitor fingers want that fudge. No, they don’t. They want a seven layer bar and some weird muffins and those pretzels. No, they do not. They want to squish the marshmallows and stuff them into my mouth. They will not.” Neither Anderson nor Lia ever explain the meaning behind these crossed out thoughts. It is very much up to the reader to decipher why certain thoughts are crossed out and others are not. To me, it seemed the crossed out thoughts depicted a fiery internal dialogue that was taking place between Lia and her disease. Lia is constantly filtering through her thoughts and it seemed as thought all of the thoughts that she crosses out are thoughts that she refuses to acknowledge. Instead, her “stronger self,” the part of her brain that is consumed by her eating disorder, forces her to make different choices. Only when Lia starts down her road to recovery at the end of the book do the crossed out lines disappear. I believe this is because Lia is no longer fighting against herself. The way in which Anderson utilizes the strikethrough made it very clear to me that Lia was fighting an internal battle against herself and the progression of her eating disorder.
It would have been easy to simply demonstrate to the audience how Lia is fighting against herself. However, Anderson makes it clear the internal war waged is also against food and her weight. To illustrate this aspect of Lia’s eating disorder, Anderson chooses to label the calories of every food that Lia eats throughout the novel. For example, rather than having Lia say she ate some lettuce, a couple of tablespoons of salsa, a hard boiled egg white and topped her lunch off with a diet soda, Anderson writes, “I eat in my car: diet soda (0) + lettuce (15) + 8 tablespoons of salsa (40) + hard boiled egg white (16) = lunch (71).’ I thought these choices demonstrated the control aspect of Lia’s disease. In the novel, Lia begins to control her calorie intake as a way to cope with her parents divorce and lack of presence in her life. By counting her calories and withholding food, Lia is able to control at least one aspect of her environment, which is comforting to her. These choices were visually and textually interesting. Visually, they grab the reader’s attention first. It was almost impossible for me to read a page without my eyes skipping to the numbers on the page. Contextually, these writing choices break up the flow of the words on the page and effectively mimic the constant and inescapable nature of Lia’s eating disorder and the obsessive thoughts associated with it.
Uniquely, it seemed to me that Laurie Halse Anderson went a step further and personified Lia’s eating disorder in the form of Lia’s deceased ex-best friend, Cassie. When Cassie and Lia are young they form a dangerous camaraderie because of their desire to be the thinnest girls in school. They want to be wintergirls, what you are when, “you’re not dead, but you’re not alive either. You’re a wintergirl.” Cassie dies trying to be a wintergirl. Her esophagus ruptures one night when she is alone in a motel room after she drinks too much and binges too hard. Now Cassie haunts Lia, pushing her closer to her dangerous weight and death. Anderson crafts Cassie’s dialogue to echo what Lia is saying to herself. The best example of this is when Cassie says to Lia, “You’re not skinny. You’re a pus-filled whale. Your mom wishes she had given you up for adoption. Your dad secretly thinks you’re not really his kid. People laugh at you when your fat jiggles. You're ugly. You’re stupid. You’re boring. The only thing you’re good at is starving, but you can’t even do that right. You’re a waste.” In addition, Cassie’s presence throughout the book is unnerving and abrupt. She manages to appear everywhere from Lia’s bedroom to her psychiatrist's office. Cassie’s presence is also associated with the smell of Christmas cookies. Although the smell is reminiscent of Cassie’s sickly sweet personality, it is also proof that Lia associates her presence with something happy and non threatening, even though Cassie is toxic to Lia. Lia’s eating disorder functions in a similar way. Even though Lia’s eating disorder is detrimental, Lia associates it with strength and happiness. While not unrealistic, Lia’s association between starvation and strength was deeply troubling to me as a reader. However, it would be disconcerting if I wasn’t troubled.
Despite Anderson’s masterful portrayal of Lia’s struggle with her mental health and her anorexia, I did have several major problems with the novel. First, I feel Anderson embraced stereotypes when creating the characters of Lia and Cassie. Lia is suffering from the aftermath of her parent’s divorce, was once heavily involved in school activities and was set to go to an Ivy League school of her choice. Cassie is also heavily involved in her school, actively working to fit into every classic high school clique to cover the fact that she has a equally failing self-esteem shrouded by bulimia. I am not saying that the world doesn’t have several Cassies and Lias in it that are suffering from eating disorders and struggling with their mental health. However, I would like to argue that Laurie Halse Anderson should have included a different perspective than that of a middle to upper class, white, suburban high school student with the world at their disposal. I also found Lia to be a flat and relatively static protagonist. Although Anderson provides Lia with a backstory the reader can empathize with to a certain degree, the audience doesn’t know too much about Lia sans eating disorder. I also refuse to accept the few flashbacks that we get of Lia as a child as sufficient proof that she is a dynamic character. While Lia does make commendable and monumental steps forward in her recovery at the end of the book, her transformation felt rushed. It was almost as if Anderson realized she was about to exceed her page count without reaching her end goal and proceeded to cram all of Lia’s metamorphosis into the last twenty pages of an almost three hundred page novel. Rather than having Lia come full circle in the last sixteenth of the novel, I would liked have to seen her gradually thaw out from her wintergirl state. To make this change, Anderson would have to eliminate the pseudo love story that tries to weave itself into the plot in the form of Elijah. Elijah was Anderson’s weakest character in Wintergirls and provided nothing to improve the story. Instead, he comes off as a momentarily sympathetic hipster with dreams that hinge on lying, leading a girl on, and then stealing her entire life savings. Elijah is proof that even a work that is skillfully written by a notable author and incredibly impactful can still have flaws.
It is difficult to say that Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson is a good book. Wintergirls is an incredibly terrifying and unnerving novel. Several times, over the course of my reading, I wanted to put it down and never come back to it. Lia’s psyche was self destructive and unsettling. However, I do believe that Wintergirls accurately represents the dark and twisted reality of someone suffering from an eating disorder. In addition, the fact that a book about mental health has been treated with so much critical acclaim and was published at all is remarkable. Even though I will probably never read Wintergirls again, I would suggest it to those looking to gain insight into the behavior and distorted thought patterns of someone struggling with an eating disorder.
Hope you all enjoyed this review! I am hoping to start making blog posts two times a week. I am definitely looking forward focusing on the blog again.
-Jaime