Stick Figure
After happening upon the diary she kept when she was 11 years old, Gottlieb was moved to publish this chronicle of her struggle with anorexia nearly 20 years after she wrote it. In the late 1970s, she lived with her parents and brother in Beverly Hills, where Gottlieb's loneliness and concern about looking attractive to boys swiftly transformed into an obsession with dieting, although she had never been overweight. In her diary entries, she presents her father as a successful but emotionally withdrawn stockbroker, and her mother as a controlling airhead whose major concerns were her appearance and shopping. Gottlieb's parents became very alarmed, however, when their daughter, who believed that even smelling food would make her gain weight, kept refusing to eat. They took her to their family physician and then to a therapist who hospitalized her for several months when her condition continued to deteriorate. Though it is clear that Gottlieb, who is a regular contributor to Salon, has polished her childhood diary, her descriptions of preteen vulnerability and self-consciousness ring true--for example, when she recounts how, at lunchtime one day, her popularity skyrocketed because she could figure out a diet plan for every girl. In the context of the daunting (though unfootnoted) statistic Gottlieb cites, that ""50% of fourth grade girls in the United States diet, because they think they're too fat,"" her diary offers haunting evidence of what little progress we have made.
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4.5 stars
A lot of the negative reviews for this book seem to have somehow vastly missed the point. This is (as is made quite clear) the diary of the author, written at age 11, showing her childhood perspectives on and experiences of severe anorexia. Nothing more, nothing less, except for a brief concluding reflection written by the author as an adult. If you're expecting an adult-written memoir or a treatise on the causes and effects of eating disorders in Western societies, this is not the book you're searching for, although it certainly spotlights some leading contributing factors in no uncertain terms. That said, to me—someone who had similar experiences with childhood mental health issues, including an ED—this account absolutely rings familiar and true. If you're looking to learn about the development/mechanics/internal experience of an eating disorder, this is a good book to get you started.
A/N: Again, wanted to emphasize the fact that the writer is ELEVEN years old. Yes, the book presents a very black and white, sometimes simplistic depiction of things—her disorder, the cultural underpinnings and how she interpreted them, her family members, her treatment team and their care strategies—because that's how children, particularly mentally ill children, think and see the world. She does not go into much detail at all about actual treatments provided, other than dietary rules in the hospital, which means her account of her recovery might come across to some people as sudden or “just deciding to get better”. A little critical reading should make the reasons for this gap in coverage pretty obvious: she was an 11-year-old girl who didn't want to be there, didn't care about the therapies being promoted, and was writing a personal journal about the experiences she found memorable. This is a little girl's diary, not an academic exposition on how eating disorders work.
TL;DR: A child wrote this, and it's absurd to expect anything other than a child's—in this case, also a frequently unreliable narrator's—point of view.
