She’s living with her father and stepmother, having finally escaped from her Mom Dr. Being in her head is, I repeat, intensely unsettling and eye-opening.Īt the novel’s start, Lia has been released from treatment for the second time. She knows that she’s in a danger zone weight wise, that she’s hurt people before because of her poor nutrition, and that she craves food, but at the same time she still truly believes herself to be disgusting and fat even as she stares at her protruding ribs. What’s fascinating and intensely painful is the odd mixture of self-awareness and complete lack of self-knowledge Lia’s mental processes exhibit. Lia’s mental problems extend further than anorexia, which is a symptom of larger issues. Going into it, I thought Wintergirls was a novel about a girl with an eating disorder, which it is, but it’s also much more than that. It takes some time to adjust to, but, once you get there, the writing is such a beautiful chaos of pain, loneliness and little bits of hope. The narrative is frenetic, jumbled, nonsensical, messy, and rambling.
The first person perspective of Lia in Wintergirls particularly stands out. Some authors have essentially the same sort of characters over and over, but, for all that Anderson’s MCs (at least in the ones I’ve read) are white females, they’re quite disparate. I’ve read four and each one had such a unique narrative voice.
Laurie Halse Anderson is, without a doubt, one of my favorite authors, even if I did somewhat hate the experience of reading two of her books. At the same time, though, I’m so impressed by the strength of the sensations that Anderson can elicit in her fiction and I know that this intense discomfort I’m feeling is something she’s created and that she’s teaching me and expanding my understanding. They’re visceral and unpleasant and eye-opening. One of the other books that gave me this feeling was another Laurie Halse Anderson novel, Speak.
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