Seasons of Change

     In the novel Wintergirls, Anderson's portrayal of illness and nature combines to create a realistic interpretation of the struggle of anorexia. When Lia discovers that her best friend Cassie passed away, she holds guilt and presumes herself responsible, which spirals her illness out of control. Due to the competition that they were holding with themselves, she is obsessed with lowering her weight. The theme of nature is seen throughout the novel and in the flashbacks that Lia talks about. When they were kids and hanging out during the summer, she seemed happy and innocent and was unaware of her body until she hit puberty, “That was the summer I finally grew, after years of being smaller than everyone” (Anderson, 164). The summer lets her bloom into a teenager with unknown desires, but as the present is set in the winter, her feelings of herself have changed. While on a ski trip with Cassie, Lia and she made a pact to be wintergirls and to be the skinniest, “I took the knife out of my pocket and cut my palm just a little. ‘I swear to be the skinniest girl in school, skinnier than you’” (Anderson, 179). When winter comes, everything dies, and it stays cold. While Lia is dealing with the death of Cassie, she is also slowly dying mentally and physically. By pushing herself beyond her limits, she is no longer able to hold the mental ability to understand the damage that she is doing physically to her body. The theme of nature symbolizes how Lia is slowly dying like plants and insects in the winter, but as she recovers in the spring, she is able to “thaw” herself and begin to recover.  

My personal reactions to this novel were sympathetic because I have been in this situation before, but not to this extreme. I have gone through being obsessed with the scale and the sense of being proud of how little I would eat throughout the day. It even became a competition between friends. We would each brag about how little we ate and what we ate exactly. If you ate too much or something “unhealthy,” it was frowned upon and considered disgusting. When I was going through this phase, I thought that if my stomach hurt and was rumbling for food then I succeeded in my goal and that I would only be smaller because of it. This correlates back to Lia’s sense of control and wanting to become smaller in the process. While reading this novel, I saw a bit of myself in Lia’s ways, and it makes me sad that not only I went through that, but the millions of girls who are going through the exact same thing. I believe that body dysmorphia and eating disorders should be talked about more in a classroom setting so that students are made aware of the mental and physical impacts they can cause.