To all my Wintergirls

By -

 


    Wintergirls was, not only, a tough book to read, but its' topic is a tough topic to talk about. When thinking about the topic of eating disorders, I only ever thought about either starving yourself or binge eating then throwing up. I never think about all of the effort and small details that goes into having an eating disorder. Calorie counting is one example. To be able to know the amount of calories in all these different foods and being able to rattle it off and add them up in an instant is insane to me. It really seems like so much more work would go into having a major eating disorder. The things that come with some people having eating disorders is also hard to talk about because things like cutting, in Lia's case, and also depression are things that are tough on their own but, to add them to having an eating disorder would just be that much harder to manage and deal with. I will say that this book, if approached in the right way, could be extremely useful to high school students because high school, in many cases, is where eating disorders, depression, etc. is likely to come about, and for them to have knowledge and an ending that shows progression of getting better is something that could really help students in many ways when starting to deal with these types of things. 

Comments

  1. Abby MardisNovember 15, 2021 at 8:25 AM

    Hey, I like what you included about eating disorders going farther than jus starving or binging, because I think people forget about that a lot.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Growing Pains - The Symbolism of the Tree in Speak

By -
I have felt the paralyzing pain of internal disease. The kind of trauma that causes your mouth to curl in and swallow you whole. I, like so many other women, are walking the halls in Melinda’s shoes in “Speak.” I thought Laurie Anderson did a phenomenal job of twisting all of the tribulations a high school girl goes through, into the tree that Melinda is. Whether we’re as strong as an oak or weak as a bush, we have all gone through the disease that strikes Melinda from the inside out. Melinda is like a half-dead tree. Some parts of her strive to blossom and create beauty. Other parts are broken and diseased. Like a dead tree, Melinda needs to save herself and “cut off the damage, [so it] is possible for the tree to grow again” (187). The symbolism of a tree is significant in “Speak.” Trees reflect her growing process. In the beginning, Melinda is a sick and lifeless tree. Her view is negative and dark. She’s so far past repair, bursts of sunlight do her no good. Sunlight would be pe...
Read more

How Starr Goes from Acting to Embracing in The Hate U Give

By -
In The Hate U Give, Starr Carter is caught between two worlds. She lives in a predominantly black neighborhood, but her father sends her and her brothers to a private school where she is surrounded by white people. She talks about acting differently depending on what group she is around, which can create some identity problems. She says on page 11, "Funny how it works with white kids though. It's dope to be black until it's hard to be black." When at Williamson, she sees white kids that think it's cool to engage in black culture, but she knows they don't understand what she goes through in her Garden Heights community. She witnessed her friend Natasha's death when she was 10 years old, and she sees gang activity in her community all the time. When she is among her black friends, like at the party, they tease her for hanging out with the white kids. This reminds me of a Drake song where he says, "I used to get teased for being black, and now I'm...
Read more

Postmodernism in Curious Incident

By -
Before I start writing, I first want to acknowledge that I just really loved this book! It seemed like a lot of the class had trouble enjoying or appreciating the novel because it's so different stylistically, which is understandable, but all of those unique elements helped make the novel more authentic. The main topic I want to focus on (also what I'm writing my paper on) is how a lot of postmodernist elements were used in the novel to make Christopher come to life. While obviously not every postmodern novel is about an autistic kid, I think Haddon really used a lot of these elements to his advantage and they ended up working out really well to characterize Christopher. One of the major postmodern elements which helps this book really craft an authentic portrayal of autism is the fact that it's metafictive. Basically, this means it's a "story within a story." Readers would be extremely limited just reading the parts of the novel which are meant to be C...
Read more