Wintergirls Response

By -

 The issue of young people facing different eating disorders in today's society is tragic. I have a friend who faces this exact struggle, so the book was very hard to read. For that reason, I did not finish the book. 

However, what I did read was very well written - I can tell the author would have knocked the rest of the book out of the park. The topic of eating disorders is still pretty stigmatized in our culture and should be talked about more, in my opinion. 

Comments

  1. AngelNovember 9, 2022 at 6:41 PM

    I completely agree with your last sentence. There have been so many times where people took this thing as either a joke or a gateway into having "diet" conversations, not realizing how insensitive that is. There was even a coworker that would try to compare with me and see if she was close enough in body weight to me. Its like you want to scream that this is not a joke or a competition but you can't even convince yourself of that fact. There is also the issue of people having just one image of someone with this disorder. Even I wouldn't know how to approach this subject.

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    Replies
    1. Samantha ReinhardtNovember 13, 2022 at 8:19 PM

      I wish we could abolish commenting on other peoples' bodies, period. The comparison thing is awful--what the heck. I think a lot of people don't know how to react in conversations about EDs even though everyone knows they exist and are very prevalent. Even I have wondered about what to say to someone in that type of conversation.
      I got seriously ill last year and dropped a noticeable amount of weight and someone close to me told me that I "looked good" without even asking if I was okay or meant to lose weight! I just wish we as a society would stop commenting on it. Even when people mean well, they can reinforce the bad voices in someone's head.

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  2. Samantha ReinhardtNovember 13, 2022 at 8:26 PM

    Josh, I think everyone in their blog post mentioned they didn't finish the book. Except for Cam (I don't know if he finished it), that makes everyone in the class!
    If a group of gen Z college students struggle with this book so much, I can't imagine a classroom of nihilistic teenagers handling it much better.
    I know I should be able to see past my personal struggles and value a book for its "bigger picture" lesson, but this one is just so realistic and graphic I could not do that. If I was watching a movie depicting the scenes like what was in this book, I would turn it off immediately. I just couldn't get through it because of that.

    You mentioned you have a friend who struggles like Lia does. I have one as well who has landed herself in the hospital as a teenager by doing something similar to what Lia did to herself in the latter portion of the novel. She still battles with these problems every day. I think because I am very much a support system for someone like Lia in real life, reading Lia's story feels a little redundant for me personally.

    Because this class is, of course, about looking at different books for adolescents, I know that I should be reading with a more analytical lens and "detaching" myself a bit from the book. This just hit too close to home for me to be able to do that!

    I guess because I'm still "technically" in the "adolescent" brain development stage as I think most of us are, maybe that's a good enough excuse (lol). I will have a fully formed prefrontal cortex in two years, so maybe I'll revisit it then.

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