_Wintergirls_ Response #2

After all of our talk in class about whether YA fiction is too dark, it was good for me to begin with a book that is pretty intense, dealing with two girls with eating disorders, major mental health issues, and self-harm through substance abuse and cutting.  It is hard to read, and Anderson doesn't offer any easy answers, as much as I may have wanted Lia to enjoy drinking hot chocolate with Elijah enough to choose that kind of life over the one she was living, for example, or decide that her stepsister Emma having a healthy body image was more important than her quest for thinness.  I read many dark and difficult books in my own adolescence, but it is harder now, as a teacher and a parent, to think about these issues that may someday affect my students and children.

One of the things that caught my attention in this novel were the contradictions that were not emphasized as much as the strike-out ones but that are key to anorexia as a condition.  Lia knows she is and is proud to be the thinnest girl in the room at the memorial for Cassie at school; yet, her image of her body at New Seasons is grotesquely overweight.  She hides her thinness from her family under layers of clothing but she takes pride in her appearance as a sign of her strength.  She disapproves of her stepmother Jennifer's attempts to control her 9-year-old stepsister's diet, but doesn't identify the factors that contribute to her own negative body image.  Anderson does not attempt to explain these contradictions away.

Something that surprised me in the book was the way Cassie's ghost made it into Lia's meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Parker.  I think having the metaphorical ghost of a character who has died present in a narrative is a common enough thing that it really never occurred to me that Lia's hallucinations might be real and different from her other issues, not just a literary representation of her feelings of guilt about Cassie's death.  When she was talking to Dr. Parker about Cassie's ghost and about the other issues she had had since early adolescence, I began to wonder if she were really developing schizophrenia.  I don't feel like that prediction was confirmed at the end of the book, but that seemed to me to be where the diagnosis was headed.