I have been reading Crystal Renn's book,
Hungry and I am in love with it. Aside from my unhealthy penchant for books about eating disorders, I'm beginning to enjoy the end of the book in which she gets better. I haven't finished it yet, but Renn makes a multitude of excellent points about the stigma surrounding the modelling industry, the facts and myths of eating disorders, and ties it all together with her clever sense of humor and heart wrenching stories of her personal experiences with the disease.
I have also read
Unbearable Lightness by Portia De Rossi and
Wasted by Marya Hornbacher. Reading
Unbearable Lightness made me feel level with Portia. Her descriptions of the painfully embarrassing moments that take place in everyday life make her seem friendly and real, and I felt a connection with her because of her open & honest writing about her eating disorder.
Marya's book is terrifying, yet fascinating. The thrilling plot aside, she is a brilliant writer! You can tell by her style of writing and beautiful language that she is wildly intelligent, but she also uses a fluid, tumbling stream of manic thoughts going through her head during her narrative.
I love books, don't you? :)
Next on the reading list...
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson,
The Best Little Girl in the World by Steven Levenkron,
Wasted by Marya Hornbacher, and
Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi. I've read them all before, but they're so good! I'm on an anorexia kick, I guess.
My Favorite Quotes:
"Dead girl walking,” the boys say in the halls.
“Tell us your secrets,” the girls whisper, one toilet to another.
I am that girl.
I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.
I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
-
Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson
“I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.”
-
Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
Lora and I started fighting over nothing. Well, not really over nothing. I was taking my shirt off, my back to
her.
“Max, let me see your back.” Her voice
was sharp. I had stopped changing in
front of her. I had slipped. “What?
No.” I pulled my pajama tops on
and went into the bathroom, locking the door.
“Max!” She banged on the door. “What the fuck is up with your back?”
“What are you talking about?” My hands ran their panicked course over the bones
of my back, my collarbones, my wrists, my knees.
“Max, you aren’t eating! Come out here!” I came out and stood in front of the mirror,
brushing my hair. It fell to the floor
in thin dark clouds. She stood at her
desk, banging things.
“You know, Max, this is, like, bullshit.”
I didn’t say anything. I looked
at myself sideways in the mirror. I was
thinner, but not thin enough yet.
“I mean, like, you could talk to someone about this, or something.” I got into bed and vigorously cracked open a
book.
“MAX,” she screamed. I looked up,
waiting.
“Fuck you,” she said. “I mean, about
this. Just fuck you.” She slammed out of the room.
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
"Fat and Skinny had a race
All around the pillow-case
Fat fell down and broke her face
Skinny said, ha-ha, I won the race!"
-
The Best Little Girl in the World, Steven Levenkron
"It's 4:15am. It's time for my morning workout. I have exactly one hour to run and do sit-ups and leg lifts before I get in the car to drive forty-five minutes to the set for my 6:00am makeup call...As I slip out of bed and do deep lunges across the floor to the bathroom, I promise myself to cut my calorie intake in half to 150 for the day and take twenty laxatives...But i's not the weight gain from the six ounces of yogurt that worries me. It'sthe loss of self-control."
-Unbearable Lightness, Portia de Rossi
The one thing that can make her laugh these
days is how much she used to take things for granted. In the past, little hurts, like doing badly
in school, or getting dumped by a guy, really used to throw her. How was she to know what was lying in store
for her? She shakes her head at how foolish she used to be, getting upset
because her favorite dress got lost at the cleaners, or something equally
stupid.
