Going Hungry: Writers on Desire, Self-Denial, and Overcoming Anorexia Book

I am always leery of picking up first-hand accounts of experiences with disorders. I don't know why because I'm a qualitative researcher who does Participatory Action Research but hey, we're all full of contradictions right. Anyway, I decided to check this out. so many books about Anorexia are admiring the problem, or they're written at the start of recovery. It's often one person's story and I have a tendency to assume someone who has written a book is the arbiter of what it means to have X disorder. But this book is about recovery, and it has hard truths and lessons that aren't preachy or self-important. It's just people telling their truth and the reader can choose what to do with it.

Something that meant a lot to me about this book is that the authors range in age. Some of them (when the book was published) were still in university, others had long sense graduated. Through the sample, the book challenged the idea that Anorexia is ultimate First World Problem that privileged white girls just get. It showed that even though everyone's experience and origins are different, there are common threads, everyone in the book has anorexia.

I do want to bring up that this is the book that led me to say "Screw Diagnostic Criteria" because authors would point out that they "hadn't gotten scary thin", not all of them lost their periods for example or met the necessary weight percentage. And yet they still identified as anorexics. That's because the disorder is more than a set of check boxes, it's a label that can help people give voice and face to their experiences. And the authors are fearless, not shying away from even the darkest depths of the disorder. And in every story there's hope, like Pandora's box. Some people have the huge going to the hospital wake up calls, but for many it's a different experience. What stood out to me is how almost every person could point to a "small" act of decency or kindness from a loved one that broke through, and that is huge.

It's a collection of life stories and yes, there were some that were not as compelling to me as others, but not because of writing. Some stories were very emotionally intense for me so having stories that didn't leave me almost sobbing on the El was a welcome break. It would feel like coming up for air rather than something that made me disengage as a reader. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who wants to know more about the human face of Anorexia and develop something other than pity for those on that journey.