Starvation

I received an advanced reader copy of Starvation for review from the author, Molly Fennig. As this book is about an eating disorder, please be aware that the contents may be triggering for some. There is a lengthy trigger warning at the front of the book as well, but I thought I would add one too, just to be sure, for disordered eating and for suicide. I would also like to clarify that I am not an eating disorder survivor, and therefore my opinion about how well this book handles sensitive discussions on disordered eating is to be taken in with that caveat.

Starvation follows Wes, a teenage wrestler whose introduction to disordered eating comes from his ballet dancer girlfriend, Caila, who is also battling an eating disorder of her own. He knows what Caila is doing is unhealthy, but decides to employ some of her strategies to get himself into a lower weight class, thereby starting off a series of increasingly dangerous habits of disordered eating. Some negative reviews of this book note that it is heavy handed with its messaging and piles on depictions of trauma unnecessarily. I agree to some extent, but I would argue the messaging is direct rather than heavy handed. The reader can be absolutely sure by the end of this book that eating disorders are not to be messed with, given how they destroy your mental, physical, and financial health – extremely important, in my opinion, since eating disorders are so often dismissed as the vanity projects of upper middle-class white teenage girls. An eating disorder can affect anyone at any stage of their life.

Fennig also addresses society's misconceptions about eating disorders head on. The protagonist is a "healthy," sporty, boy. Wes' father initially sees Wes' disordered eating habits as "healthy," and "ambition," in service of his wrestling. When Wes is in recovery from his eating disorder, his father gets increasingly annoyed that Wes finds it physically difficult to eat. Eating disorders are a psychological illness, and therefore the cure cannot be simply to "just eat," as Wes' father intones.

The addition of suicide(s) in this book was a surprise to me, and I wonder if it was necessary. However, eating disorders do come with psychological stressors, and suicidal ideation can accompany them. Despite a lot of dark discussions, there are several passages in Starvation that are light, funny, and hopeful, so I would not count this book an eating disorder version of A Little Life. As of yet, I do not know anyone else who has read this book, so I would love to talk to you if you have!

To close, I would like to include the final paragraph of Starvation (not a spoiler):

“This isn’t a love story. A fantasy. A fairy tale. But this is my life. And I don’t know how my story ends, and maybe that’s part of the beauty of it. Maybe I get a happy ending. Recover from my eating disorder, even if I will never have a different relationship with food. But maybe I won’t. Many of us don’t, you know. Many of us don’t even get to tell our story.”

For more information about eating disorders, you can listen to this episode of the Maintenance Phase podcast, and read Appetite: Sex, Touch, and Desire in Women with Anorexia by Dr. Melissa Fabello and Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself by Chloe Angyal.