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6. Reading Eating Disorders
Writings on Bulimia and Anorexia as Confessions of American Culture
By Greta Olson
Published by Peter Lang, Frankfurt, Germany, 2003
300 pages, $84.95

Reviewed by WJC

This interesting (and expensive) book, published recently in Europe, begins with a poet's clever paraphrasing of Howl, directing Alan Ginsberg's lament towards eating disordered behaviour and the people who suffer from it.

Olson's notion is to show how novels, poems and literary autobiographies can reveal things about women's disordered approach to food and their bodies that are missed by medical, psychological and sociological texts. She examines the literary accounts as a method of reading American culture, and proposes that these accounts can tell us something unique about the experience of being a woman with a profoundly troubled relationship to food. By using language and employing imagery in a rich and unusual way, she tests paradigms of conventional thinking about eating disorders. The story form also makes the material more readable and accessible, thus heightening the public awareness of the plight of many young women.

She begins by tracing anorexia from the religious rites of dieting in the middle ages through the desired plumpness of the European courts to the fashion for thinness and disgust with obesity that dominates our culture to-day. Bulimia, a more recently recognized phenomenon, has a somewhat shorter history, but plays a large part in literary accounts nevertheless. Weight as a moral issue and the increasing rates of obesity in the past decade lead her to indict the aspects of the American economy that promotes calorie laden fast foods, diet products and exercise equipment in the same breath. She speaks from the perspective of an ex-patriot, born and brought up in the US, choosing to live and work in Europe.

She has an interesting perspective on the culture that has given rise to the cult of confessionalism. Vicarious pleasure in narratives about secret illnesses, behaviour or deviant bodily experiences has fuelled a host of books and TV shows, some of which function as vehicles for the proliferation of behaviour -- how to purge or conceal your emaciated form. She cites "Wasted" as the apotheosis of confessional writing, recognizing that Myra Hornbacher educates people to the pain suffered by eating disordered individuals and condemns society for cultivating the ideal of thinness.