Wintergirls by Laurie Anderson
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The novel Wintergirls by Laurie Anderson strives to speak about how a teen girl named Lia had to make the attempt to hear the cries of others suffering in the hopes of removing her mental distress into external healing. Lia was struggling with anorexic disorder and cutting. She hates the pattern of her own behavior but is powerless to stop it. Her perceptions are hopelessly distorted and she starves herself to get rid of the repulsive largeness of her body that is visible to her eyes alone. It is only when her life is in critical danger that she finally comes to a realization that no amount of weight-loss will ever be enough for her and she was able to acknowledge the seriousness of her condition and seek help.
Lias anorexia is a condition that she alone sees. No one else sees her as fat or overweight, yet what she sees is a mass of largeness that must be destroyed. Her attempt at establishing a deceptive appearance hid any hint that there is something wrong with her. In fact, the only connection that Lia had in order to make emotional experience something external was with her former best friend, Cassie, who ends up passing away due to her own devilish being. The idea of anorexia is shown as one where an individual afflicted with “ghost with a beating heart”(Anderson, 196). The lack of external arbitration due to a lack of an unwillingness to care helps to further her obsession with weight-loss. The confession that she will never lose as much as she wants helps to begin the process of moving from the subjective into the matter of the external.
Lia was put into the center because she passed out while driving and hit the car in front of her, at ninety-three pounds. Cassie was in the car that day, but no one was killed. Lia even claimed that, “Cassie understood. She listened to everything that happened and she told me I was brave.”(Anderson, 28). “Four weeks later, the gates opened. Mom Dr. Marrigan drove me home to her house and we pretended none of it ever happened, except for the meal plans and the rules and the appointments and the scales and the hurricane of my mothers disappointment”(Anderson, 28). Lia would say this after she left the New Seasons Treatment Center, in which she referred is to as a “prison”(Anderson, 195). This text give the readers a glimpse that the story is about family as much as it is about anorexic disorders. Lias parents are divorced and her father is remarried to a woman with a nine-year-old daughter. Lia genuinely loves her step-sister and that her character arc because when she thinks she has no one there for her, she would turn to her little sister because she knows that she can be completely herself around her. The fact that she Lia goes to live with her dad helps her indulge in her anorexic behaviors. Although the story is in Lias first person narrative, the readers can pick up that the grown-ups showed love and tried their