Where the Monster Weights

A young woman narrates the story of her struggles with anorexia.

In her debut memoir, Weber describes her process of battling—and healing from—anorexia. The account begins when she and her twin brother, Corbin, left their home in Texas and moved with their family to Singapore. Corbin struggled to adjust, acting out and cutting himself. This took its toll on the entire family and left Weber feeling alienated and neglected. Psychologically fragile, she realized that being thin attracted the positive attention she craved. She developed an eating disorder, which slowly and insidiously subsumed her life. The process of acknowledging and managing her disease upended her life as she became an expert at hiding the extent of her starvation from her family and boyfriend; she repeatedly lied to her nutritionist about how much she was (and wasn’t) eating, straining her relationships until her health reached a crisis point. Weber has an important, frightening story to tell, and some of the details she shares are enlightening. For example, she describes the disorder as her “monster,” a voice that constantly undermined her and controlled her thoughts. The prose, however, drifts toward the distractingly florid, especially when describing Weber’s relationship with her boyfriend, Curtis: “I thought I caught a glimpse of a storm cloud on the horizon of our fairy tale’s powder blue skies.” Also distracting are some of the black-and-white photographs that Weber includes of herself and her friends and family; they seem superfluous and remove the reader from the flow of the narrative. The exceptions are the photos that show just how dangerously thin she became.

An affecting but uneven memoir of addiction and overcoming despair.