PICKY

A young woman struggles to overcome her fraught relationship with food in Kinn’s debut novel.

Apples, carrots, bread, chicken, cereal, granola bars, milk, peanut butter, potatoes, and rice: These are the only 10 foods that Zillah Scriven will eat. Her extreme pickiness is one of several attributes that make the 23-year-old Zillah feel like a child. She’s also only five feet tall and still lives at home with her mother, Paula, whose obsession with safety causes her to indulge her daughter’s dietary restrictions, much to the chagrin of nutritionists and Zillah’s absent father. Zillah is slowly working her way through college—her fear of using public bathrooms limits how many classes she can take per day—but she’s hoping to land an internship and move in with her boyfriend, Cliff. One day, while sitting in her bedroom, Zillah hears a sentiment, spoken in the next apartment, that closely matches her own: “My life revolves around fear and the fear keeps me stuck here at home.…I want my adult life to begin.” She realizes that she’s listening to a neighbor’s conversation with her therapist. Zillah begins to regularly eavesdrop on these therapy sessions, soon learning that the stranger is an agoraphobe who hasn’t left her apartment in months. Zillah begins to recognize that she shares several anxious tendencies with this woman and even wonders aloud about seeing a therapist herself, although Paula quickly shuts down the idea: It’s “called ‘being an adult,’ and you don’t need to pay some therapist to do it for you.” When Zillah unexpectedly befriends her mysterious neighbor—a woman named Lise—she begins to explore the reasons for her own diet and how they’ve been keeping her from living the life she wants.

Kinn brings Zillah to life with an idiosyncratic narrative voice, capturing the revulsion and neuroses that dominate her life. Here, for instance, Zillah describes the horror of eating a strawberry: “I imagine the slippery spatter and viscera in my mouth. Invading my throat. Choking me. Leaving a taste I won’t be able to get rid of…My stomach tightens like I’ve drunk from a cup of dirty paintbrush water. It flows through me, turning me to brackish yuck.” Kinn is a clinical psychologist and takes pains to accurately portray the condition known as ARFID (avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder) as well as the treatment strategy ERP (exposure and response prevention therapy), which uses lighthearted activities and games to help patients confront their problems. The novel often feels like an enactment of such therapy, placing readers convincingly in the position of Zillah in order to move them toward a state of understanding and catharsis. The book explores the protagonist’s realization that her intense pickiness isn’t pickiness at all, but a peculiar regimen forced upon her—the result of a family history that she knows nothing about. Although the book lacks some of the sharpness that one might expect in a literary novel, the reading experience is nonetheless transformative.

An insightful work about the mental obstacles that can stand between people and the lives they wish to lead.