THE SKINNY

In this memoir, a recovering anorexic tackles the topic of her eating disorder with levity and gravity.

Glick writes that when she was 11 years old, her mother told her that she “looked fat from the front,” so her mom decided to limit the number of sweets Glick ate to one per day and made disparaging comments about her weight and appearance; the author describes her family as “looks and weight-obsessed.” When she lost weight in the sixth grade, the effusive positive attention she received from her parents influenced her life going forward, leading to a preoccupation with calorie-counting and constant exercising. She was eventually hospitalized for anorexia. Throughout, the author—an attorney and mother of three—shows herself to be a skilled writer who chronicles her struggles with her eating disorder with seriousness, but also humor: “If there’s one thing I care about as much as being thin (or not-fat), it’s being funny,” she writes at one point. “In fact, I think I care more about funny.” For instance, when she notes that she made friends at the hospital and realized she wasn’t alone in her illness, she writes, “If hanging out in the smoking room at age fifteen with three other anorexic teenagers and a cute guy who may or may not be in need of heart surgery isn’t the pinnacle of teenage fun and freedom, I don’t know what is.” At the same time, she doesn’t play down the more difficult aspects of that environment, such as that if she failed to gain a certain amount of weight each day, her possessions were temporarily taken away, and her bed—with her in it, wearing a hospital gown—would be wheeled into the hallway. Glick worked to change her food-restricting and over-exercising behaviors and saw herself as recovered, only to realize years later that it was quasi-recovery—and she effectively shows how she became more comfortable with the idea that vigilance is needed to prevent slipping into old behaviors.

A pithy and often profound look at one woman’s experience with mental illness.