When she teases apart the structural underpinnings that prescribe gender, her analytical skills are breathtaking. When she lets those structures tumble and gives voice to the child raised in a spartan emotional wasteland, she broke my heart ... Moss goes back into a dark past to bring forth childhood memories. Setting that childhood voice free comes at a cost. A second voice, rendered in italics, constantly challenges her memories, berating her for making up stories. She alternates that vulnerability with her mature intellect, which sees that the literature she read to escape actually enforced British imperialism’s moral values of racial superiority, robust physical health and modest womanhood.
Not a pleasant read and it’s not meant to be. It is a memoir of mental illness, specifically anorexia, and it is an extraordinary record of that particular variety of spiritual, emotional, and physical torment ... Raises the question of why we read illness memoirs. In the best case, such an account increases our empathy for and appreciation of what people (perhaps we ourselves) go through.
