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Reading Eating Disorders

REVIEWS

"In contrast to earlier studies such as Maud Ellmann's The Hunger Artists and Leslie Heywood's Dedication to Hunger, Olson proposes a more far-reaching study of poetry, prose, and their cultural contexts. The three key texts here are book-length memoirs coupling the narrative search for selfhood with protocols of life-threatening anorexia: Jenefer Shute's confessional novel Life-Size (1992), Stephanie Grant's memoir The Passion of Alice (1995), and Marya Hornbacher's semi-fictional 1998 memoir Wasted (which, in contrast to the other works, also chronicles bulimia). In addition to these book-length accounts of relatively high cultural visibility, Olson explores poems by various authors as well as the often anonymous textual production stimulated and made available by the Internet. Some of the poems the author found online do not exactly qualify as literary masterpieces (e.g., one of them semi-rhymes the lines "thin as a rib / I turn to sleep" [44]). Yet it is precisely the improvisational character of these texts that allows their readers to gauge the deep linkage between disordered eating and the desire for self-expression. […]
In the subculture of eating disorders, literary texts play the powerful role they seem to have lost in the larger culture. At some clinics treating eating disorders, the books Olson discusses are banned. Hornbacher's Wasted could be read simply for the variety of tips on how to vomit silently, how to "eat one hundred calories per day and eat so slowly that one is to busy to eat anything more," and how to spit out food after chewing to acquire "the sense of having eaten" (263).
While respecting her texts as victims' stories, Olson struggles with their narrators. To them, she laments, "identity represents the digits on the scale, […] the shape of the thigh, and the amount of flesh that can be pinched between the forefinger and thumb" (284). In other words: these works do not depart from the fetishization of the slender feminine body in American culture. They perpetuate "cultural scripts that equate women with somatic experience and physical weakness" (284). It might not even be necessary to evoke a Foucauldian reading here and thus an analysis of the ways in which these confessions help classify the deviant and support institutions of control and correction. Kafka's Hungerkünstler, frequently evoked by Olson, seems the more relevant model. The authors of anorexia narratives perform emaciation for an audience; and they never make it entirely clear whether they would prefer the sympathy reserved for victims or the admiration lavished on the marvelously thin.
Reading Eating Disorders responds to this ambivalence with a finely tuned methodological apparatus—joining cultural studies, the history of medicine, and a close reading approach that is careful not to reduce the literary documents to simple mirrors of cultural and social debates. In fact, Olson demonstrates how that reliable, seemingly innocent metaphor itself is transformed in the eating disorders discourse. Mirrors are "cruel witnesses" here, supplying the narrators of memoirs and the speakers of poems "with a means of measuring their worth" (279). Mirrors appear in textual universes otherwise dominated by elements of the Gothic, the atmosphere of powerlessness and obsession, and the setting of the total institution. What is seen in the mirror, this study argues, is always already tied into a tale. It is either an account of the emaciated body as a "perfect artistic creation"—or a story of the body as a "horrifying fat monster" (165). By rigorously analyzing these tales, Great Olson demonstrates where her project is really located: less in the world of calories and confessions than at the very nexus of narrative and vulnerable self."
— Christoph Ribbat for Amerikastudien/American Studies, Vol. 50, No. 4 (2005): 661-662.


"This book is a unique attempt to understand literary and autobiographical accounts on eating disorders from a cultural perspective. It is respectful of the extensive scientific literature on eating disorders, and yet it addresses previous literary theory accounts, such as those of Ellmann and Heywood, as well as broader issues in literary theory."
— Richard Gordon, Ph.D., author, Anorexia and Bulimia: Anatomy of a Social Epidemic

"Olson's notion is to show how novels, poems and literary autobiographies can reveal things about women's disordered approach to food and their bodies that are missed by medical, psychological and sociological texts. She examines the literary accounts as a method of reading American culture, and proposes that these accounts can tell us something unique about the experience of being a woman with a profoundly troubled relationship to food. By using language and employing imagery in a rich and unusual way, she tests paradigms of conventional thinking about eating disorders. The story form also makes the material more readable and accessible, thus heightening the public awareness of the plight of many young women. […] She has an interesting perspective on the culture that has given rise to the cult of confessionalism. Vicarious pleasure in narratives about secret illnesses, behaviour or deviant bodily experiences has fuelled a host of books and TV shows, some of which function as vehicles for the proliferation of behaviour -- how to purge or conceal your emaciated form."

— "WJC" for Sheena's Place, Flushed (Spring/ Summer 2005, Issue 8)

"Der "as." zeichnende Rezensent zeigt sich recht interessiert an Greta Olsons Studie über literarische Selbstzeugnisse von Menschen, die an Anorexie beziehungsweise Bulimie leiden. Wie er ausführt, analysiert die Autorin einige Gedichte und drei Romane einerseits im Blick auf die gesellschaftlichen Ursachen der Essstörungen, betrachtet sie anderseits aber auch in der Tradition der seit Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton und Sylvia Plath gepflegten "Bekenntnisliteratur" als Texte mit explizit literarischer Dimension. Zwar geht die Studie nach Einschätzung des Rezensenten hinsichtlich der Ursachenforschung nicht wesentlich über das hinaus, was die Fachliteratur zu diesem Thema bereits hervorgebracht hat. Die Auseinandersetzung mit den drei unterschiedlichen Romanen findet er dennoch ausnehmend "ergiebig". Er weist insbesondere auf die auch von der Autorin betonte Ambivalenz solcher Zeugnisse hin: "Sie können - auch - als eigentliche Lehrbücher für essgestörte Praktiken studiert werden, und es gelingt den Verfasserinnen meist nicht, die obsessive Fixierung auf das eigene Körperbild zu überwinden."

— Rezensionen - Neue Zürcher Zeitung vom 21.06.2003

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