Category: Why Should Your Parents Have All the Fun?

This compelling biography reads like a novel. Marya paints a chilling portrait of how bulimia and anorexia took over her teen years, and how she still struggles with her eating disorder, even today. Dragging the reader through her highest highs (a great political internship in Washington D.C.) and her weight dropped to 76 pounds) Marya gives you the inside scoop on what eating disorders are really like — and it’s no runway model’s life! But the part that really sticks is when Marya discusses, without a trace of self-pity, how ravaged her body and heart are from the disease, and how many years anorexia has taken off her life. (She’s only 23 years old, but strangers guessing her age think she’s 36) A haunting book that will stay with you for days.

Billie is fifteen and out of control. She’s torn between wanting to be like her best friend, a rambunctious, big-haired sexy siren, and her sister Cassie, a cool blond with perfect study habits. Besides trying to appease her uptight, controlling father and managing her new relationship with the coolest guy in school, Billie is frozen with fear over her upcoming PSAT’s. Then, to make matters worse, she begins to overhear disturbing phone conversations between her parents and her perfect sister, who is away at college. When her sister comes home for Thanksgiving weighing next to nothing and wearing the same old sweatpants for days at a time, only Billie seems to notice that something is not right. Their parents stubbornly refuse to believe that anything is wrong as Cassie slowly begins to erase herself from the family. Can Billie make them see that Cassie is a victim of anorexia before its too late? While Cassie’s disease plays a part in this novel, it is ultimately Billie’s coming of age story as a “Jersey Girl”. A great novel that show how much family expectations can change our lives for the better or for the worse.

My Sister’s Bones, this novel is about a girl with a sister who has an eating disorder. But unlike Billie, Frannie(the narrator of Hunger Point) is about as obsessed with food as her anorexic sister Shelley. After Shelley is checked into a hospital for her disease, Frannie discovers her own self-destructive tendencies (dating guys that she calls “Rat Boys”) as she tries to understand why her sister won’t eat. With an uncommunicative father and a mother who obsessively diets and counts the calories on everyone’s plates at dinner, its easy to see where Frannie and Shelley have gotten such backward ideas about food, love and perfection. It’s only after a long depression following Shelley’s death that Frannie can learn to deal with her situation and come back out on top. A sad and funny novel about redemption.

Take a trip back to 1984. Alice has just checked into a eating disorder rehab after suffering a heart attack because she has been starving herself. She weighs only 92 pounds. Along the road to recovery, Alice meets some seriously oddball characters. There’s Gwen, an shy anorexic who also obsessively pulls out her fine blond hair; Louise, a compulsive eater who always asks to eat Alice’s leftovers at meals; and finally, Maeve, the big, beautiful bulimic who will shake up Alice’s world and make her finally face the person she really is, and the person she has the power to become. This novel is slow getting started, but well worth reading through to the end as you watch Alice gather together the pieces of her life and try to figure out how to go on after leaving the clinic for good.