Lia and I are self-doubters.
We are our own worst enemy. We participate
in constant self-deprecation and spew mental vitriol at ourselves for not attaining
an impossible perfection. We are both,
in many ways, self-harmers.
The world, through our eyes, is made of many moving parts,
all of which are mostly tiring. You
leave pieces of yourself everywhere you go and with every person you meet. So where is the whole?
Lia: A teen damaged in some of the worst ways possible. She has been through trauma and lives
trauma. She hates herself. She hates the thought of being fat. She has anorexia nervosa which is honestly
just the tipping point of her troubles.
She is fueled by extreme guilt over the death of her friend Cassie who
she’d been estranged from for six months.
They were estranged because the people around Cassie told her that Lia
was a bad influence, when the truth was that the girls were really a bad
influence on each other, with Cassie influencing the most. Cassie’s last act before her death was an
attempt to reach out to her old friend.
In her desperation, she called Lia 33 times, leaving – I believe – just as
many messages. This final act haunts Lia
for a long time.
Lia doesn’t eat. She
measures calories and consumes only what is needed for bare bones survival. She develops an obsession with her caloric
intake and finds anything outside of that disgusting and shameful.
Lia lives in a complex world and has complex feelings and
relationships. She is real and she is a
force of nature. Reading through her
journey of self, unlocked some deep dark thoughts within myself. Though we are vastly different (a major
understatement) our deep sufferings essentially boil down to the same thing and
manifests in a similarly dark pattern. I
don’t have and have never had an eating disorder of any kind. I am a college age black male who has grown
up in the inner city. We could not be
more different and yet we are more alike than I care to admit. The darkness, the hate, the obsession; it’s
all there. It probably starts with
trauma such as the loss of a loved one or the loss of a childhood something that
clearly separates you from the “rest.”
You pound that distinction into your head for the rest of your life on a
daily basis. What makes you different,
makes you deeper, makes you darker, makes you more, makes you less. The loss lingers and manifests as sadness and
anger. The loss of a best friend or a
father, mother, uncle, or cousin; all can profoundly change you. When death surrounds you and couples with
that vague sense of the world being inherently shitty, of your own place being
sabotaged and a place of eternal suffering; Lia and I decided to obsess over
what we felt we could control which for her, was her weight and for me…well I’m
not ready to reveal that just yet.
Lia is a beautiful character and
Wintergirls is a beautiful book in just about every way even though it has an ugly
truth to tell. I admit that I didn’t
initially like it and felt Lia was annoying and too cryptic the first few
chapters but that’s a surface issue. Once
I got to the substance I couldn’t dare stop getting to know Lia and hoping for
her safe return from her darkness. Thank
you Laurie Halse Anderson! I have been
touched by this magnificent work.
