“Against the False Narratives of Anorexia”

Find at Slate an extended personal reflection by Katy Waldman concerning anorexia and its etiology, with a special focus on the role of literature and narrative. A few excerpts:

More fundamentally, though, anorexia is an inveterate liar whose grand theme is your identity. Because the channels through which it flows and acts are so often linguistic, the disorder has inspired a perverse literary tradition, replete with patron saints (Catherine of Siena, herself a twin, who recorded the details of her miraculous asceticism in letters she sent to aspiring female mystics), glamorous elders (Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath), tropes (fairies, snow), and devices (paradox, irony, the unreliable narrator). “Anorexic literature” commits the inherently literary, self-mythologizing qualities of anorexia to paper. From the novels of Charles Dickens to the poetry of Louise Glück, it contains and reproduces something more amoebic, perhaps more dangerous, than dieting tips: a specific persona and sensibility.

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We’ve long linked pathological thinness to profundity or poetic sensitivity. The roots of the romance go back to Catherine, who felt closer to God when she stopped eating and later, unable to consume food in spite of herself, considered her affliction holy. If excess flesh on a woman implied gluttony (a sin) or pregnancy (a shame), emaciation helped demonstrate the soul’s dominion over the body. Anorexia mirabilis—the saintly loss of appetite—signaled an embrace of Christ-like abnegation and suffering, or else a spirituality too pure to incline toward earthly pleasures.

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