Lily and Rose are twins. Thin Girls starts when they are in their early twenties, with Rose living in an in-patient eating disorders program. She has been there a year, because she has found a way to keep herself at her weight, eating just enough to stay steady, but never putting on any weight. She wants to recover, but she also wants to avoid food. She has been longer than any other girl, and she knows all the tricks to avoid eating, despite the supervised meals and the daily weighings. It helps that it is not a well-run facility, and some of the residents have chosen it because it has a reputation for being ineffective. Rose narrates her experience, and the exercises that the counselors get the residents to do seem ridiculous. The book starts off with “pre-eating” exercises where they have to pretend to eat. In the dining hall, Rose sticks food to her body and throws it out after she leaves. For weighings, she adds weights to her hair to be recorded as heavier than she is. It’s hard to imagine that staff at these facilities would not be familiar with such ruses, but it does make clear how intent the residents are on defying the healthy goes of the program, and how good they are at deception. 

Rose goes back in time, setting out the story of her and her sister. Initially the only difference between them was a mole that Lily had, which annoyed Rose when she was a girl so much that she tried to cut it off when Lily was sleeping. But once they get to be preteens, one of the popular but mean girls at school commands the other girls to try a diet. Rose does it, and sticks with it long after the other girls have moved on. So the difference in weight between Rose and Lily starts. Gradually Rose becomes the thin one and Lily eats the food that Rose leaves, so she gains. Their parents’ marriage crumbles and their mother leaves home. Their father is an alcoholic who can’t cope with life. They have no real supervision. Both sisters have an unhealthy relationship with food. While Rose starves herself, Lily becomes obese. But Rose is the one who ends up in a facility. Lily has a string of bad boyfriends, while Rose has none. Rose falls in with a group of girls who prize being very thin, and this reinforces her behavior. Each of the chapters about the past starts off with the year and the respective weights of Rose and Lily, and it is clear that the two are related and complementary. Roses weight goes down as Lily’s goes up.

Ultimately, both sisters help each other to solve their respective problems, after placing themselves in positions of great danger. Both of them have bad judgment in some crucial areas, and need help in expressing themselves in order to improve their relationship with food. Other characters with eating disorders die. The story is always clear about how serious eating disorders are. Thin Girls also has a fair amount of sex. If it is for young adults, they need to be readers who are ready to grapple with some very mature themes. It might not be a great book for readers who themselves have eating disorders, since there’s plenty here that could be triggering of dysfunctional behavior, especially with its many tips on how to get away with not consuming calories. 

The virtue of Thin Girls is that it provides insight not only into the distorted thinking process behind some anorexia, but also the difficulty facing those who try to address that thinking and who try to change the behavior. Its portrayal of the Rose’s residential treatment facility is memorable — the ways that the residents encourage and help each other to defeat the treatment, the ineffective group therapy, the isolation from the rest of the world. Rose is a good narrator for the story, partly because she has a geeky side with a fascination for apparently random facts about the animal world and the eating habits of animals that provide a quirky perspective on her own behavior. 

The narration of the audiobook by Jayme Mattler is done well, making Rose a relatable character, which is not easy when she spends so much time engaging in self-defeating actions.

Christian Perring is editor of Metapsychology. He lives in Suffolk County of Long Island, NY. He is Full Adjunct Professor at St John’s University, Vice President of AAPP and is an APPA Certified Philosophical Counselor.

Categories: Fiction, AudioBooks

Keywords: eating disorders, anorexia, fiction