The Girls Who Do Not Eat: Food, Hunger, and Thinness in Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls

Somewhere along the line I’d lost the will not to eat.

Partly I wouldn’t be good old Daisy if I didn’t get my appetite back just when everyone else in the world was learning how to starve, and partly the idea of wanting to be thin in a world full of people dying from lack of food struck even me as stupid.

—Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now (159)

I would never be popular. I didn’t want to be; I like being shy. I’d never be the smartest or the hottest or the happiest. By eighth grade, you start to figure out your limits. But there was one thing I was really good at.

I took the knife out of my pocket and cut my palm, just a little. “I swear to be the skinniest girl in school, skinnier than you.”

—Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls (179)

Studies in a range of disciplines in the social sciences suggest that anorexia, an eating disorder that has become an epidemic over the past few decades in what Alan Beardsworth and Teresa Keil term “prosperous Western societies” (177), occurs frequently among adolescent girls. When Susan Bordo began to explore this issue in the United States in the 1980s, she called the incidence of anorexia from 1945 on “dramatic,” adding that “[t]oday, in 1984, it is estimated that as many as one in every 200–250 women between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two suffer from anorexia” (140). Twenty years later, this incidence has not become less dramatic. As Sharman Apt Russell notes in Hunger: An Unnatural History, “according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, one in one hundred adolescent females in the United States” is anorexic (158). These girls, as Paula Marantz Cohen indicates, “usually come from intact middle- and upper-middle-class nuclear families” (125). One could assume that such girls come from conditions of sufficiency, at least in terms of food supply, yet these studies suggest that girls going through a crucial stage of their lives starve themselves voluntarily amid societal pressures to be thin.

In literary studies, scholars have examined how anorexia is portrayed and can be understood in literary works. For example, in Lilian R. Furst and Peter W. Graham’s anthology Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment, contributors investigate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works and shape their arguments around the idea that eating and non-eating are exercised as weapons when individuals are forced into a power struggle between self and society. In a 1988 article, Lynne Rosenthal explores suicide in young adult texts, one of which is Deborah Hautzig’s 1981 novel Second Star to the Right, in which a self-destructive female protagonist attempts suicide through dieting to the point of near-death, and suggests that dieting satisfies the protagonist’s “need to exert mastery over her life” (24). In her article entitled “Pleasure, Pain, and the Power of Being Thin,” Beth Younger shows how print texts published between 1975 and 1999 “valorize the contemporary ultra-thin standard of beauty” (46): “Just as magazines, television, and films perpetuate and reinforce an idealized standard of beauty, popular Young Adult literature of the last twenty-five years has often perpetuated an unrealistic beauty ideal” (54). Jennifer Miskec and Chris McGee compare portrayals of self-mutilation in earlier young adult novels with those in more recent ones and reveal “a shift away from depictions of cutting that are personal, internal, tied to a specific trauma, and involve self-punishment” (176). They note that recent young adult novels incorporate self-injury into the stories without defaulting to melodrama and “instead turn their gaze toward social constructions of gender and in particular toward what the body means in a given culture” (174). That is, self-injury “extends beyond the merely personal to the broadly social” (174). Although Miskec and McGee do not address the issue of anorexia directly, they read the protagonists’ behaviour as not simply an internal struggle...