The Stone Girl (review)

Although Sethie gets straight As at her competitive girls' school in New York, she finds more satisfaction in smoking pot, having sex with Shaw, and keeping thin. When she meets one of Shaw's friends, Jane, the girls immediately bond, and Jane teaches Sethie to purge after eating, not realizing that Sethie has a bigger problem than the occasional pizza and chips binge. As Sethie's relationship with Shaw wanes, she steps up her efforts to lose weight, but when he comes clean about how he feels (or actually doesn't feel) about her, controlling her eating is all Sethie has left. The third-person narration is so densely focalized through Sethie's distorted view of things that it begins to feel claustrophobic; short, choppy sentences predominate, most of them starting with Sethie's name followed by a present tense verb, a style that becomes repetitive. Additionally, the lack of honest self-awareness and reflection renders Sethie's motivations a bit fuzzy: for a smart girl who craves control, she's quick to indulge in drugs, lies, and unprotected sex, and there is no textual revelation of why she prefers to take refuge in delusions. Her decision to get help is a rather quick turnaround; seems all she needed was a good talking-to from a sensible friend and a finally concerned mother to snap out of it. While unlike other treatments of anorexia and bulimia, this nevertheless touches on what is likely a more ordinary experience of girls who tell themselves lies until the truth becomes too insistent.