Wintergirls

Note:  All of these posts are linked on the literature page as well.


WINTERGIRLS


Probably everyone who reads this blog has read or heard of this book - it's pretty much the ultimate ED book except for Wasted, as far as I know.  It also deals with cutting/SI - Laurie Halse Anderson's writing is as genius and great about the subject as ever, and this book is just AMAZING.  Everyone, not just people with EDs, should read this.


Some Favorite Quotes (some spoilers):
"So, she tells me, the words dribbling out with the cranberry muffin crumbs, commas dunked in her coffee." 
"I inscribe three lines, hush hush hush, into my skin. Ghosts trickle out."
"I started coming here after the first prison clinic stay because Dr. N. Parker is a scam artist specialist in crazy teenagers troubled adolescents. I opened my mouth during the first couple of visits and gave her a key to open my head. Ginormous mistake. She brought her lantern and a hard hat and lots of rope to wander through my caves. She laid land mines in my skull that detonated weeks later."
"Nobody should ever go to a funeral alone."
"I go up two flights and tiptoe across the polished floor of her bedroom, sloooooowly turn the doorknob, and open her bathroom door a crack. A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.  I close the door."
"I showed her how I'd been making tiny cuts in my skin to let the badness and the pain leak out. They were shallow at first, and short, like claw marks made by a desperate cat that wanted to hid under the front porch. Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care...."
"My fingers reach through the screen and comb through the garbage until they find the home of the shrieking chorus, hungry girls singing endless anthems while our throats bleed and rust and fill up with loneliness. I could scroll through these songs for the rest of my life and never find the beginning."
"I'm stable enough to go home until then. They all say I'm stable.  I failed eating, failed drinking, failed not cutting myself into shreds. Failed friendship. Failed sisterhood and daughterhood. Failed mirrors and scales and phone calls.  Good thing I'm stable."
"I breathe in slowly. Food is life. I exhale, take another breath. Food is life. And that's the problem. When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out.  But it's a lie."
"There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore."
"Wreaths of pus-colored fat were suffocating my theighs, my butt and my belly, but they couldn't see them. They said my brain was shrinking. Electrical storms were lighting up on the inside of my skull. My tired liver was packing her suitcase. My kidneys were lost in a sandstorm. 85lbs was not enough stuffing for a paper girl. 85lbs was skin that wanted to be shed. 85lbs was fluffy monkey hair growing all over to keep me warm. They said I had to get fatter. But 85lbs makes me want 75lbs. To get there I'll need to crack open my bones with a sliver mallet and dig out marrow with a long-handled spoon."
"89lbs. I could say I'm excited, but that would be a lie. The number doesn't matter. If I got down to 70lbs, I'd want 65lbs. If I weighed 10lbs, I wouldn't be happy untill I got down to 5lbs. The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is Love. I finally get it."
"Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of strange little girls screaming through their fingers. My patient sisters, always waiting for me. I scroll through our confessions and rants and prayers, desperation eating us one slow, bloody bite at a time."
"I am the library aide who hides in Fantasy. I am the circus freak encased in beeswax. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelian frame."
"This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentances build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point baracade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close."
"I keep thinking that if I could just unzip my skin, step out of this body, then I would see who I really am."
"I need to run, to fly, beating my wings so hard I can't hear anything over the pounding of my heart. Rain, rain, rain, drowning me."
"Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners."
"Yesterdays dirt and mistakes have moved through me. I am shiny and pink inside, clean. Empty is good. Empty is strong."


And my personal favorite:
"Why? You want to know why? Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight. Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through the hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and the worst of all: 'a disappointment.' Puke and starve and cut and drink because you need an anesthetic and it works. For a while. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it's too late because you are mainlining it now, straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can't stop. Look in a mirror and find a ghost. Hear every heartbeat, scream that everysinglething is wrong with you. 'Why?' is the wrong question. Ask 'Why not?'"


Yup, that last quote just about sums a lot of stuff up.