The Anorexia Diaries : A Mother and Daughter's Triumph Over Teenage Eating Disorders

Rating:
Summary: Superficial and simple
Review: Without trivializing the sufferings of the Rio family, I honestly feel like this book offers no insight to the complexity of anorexia nervosa. Tara's eating disorder - which was not anorexia at all, but bulimorexia - was a relatively short ordeal, and she did not hide it from her family like many sick young women do (or like the excerpt from the back of the book would have the prospective reader believe she did). Introspection is nihil - rarely expressed is sentiment deeper than "I feel fat". Moreover, the overall tone is self-centered, as the authors never speculate upon the epidemic nature of the disease; I call this sort of self-congratulatory, non-academic memoir "victimization literature." For these reasons and more, I cannot recommend this title as a quality account of an eating disorder.

Rating:
Summary: Superficial and simple
Review: Without trivializing the sufferings of the Rio family, I honestly feel like this book offers no insight to the complexity of anorexia nervosa. Tara's eating disorder - which was not anorexia at all, but bulimorexia - was a relatively short ordeal, and she did not hide it from her family like many sick young women do (or like the excerpt from the back of the book would have the prospective reader believe she did). Introspection is nihil - rarely expressed is sentiment deeper than "I feel fat". Moreover, the overall tone is self-centered, as the authors never speculate upon the epidemic nature of the disease; I call this sort of self-congratulatory, non-academic memoir "victimization literature." For these reasons and more, I cannot recommend this title as a quality account of an eating disorder.