Review: "The Ministry of Thin" by Emma Woolf

The Ministry of Thin by Emma Woolf
First published 2013
★★

In 2012, Woolf published An Apple a Day, a memoir (drawn from a Times column that she wrote) about trying to recover from anorexia. In 2013, she followed up with The Ministry of Thin, in which she takes an extremely unscientific look at the pressure that girls and women are under to look and sometimes act a certain way.

And...I can only think that Woolf was still deep in her disorder when she wrote this. She speaks of anorexia as a thing of her past, but she also says that I literally don't go near butter (loc. 267); wonders whether, despite her anorexia, she was ever actually mentally ill (loc. 2597); describes women who don't have 'fuller figures' as 'the perfect ones' (loc. 3167); argues repeatedly that size is purely down to behaviour rather than, e.g., genetics; and tries unconvincingly to argue that she doesn't have a problem with fat bodies:

This [fear] is the way I feel about fat in food. However, fat as body shape seems quite different. It interests me. I wonder what it would be like to become very large. (loc. 606)

but then continues with fun things like this:

I know it's easier than it sounds. I know that, despite having come close to death, I would still choose battling anorexia over battling obesity. No one wants to be fat. Everyone wants to be thinner. (loc. 760)

The book isn't entirely about body size—Woolf also talks about, for example, the pressure to be made up a certain way (she tells us that the fact that she sometimes leaves the house without mascara is down to 'my own laziness' (loc. 1643))—but as far as I can tell most of this book is her attempt to delude herself into thinking that she's perfectly healthy and normal now, and any residual terror of butter or disdain for fat people is just natural because she's a woman in today's (or 2013's) society. I do not recommend reading this if you have ever had an eating disorder. I do not recommend reading this if you have a bigger body. I do not recommend reading this in general.

Woolf was still only very recently into some semblance of recovery when she wrote this. It's been ten years, and I really hope that things have continued to improve for her. But...somewhere along the way, I wish an editor had looked at this and said, 'Look, interesting concept, but let's table this for a few years until it feels less raw and you can think about actual science and research instead of your continued tithing at the Church of Thin.'