Review: "Starving Doll" by Bleuen Gauguin

Starving Doll by Bleuen Gauguin
Published August 2025
★★

What the (sub)title says—this is a memoir of an eating disorder. This is a pretty grim one; the book starts with a difficult relationship with Gauguin's parents (the relationship starts with emotional abuse and never really deviates) and moves on to unhappiness after unhappiness. I'm not sure I'd describe it as angsty, but it's one of those terribly unhappy books that is really devoid of any levity or joy that might break things up; even when Gauguin describes starting a graduate program that interests her or entering a new relationship, the focus goes almost immediately to, for example, the new lover's faults and why things clearly (to the reader, if not to Gauguin in the moment) aren't going to work out. And hey! Sometimes that's how life feels—if things are dark enough emotionally, it can be hard to find any joy even when it should exist. But it's not all that fun to read something that is mostly that pain and has no glimmers of light, no sense of looking back from a happier place.

I also struggled with the lack of context for the book. For a significant chunk of it I was trying to figure out where the author is from—from the name I guessed France or French Canada, but since the name also seems likely to be a pseudonym (among other things, there's a random mention of Paul Gauguin, who is never mentioned again), that's not a sure thing. I started flagging the limited clues I could find: mention of Gauguin's brothers taking holidays to Florida and Montreal, a mention of the author's monthly budget, which was in euros, and finally(!) a comment that she was going to Paris over the weekend to visit her brothers, which I guess answered the question. (Well. Kind of...could still be, e.g., set in Belgium.) But that's it. I think a bit more setting might have helped break up some of the darkness, plus give a bit more more, you know, sense of place and time.

So not really the book for me, but you never know til you try.