Review: "Dancing with a Demon" by Valerie Foster

Dancing with a Demon by Valerie Foster
Published July 2026 via Black Rose Writing
★★★

Foster's daughter Jenna seemed to be sailing along—until she stopped eating, and things got hard, fast. Suddenly conversations turned from college decisions to residential treatment programs, and everything about the future became uncertain.

Dancing with a Demon was first published in 2017, though even then it had been some years since Jenna's illness. This is helpful in terms of the telling of the story; though Foster clearly still remembers the fear and anguish of that time period, and remembers it viscerally, she also has enough distance to take a step back and look at the broader picture. (There are also excerpts from Jenna's own journals; previous editions of the book credit Jenna as a cowriter.) I do wish that this updated edition had removed weights from the book, as there are other ways to convey the seriousness of illness without including details that will be harmful to some readers.

Overall, though, there are some excellent points, including the very real limits to conversations with other parents in Foster's position and the inadequacy of many treatment programs. This thousand-dollar-a-day program was all about weight, and with our insurance covering it only on a week-by-week appeal, in-house treatment was very regimented. They could not keep a patient once he or she reached a certain number on the scale, whatever they determined as a reasonable weight for maintaining life, regardless of any real progress, mentally or emotionally. (loc. 659*) This is not an exception—insurance so often dictates what treatment somebody will get, as very few could afford that kind of out-of-pocket cost. Can you imagine the same thing for cancer? "Well, radiation has shrunk the tumor to a manageable size, so we're not covering surgery or chemotherapy, even though the tumor will almost certainly regrow without them."

A good addition to something of a sub-sub-genre.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "My Childhood Experience of Anorexia Nervosa and How I Recovered" by Clare Purkiss

My Childhood Experience of Anorexia Nervosa and How I Recovered by Clare Purkiss
Published November 2022
★★

A very short memoir. The writing is solid, but there just isn't enough here—though Kindle put this at 83 pages, I'd put it closer to 30 (double-spaced) pages. I wouldn't usually track something so short, but I like to have an account of my Kindle Unlimited reads.

So more of an essay than anything, tracking Purkiss's experience through illness at a young age but simply without the space for a complex story. Might be a fit for younger readers who find themselves trying to recover and looking for a "been there, done that" (though: I will note that it isn't really a "how I managed" book, again simply because there isn't space for real interrogation of experience and thought), but not really the book for me.

Review: "Good Enough to Eat" by Lesléa Newman

Good Enough to Eat by Lesléa Newman
Published 1986
★★★

Good Enough to Eat introduces us to Liza, a twenty-something woman living in Boston. She describes herself as a writer, but mostly she's a part-time daycare worker who spends the rest of her time eating and then throwing up her roommates' groceries, making elaborate plans for starvation diets that she'll start tomorrow, and judging other women based on their weight.

Some spoilers below the fold, but this book is older than I am, so if you've made it even this far you've probably either read the book already or have no plans to.

Now. This had been on my to-read list for almost fifteen years, and it was time. And also...I really struggled with the book. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but there are also some caveats, the latter of which are why I left this at three stars.

First, there's the stylistic choice of what I guess I'll call hyperrealism—Liza tells the reader every time she sweats or lets one rip or pops a pimple or has diarrhea. I guess it's supposed to be immersive, but it's not the sort of immersion that I enjoy.

Second...Liza is kind of horrible. This is largely intentional—she's depressed and unhappy with her life, and that impacts the way she interacts with the world and with people around her. I get that, and I would also rather have a character who is flawed than a character who is perfect (and boring). But, gosh, Liza is hard to take, and I'm not sure there was ever a moment in the book when I'd have wanted to be in the room with her, let alone interact with her on a regular basis. See: Liza constantly judging, and internally belittling, just about every woman she sees. She's also the kind of person to think that, as a presumed straight woman (the first half of the book) who has a lot of gay friends, she can use whatever slur she wants to refer to them, which is...fun...and is compounded by her reaction when one of those gay friends calls her a lesbian (she turns up at his work to sabotage him and demand a public apology). And then she has sex in her roommate's bed, and I just...couldn't with her anymore.

That takes us up to about the halfway mark, at which point Liza determines that she is in fact a lesbian and goes about trying to find other lesbians. There was a terrible moment when I thought that the moment Liza came out to herself, her eating disorder would start magically disappearing, and we'd learn that radical-feminism lesbianism cures eating disorders, but then she gets right back to hating her own body and resenting everyone else for having bodies, so...maybe not. But she does manage to decide that she's in love with the first lesbian she meets, who conveniently is willing to help introduce Liza to queer 80s culture and eating disorder resources (because all of the lesbians Liza meets also have current or past eating disorders) and while we're at it lesbian sex.

Reader, I did not enjoy this book. I'm tired. But first, some caveats.

Caveat the first: This was published in the mid-80s. Language was different, and understanding of eating disorders was different, and what was available in queer fiction was different. It wasn't so far off the period when lesbian books involved somebody being murdered at the end, or at least someone being beaten up and/or arrested. By those standards, this is low-key radical—almost none of the plot involves homophobia (only Liza's internalized homophobia); the lesbians who conveniently know everything about eating disorders frankly do have a better understanding of them than some people do forty years later; when Liza gets over her internalized homophobia, she treats being a lesbian as something to be celebrated rather than something negative. I'm sure there were other books doing related things in the 80s, but they've proven elusive.

Caveat the second: Liza is, as we have established, not my future bestie. If we existed on the same plane, I would be ducking around the corner to avoid her, and she'd see the hem of my coat as I went and think nasty thoughts about me for avoiding her (all the while not wanting to talk to me either, so there's that), and then she'd throw in some bitchy thoughts about my body for good measure. However...it's worth noting that the book is doing some interesting things with Liza throughout this. She really has very little self-awareness, which leads her to think, for example, that a small child's mother should give her carrot sticks [instead of cookies] or something. If I had a daughter, I'd never let her get fat (loc. 1350)—conveniently ignoring the fact that she's previously mentioned resenting being given carrot sticks instead of cookies when she was a child. Or, in reference to someone she once knew who lost weight and then gained it back, she thinks I know if I ever got thin, I'd stay that way forever (loc. 2081)...conveniently forgetting that she herself has sometimes lost weight to a point she's happy with, but it never lasts (not least because her weight-loss attempts are generally starvation diets). Does it make Liza more likeable? No. But it really does tell you something about what the book is doing, and how entrenched Liza is in it all.

So—no. I did not enjoy the book, and I struggled to get past my dislike of Liza and the hyperrealism to see the more interesting things the book was doing. And at the same time, it is doing interesting things, so take that as you will.

...but then there's the part where the lesbian sex at the end devolves rapidly into baby kink, and reader. I cannot. Never again.

Review: "A Life Half Lived" by Sherri Jolie Fowler

A Life Half Lived by Sherri Jolie Fowler
Published January 2026
★★★

I am writing this book for many reasons, but mostly for Monica. (9)

Fowler's daughter Monica was a teenager when she set out to lose a few pounds—and when anorexia took hold and refused to let her go. In A Life Half Lived, Fowler chronicles her daughter's life, from precocious child to woman devastated by illness. Much of the book is about what didn't work—by the time Monica was in more intensive treatment, the illness was truly entrenched, and fundamentally nothing made much of a difference. At some point it became clear that anorexia was likely to be a death sentence as well as a life sentence, and that it was a matter of time. A book by a parent who has lost a child is a specific thing—a love letter; an obituary; a perspective that nobody else has. Fowler is open about the places where she sees that she and her husband could have done differently (acting sooner, for example, or understanding that just because their daughter wouldn't usually lie didn't mean the eating disorder wouldn't), but ultimately they were trying their best with the information and the knowledge they had.

Of note: The cost of eating disorder treatment in the US is wild. Take this: Dale and I paid a whopping $60,000 upfront for just two months of treatment, requiring us to sell some of our stock market holdings to cover the cost. We had no idea how we would afford anything beyond two months if she needed additional treatment, but in our minds, it didn't really matter. We were elated that she actually wanted to try to get better. If we needed more money, we'd find a way when the time came. (109) It's obviously a privileged thing to be able to pay tens of thousands of dollars for treatment...let alone treatment that didn't work. (I'm reminded of Light, in which Nancy Levine recounts telling her daughter that relapse was out of the question simply because they wouldn't be able to afford more treatment.) But, gad, a $60,000 price tag as a starting point for treatment is just bonkers. (The Internet tells me that half of Americans have less than $500 in savings, and that median liquid cash is about $8,000—that wouldn't include stock market holdings, but just...even this inadequate treatment is out of the question for so many.)

Review: "Invisibly Unwell" by Paige Lavell

Invisibly Unwell by Paige Lavell
Published March 2026 via Life to Paper Publishing
★★★

From the outside, Lavell knew that her life looked cushy: a stable marriage, a stimulating job with wardrobe to match, a house and a mortgage. On the inside, she was barely hanging on—and she knew it was time for a change.

This is framed largely around Lavell's experience with autoimmune disorders, which took her a great deal of time and money and energy to get properly diagnosed and treated. As much as that, though, it's a story about a particular type of perfectionism and a desire to get it "right", even when "right" means doing things that are popular rather than things that work for you specifically. I don't (to the best of my knowledge) have any autoimmune disorders, but I'm not sure how much I'd take away from this if I did, other than solidarity and a reminder that it's important to find doctors who will listen to the full story.

That's not so much a bad thing; part of Lavell's experience involved getting sucked into wellness culture and chasing cures that did not, in fact, cure, and it's much better for her to tell her story in a nonprescriptive way than to assume that the exact things that eventually worked for her will work for others! With that in mind, though, I'd probably look at this more for the story of trying to fit into the wrong size and shape of box before realizing that it's okay to look for something that does fit rather than continuing to try to make yourself fit.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Basta, Àle" by S.A. Sterling

Basta, Àle by S.A. Sterling
Published December 2025
★★★

Growing up, Sterling knew she was different—she wasn't allowed to forget it. When her sisters were encouraged to finish their plates, Sterling was put on diet after diet. The resulting shame followed her into adulthood.

This brief memoir spans decades and continents; Sterling grew up in Italy but moved to the US as an adult and also moved around as part of her studies and her military marriage. I think its comp titles (Educated, Hunger, Crying in H Mart) may be doing it a disservice, as those are not only major titles but pretty specific ones, and I think Basta, Àle would benefit from comps to smaller titles...but I suppose I digress. It's a quieter, more thoughtful story than I expected; more than anything, my takeaway was about the way shame can follow one long, long beyond the point that those inflicting the shame expected. Perhaps one for readers who have had to do some unlearning of unwanted lessons of their own.

Review: "This Is Not About Running" by Mary Cain

This Is Not About Running by Mary Cain
Published April 2026 via Mariner Books
★★★★

Cain was born to run. At an age when most kids are groan to think about running the mile in PE, she was winning races and setting records—and not everybody was happy about it. There were the other teenagers who didn't like to see her succeeding when they were not, and more to the point there were the parents who didn't like to see her succeeding when their daughters were not. There were the online trolls convinced, even when she was in middle school, that she must be doing something illegal, or simply insulting her appearance (to...bring a literal child down a peg, I guess?). And then there were the coaches who cared more about their own success—and about Cain's weight, and about whether she was doing exactly what they told her to do—than they did about Cain's success, or her health, or her happiness.

My strongest takeaway from this book is that Cain is angry, and that she has every right to be. Her writing is so clear and so direct, with chapter after chapter highlighting just how hard others made it for her: bullying from classmates and their parents; her school basically shrugging and turning away; her coach subjecting her to his whims and creeping around her bedroom when she was partially clothed and insisting on undernourishment because he was convinced that lighter would mean faster, no matter how "lighter" was achieved, and pushing her to train on debilitating injuries when she should have been resting. But I want to be clear, too: Cain writes all of this plainly, but the tone is not poor me; the tone is where were the people who should have intervened? Cain's parents sound solid, but she describes an environment in which other parents did not speak up; other coaches did not speak up; doctors employed by Nike (the employer of her coach; she trained with a "Nike project") did not speak up; her teammates did not speak up. Or, if they did, they spoke against her. And she asks: How can a literal child see that this is wrong when the adults around her refuse to do so?

This memoir is not about running. This memoir is about how sports normalizes the abuse of young athletes. (loc. 174*)

It's impossible not to read this and think of other well-publicized abuse cases. The way gymnastics turned a blind eye to Larry Nasser, for example, because in exchange for access to underage athletes he was willing to say "she's fine to keep training". Or even what happened with Kamila Valieva; there was so much discussion of positive drug tests, but realistically, any doping was likely to be the direct result of whatever her coaches told her to do. Cain is writing about abuse within the context of running, but it's fair to say that what she underwent is the tip of the iceberg as far as women's sports go, especially in contexts where the athletes are young. At some point things become less about athletic excellence and more about who has power over whom.

This was not an easy read. I took a break at around 30% because it was clear that it was going to be a while before things got better, and they were likely to get worse before that happened. Absolutely worth the read, but also perhaps a good idea to pace yourself.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Two Scoops" by Willa Codrington and Emma Codrington

Two Scoops by Willa Codrington and Emma Codrington
Published December 2025
★★★

A mother-daughter story. This one starts off a little slowly, with Emma Codrington (the mother of the duo) covering quite a lot of facts and background, but it picks up when it gets more into story. I appreciate that both authors are careful to avoid specifics of numbers and (for the most part) behaviours, but what I'm really curious about is the eventual decision to send Willa from the UK to South Africa for treatment. Both Codringtons talk negatively about their experience with treatment options in the UK, but I'm not sure if there was a specific reason to turn to South Africa—why specifically there and not somewhere else? Family ties, financial reasons, specific types of treatment, something else?

Later in the book the focus turns from anorexia to OCD (not directly one to the other, but one taking more of a forefront), with things still quite dicey towards the end. Like many books about illness and recovery, there's a fair amount of summing up at the end, which is too bad, though it's nice that most of the book is about at least trying to recover (vs. the initial descent).

Review: "Bad Kid" by Sofia Szamosi

Bad Kid by Sofia Szamosi
Published March 2026 via Little, Brown Ink
★★★

In the early aughts, at the age of 13, Szamosi was dragged out of bed and sent to a wilderness "rehabilitation" program for teenagers. Between then and turning eighteen, she spent two years in such programs...the sort of programs that have more recently gotten quite a bit of press for being ineffective at best and abusive at worst. I've read enough about these programs to say that what Szamosi describes sounds like the milder half of the scale, but...that's partly because the harsher half of the scale is so terrible. Some readers might find some of the themes throughout the book to be a bit much for teenagers, but I think the point here is that this was Szamosi's teenage years...and anyway the worst of it is what was done in the name of "treatment".

The art style is simple but gets the job done. I particularly appreciated the collaged bits included throughout—photos of Szamosi from her teens, snippets of journal entries, the occasional location photo, etc. We're around the same age, and the photos in particular are so evocative of that time period, things that made me think "oh yes, I've known variations of that girl". Photos aside, the illustrations are black and white, with red for emphasis.

Two things I would have liked a bit more of: First, while Szamosi writes her teenaged self with a combination of compassion, wryness, and cringeing (we should all have some teenage moments that we cringe to look back on!), I would have liked a bit more of a sense of direct "looking back". That is...we see that Szamosi can see that she wasn't making a lot of good decisions as a teen, and that she can see now how much her mother was struggling to figure out what to do, how to help her. Most of the actual telling is from the perspective of Szamosi as a teen, though, and I would have loved some more reflection—what does she now think would have been best for her? How much of her teenageness does she now consider concerning, and how much does she think was normal/stuff she'd have grown out of? And second, where did things go after the end of the book? There's a conclusion, but it's a little abrupt, and I can see a number of possible trajectories. Some kind of an afterword might have been nice.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Tell Me How You Eat" by Amber Husain

Tell Me How You Eat by Amber Husain
Published February 2026 via Washington Square Press
★★★

Struggling to find the key to recovering from anorexia, Husain set about looking at some of the meaning that has historically been ascribed to food: food as power, food as rebellion, starvation as power, starvation as rebellion.

I was and still am rather unsure of what to make of the book. Husain traces various political movements (women's suffrage, etc.) and the weaponization of food—whether something to be forced upon somebody (e.g., in response a hunger strike) or withheld (e.g., Israel's starvation tactics in Gaza). It's interesting material, but while the book description says "Each chapter searches for reasons to eat and live", I wondered whether at times Husain was looking less for reasons to eat than for justification for not eating (not eating enough to sustain life, not eating animal products).

There's a depth of curiosity and research here that I appreciate, and Husain is for the most part careful about what details she shares about her illness (I wish more authors writing about eating disorders were so circumspect). I think I ended up not being quite the right reader for this book—the connections were not entirely there for me, though I suspect that some of that is at that some point I lost track of the magic-mushroom context. This may be something to come back to at a future point in time; therapy with substances usually associated with recreational use has been cropping up more often in my reading (e.g., Amy Griffin's The Tell), and I'll have to keep an eye out for more.

Thanks to the author and publisher for inviting me to read a review copy through NetGalley.

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.

Review: "Sobibor" by Jean Molla

Sobibor by Jean Molla, translated from the French by Polly McLean
English translation published 2005
★★★

Spoilers below

Pulled this one from deep deep down on my TBR, and it's an odd one. Part YA eating disorder story, part Holocaust story. Emma's anorexia/bulimia serve as...something of a penance, plus something of a visible sign of shame, I think? The timeline was a little confusing, but the short of it is that she discovers a Holocaust-era diary that her late grandmother had stashed away; the diary is written by a French Nazi sympathizer (and Nazi himself), and the more Emma reads the more she questions what she knows about her grandmother: in addition to what Emma learns through the diary (in which her grandmother makes appearances), why did she have this diary, and who was this man to her?

I'm not sure quite what to do with this. The comparison of the body of someone who is very sick with anorexia (and yes, Emma is very sick) to a person who survived—or, for that matter, didn't survive—the Holocaust is not a new one, but here it's a bit more literal. But...when Emma eventually works out the details, she understands that the writer of the diary, despite the different name, is her grandfather. There's a whole confrontation, and it just feels odd—like someone's (the writer's?) fantasy of, well, confronting a Nazi.

It would be interesting to see this spread out over more time. Most of Emma's reaction, other than the confrontation, is confined to her relationship with food and her body. But...I'd have liked to see her really wrestle with what this means for her memories of not just her grandfather but also her grandmother. Her grandfather gets the brunt of the blame, as well he should (he's the one who happily worked at a death camp and who, somewhat less happily, committed murder himself); her grandmother, who is dead by the time Emma is working all of this out, gets less attention. But she's in many ways the more interesting character: she was at the camp as forced labor from Poland, and her relationship with Emma's grandfather meant survival...but the fact that she stayed with him after the war, buried his secrets, is something separate, and I don't think the book really gives enough room for Emma to work all of that out.

Review: "Spirit of the Mountain" by Shelley Davidow

Spirit of the Mountain by Shelley Davidow
Published 2003
★★★

I decided that I'd make some headway on my TBR, so I picked this up, because it's been on my list for years...only to find that it never actually made it to my Goodreads list. It was about time regardless, but I'll have to double-check next time!

At any rate: in Spirit of the Mountain, a young teenager from Durban goes to the countryside to stay with her uncle. She's already anorexic when the book starts, and she deteriorates as time goes on; her mother (who is city-bound and racist) is not enthusiastic about Emily's time away, but Emily's uncle is convinced that the countryside is what will cure her (never mind that he has exactly zero plan for how this will happen).

This is interesting—in many ways it's more of the same thing, one of many similar YA "issue books" about eating disorders from a particular era...albeit at the end of that era. What distinguishes this is the setting; when Spirit of the Mountain was published, apartheid had been over for less than a decade. Although Emily's uncle is the prototypical good guy who gets along with everyone, tensions are high...but also, it's eventually a sangoma (traditional healer), not a Miracle Therapist, who sets Emily on the path to wellness. (Unfortunately the sangoma does fulfil the role of the Miracle Therapist—tells Emily that her illness is because she's afraid of becoming a woman, knows exactly what she has to do, et cetera. I'm also decidedly skeptical of the idea that the right thing to do for a struggling infant is to tell its mother that she can't have him back because an equally unwell teenager is caring for him and they need each other to get better!)

Ultimately I think this is trying to do some interesting things but the timing of writing perhaps gets in the way. Anna, an African woman who works on Emily's uncle's farm, is allowed to be a smart and resourceful character, but she's not given much personality or role beyond helping other people get better; the sangoma is a peaceful man with all of the answers, but most of the other local Africans are an angry, spear-wielding mass just outside the gates; Emily is treated as a gold-star exception for not looking down on various characters on the basis of skin color. None of this feels particularly unusual for a book from this time and place (lots of trying to figure out how to write about race in a post-apartheid South Africa, I think), but it does feel dated.

Review: "Bones, Mirrors, and Lies" by Sidney Hoeppner

Bones, Mirrors, and Lies by Sidney Hoeppner
Published June 2025
★★

One of those memoirs that is heartfelt but perhaps written a bit too soon. Hoeppner wrote this a few months into working toward recovery, and the ambivalence is clear; at times Hoeppner writes as though she is fully recovered, but then it becomes clear how much she is still struggling. (Even the six mentions of a particular weight—not to mention that same weight on the cover—in a book that is only a hundred-odd pages long suggests to me that part of her is still finding some validation in illness.)

All of this is a very normal place for someone to be in, just a few months in, but it's more catharthis-writing than anything. I hope that with more time she'll continue to get into a better place.

Review: "Beyond the Barbell" by Natasha Kostalas

Beyond the Barbell by Natasha Kostalas
Published September 2025
★★★

Kostalas thought she'd found her calling as a teacher, but when the workload burned her out she sought refuge in something else: weightlifting, followed by bodybuilding. And for a while, bodybuilding was not just a refuge but a calling, an identity—until it too burned her out, albeit in a different way.

I picked this up because doing some (very low-key) weightlifting myself has made me curious about memoirs on the subject, and there aren't that many memoirs on the subject, especially not by women. Kostalas's story is more about bodybuilding than it is about weightlifting, which is an important distinction—to oversimplify it, let's say that weightlifting is about getting stronger and hitting new personal records, while bodybuilding is about the aesthetics of a ripped body. Weightlifting competitions come down to objective numbers; bodybuilding competitions come down to subjective opinions.

So this is about the latter, and all the grim stuff that comes with it: bulking up to gain muscle, cutting to lose body fat, diving headfirst into behaviors that under other circumstances would be diagnostic support for an eating disorder. And it's that that took Kostalas back out of it: strict, months-long diets to prepare for bodybuilding competitions just aren't sustainable, especially if you want to retain your physical and mental health.

I found the material here interesting, though in places I think Kostalas was still too emotionally close to a given situation to be able to write objectively about people or events. The writing a bit of a struggle. I'm rating on a curve because I believe this is self-published (which typically means that the resources that go into publishing are significantly reduced compared to, e.g., what an established publisher can do), but an extensive round of line editing would have been helpful; among other things, there's way too much passive voice (I would still be the receiver of negative comments (loc. 1012)) and extensive use of the modal "would" (A few times I would meet up with Anton (loc. 2349)) where a simpler past tense would suffice. (I also would have liked to see less recounting of Instagram posts—I understand the purpose that they serve, and maybe it's just me, but if I want to see what someone wrote on social media, I'll check social media.)

Late in the book, Kostalas talks about a shift to powerlifting (which I am sort of using interchangeably with "weightlifting", even though they appear to be two different things, but I am confused, so let's just go with "switched to aiming for personal bests rather than aesthetics"), and I can only hope that that's been a healthier and more rewarding place to be.

Thanks to the author for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Letting Go of Perfect" by Daniel O'Shaughnessy

Letting Go of Perfect by Daniel O'Shaughnessy
Published October 2025 via Jessica Kingsley Publishers
★★

O’Shaughnessy struggled with body image for years, especially within the context of the queer communities he was part of and where he sought approval. In Letting Go of Perfect, he details some of the lessons he's learned from lived experience and his work as a nutritionist.

I'll go ahead and qualify this review by saying that I'm not a gay man and I don't have personal experience with body dysmorphia, so I'm not the target audience for this book. I read it because I've read quite a bit about eating disorders and body image, and I'm always curious about different perspectives. O’Shaughnessy comes at it with a lot of compassion, acknowledging the internal and external factors that can contribute to body image issues and dysmorphia.

As much as I appreciated the intent here, though, I struggled with the book. The structure is a bit "everything but the kitchen sink", with a lot of lists that feel like something of a rapid-fire overview rather than in-depth experience or advice. Because of the lists, I ended up doing quite a lot of skimming, which is extremely unusual for me and books.

There's a lot of generalization here (particularly significant for gay men; especially when it intersects with body image within the gay community; for many gay individuals, especially those [...], life often becomes; in many fitness spaces, particularly in the gay community, there is often...), and I wasn't sure what to make of that—I think I would have liked to see more hard research worked in, because although I have no doubt that gay men face different body image considerations than other populations, it was never clear to me whether O’Shaughnessy's many particularlys and especiallys were meant only relative to straight men or something else. I'm not here to put body image struggles on a scale (no pun intended), but if you're going to tell me that something is particularly difficult for a certain group, I want to know who the comparison population is and what research this is based on.

A lot of the advice here is basically solid, if broad. Some of it gave me pause, though. I am still not sure why one of the first topics in the book is blood sugar balance, which to me felt like another set of food rules on top of whatever internal rules someone who might be struggling with food might already have, and before any other real discussion of those struggles took place. And while I can imagine some readers finding value in O’Shaughnessy's journal exercises and so on, some of the tasks felt appropriate only for those in a very specific place. "Try setting your strict dietary rules aside and eating whatever you want once a week" (not a direct quote), for example, would be manageable for some people, but for others it might lead to bingeing. I suspect (just a guess, mind) that the things O’Shaughnessy chose to put in here are the ones he found most useful in his own journey, which is of course fine, but it's worth remembering that everyone's path is different, and there are a lot more experiences and resources out there.

So where does this leave us? There's value in validation and seeing some of your own experience in a book, so I can imagine parts of this one being useful to folks with body dysmorphia or body image difficulties (two different things, but though the book officially focuses on the former I think the latter is more applicable for a lot of it) who feel more heard by resources aimed specifically at gay men or even more specifically at gay men who are part of a particular scene. But I'd approach it with caution and suggest using it only in conjunction with other resources, therapy, etc.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Losing to Anorexia" by Adela Lily

Losing to Anorexia by Adela Lily
Published August 2024
★★

Short, thematic, rhyme-y poems. Too much focus on finding a rhyme for my tastes. May be written by a teenager, which is interesting—I'm never sure whether to laud self-published teenagers for their initiative or grouse, like the not-quite-elder millennial that I am, that in my day teenagers didn't try to monetize our angsty poetry; we either limited it to our diaries or only shared it on LiveJournal to audiences of, like...three. Can I do both? In any case, I hope this was cathartic to write.

Review: "Food School" by Jade Armstrong

Food School by Jade Armstrong
Published April 2024 via Conundrum Press
★★★★

A pleasant surprise. Food School is a quick graphic novel about a woman in an adult intensive outpatient program for an eating disorder. There's not a ton here that's new, but a couple of things that feel notable: first, this is about trying to get better, not about being sick. That might seem like a small distinction, but (take it from somebody who has read too much in specific genres and subgenres and subsubgenres...) it's actually a significant one. Second, Armstrong is good about avoiding (or rather, redacting) things that are realistic in the context of the story but that could be triggering to some readers. And third, while it's not unheard of to have an adult protagonist in this sort of thing, it's still uncommon, and it's nice to see Olive trying to figure out recovery (and I mean: genuinely trying, even when she hates being in the program and hates everyone around her and hates everything about it; she's often ambivalent and doesn't always get it right, but she knows why she's there) while also trying to adult. The ending is abrupt, but overall the story worked better for me than I expected.

Review: "Light" by Nancy Y. Levine with Rachel Levine

Light by Nancy Y. Levine with Rachel Levine
Published August 2025 via Rootstock Publishing
★★★★

When Levine's daughter Rachel went off to college, Levine and her husband breathed a sigh of relief—they'd managed to raise both their kids in a way they could be proud of, and their kids were now out in the world. Their hardest parenting days were over—they thought. When Rachel came back from her study abroad trip thinner, they didn't worry...but when her weight dropped, and dropped some more, they did. And for some reason, none of their suggestions to help her gain weight seemed to be helping.

Light takes Levine and her family through Rachel's illness, including—eventually—a protracted stay at a residential treatment centre. This is Levine's story, not Rachel's, though Levine draws on Rachel's experience and journals as well. And it's an interesting telling: Levine describes really having no idea, when Rachel's anorexia/orthorexia started, how to deal with it or what to say; a lot of their early attempts at interventions were useless because Levine and her husband figured that Rachel could just be talked out of her eating disorder. Later, Levine started to get a sense of the impact of problematic family dynamics (not in a "this caused it" kind of way, to be clear, but in a "this makes for a more difficult environment in which to get well"). I struggled to read about some of those dynamics, to be honest; I grew up in a very healthy-eating household (e.g., to date I have had soda maybe half a dozen times in my life), but my parents never placed value judgements on body size or different eating habits, and...well, from my perspective, some of the comments Levine describes from a certain family member in particular are divorce material. It gets more complicated than that, as we eventually see that there are much broader family cycles at play, but, well. Some of it was tough to read.

This is a 3.5-star read for me, and while I eventually decided to round up, I almost rounded down because there are way too many numbers in here—it maybe makes sense when you consider that Levine is a nurse who is probably used to using all kinds of numbers as a way to evaluate health and paint a clinical picture, but she also describes, in the book, being told by other health professionals that they consciously avoided numbers (weight, calories; also, more generally, specifics about food intake) in treatment because they could be triggering. It makes those numbers an odd choice to include in the book, and while I think this could be a valuable read for people in Levine's position (i.e., parents struggling to help a child with an eating disorder, especially an adult child), I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for whom numbers can be difficult.

So—some reservations, but an interesting story told well. I think it's worth noting that Levine and her husband were (as she notes) in an extremely privileged position to be able to support their daughter financially through her treatment; it was not a small expense for them, but it would have been far, far out of reach for many (perhaps most). What must it feel like to have to tell a child that they cannot get sick again, because more treatment would be out of financial reach? A reminder of the many flaws of the US health care system.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "We Loved to Run" by Stephanie Reents

 

We Loved to Run by Stephanie Reents
Published August 2025 via Hogarth
★★★★

On a day like this when the whole world unspooled slowly and leisurely, we loved to run. (loc. 1316*)

It's the early 90s, and at a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, the women's cross country team is on fire. They are smart, and they are fast, and they swing between being the closest of close friends and being ready to tear each other's throats out. They are all fast, but some of them are faster; some of them are faster, but the slower runners' times count, too, in their meet placements. They are all thin, but some of them are thinner; some of them are thinner, but some of them know how dangerous that slippery slide can be. They tell each other secrets and break each other's confidences; they push each other to be their best and knock each other down; they run.

Reents plots a course here that is partly in third person singular and partly in first person plural: Emotions did not behave predictably under physical duress. We loved each other, too, the love as dark and sticky and intense as blackstrap molasses. (loc. 116) There are too many characters to follow each one closely, but a few are highlighted and a few more run through the chapters again and again. Some of them are more palatable than others, but that's kind of the point. In some ways I found Harriet and Chloe to be the most interesting characters, Harriet because she subverts a lot of literary expectations of how a character with an eating disorder is written, and Chloe because she can't quite get a grip on her teammates finding her tedious.

What you make of the book will probably depend largely on how you feel about the first person plural. It worked for me, but I think partly because we also had those sections in a single character's head. (Having numerous POV characters also allows for multiple dramas, small and large, which never hurts...) I'm guessing that the choice of timing (the 90s rather than a contemporary setting) has something to do with Reents's own experience as a college runner, but regardless, it was a nice choice; I think I wouldn't mind reading a bit more fiction set in, say, the 80s through early 2000s—contemporary enough, but minus everyone being constantly glued to their cell phones and social media.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for inviting me to read a review copy through NetGalley.