Dr. Kia Jane Richmond is Professor and Director of English Education at Northern Michigan University and author of Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Real Struggles through Fictional Characters (Bloomsbury, 2019). She is a frequent presenter at NCTE, ELATE, ALAN, CEL, and MCTE conferences and has published many articles and book chapters focused on young adult literature and teacher preparation in English Language Arts. She can be reached at [email protected]. |
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
Lia Overbrook is an 18-year-old high school student who lives with anorexia nervosa. She is unable to see her body in ways that are healthy. Instead, Lia feels repulsive and frail, which will not help her reach her (unrealistic) goal weight of 80 pounds. Like many young people with eating disorders, Lia finds ways to lie about her eating habits to her family, over-exercises and weighs herself repeatedly– both in secret, and doom scrolls online in chat rooms and underground blogs filled with the voices of others who are seeking solace and advice for weight-loss. Those voices are loud in Lia’s head, bumping into the voices of her parents (who are constantly fighting) and her best friend Cassie Parrish (who has lived with bulimia since she was 10 years old), and the buzzing of “echovoices that made a permanent home inside the eggshell of her skull,” saying ":: Stupid/ugly/stupid/bitch/stupid/fat/stupid/baby/stupid/loser/stupid/lost/::” |
Anderson shares accurate material about Lia’s treatments including talk therapy, medication, and hospitalization. On her website: (https://madwomanintheforest.com/book/wintergirls/), the author includes discussion questions, facts about eating disorders, activities and projects, and an interview about her own experiences while writing the book. Laurie Halse Anderson, a New York Times bestselling author and phenomenal speaker, has won numerous awards for her writing, including the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2023), the NCTE Intellectual Freedom Award (2015), and the ALA’s Margaret A. Edwards Award (2009). Her most recent novel, just published this year, is Rebellion 1776, a middle grade historical narrative about a young girl living through an epidemic during the Revolutionary War. |