Insatiable

Eve Eliot

Eve Eliot has done something that few, if any, other authors who write about eating disorders have done: she considered the fat kid.

I mean, think about it. We're constantly hearing that childhood obesity is an epidemic in the United States, and the diet book industry has gone through the roof in the past couple of decades. (Would that I'd written The Eat Your Weight in Bushes and Slim Down! diet book five years ago. I'd be rich.) And yet every book I've picked up dealing with childhood eating disorders is preoccupied with anorexia and bulimia. One might call it an obsession, even. Books on eating disorders, as a rule, do not talk about childhood obesity.

Eliot feels the pull, though. Anorexia and bulimia is sexy, from the perspective of addressing eating disorders. And three-quarters of Eliot's main characters fall solidly into the anorexia/bulimia camp, and those three, as one would expect, get much of the screen time here (and more of the drama). But at least we have Phoebe, the smart, popular girl who cannot stop eating. And her presence in this book alone, let alone the fact that certain chapters of the book focus on her, raises the book a couple of notches by itself.

Eliot gives us the story (thinly-veiled nonfiction, I'd expect; Publisher's Weekly calls it "a work of fiction based on actual case histories," which I assume means it's got more truthiness than, say, a James Frey book) of four teenagers who all have eating problems. They also have a few side-effect-style problems (one character is a cutter, though the actual descriptions of cutting and its psychological effects sound more like they were absorbed from a psych journal instead of direct experience), but the eating disorders take center stage.

There's a lot of potential here, but much of the time, I wasn't sure under what it was hiding. The dialogue tends to flatness, the characters to steretypical actions (though they are well-drawn, especially for a book based on case histories), and the whole thing seems dated thanks to the details on which Eliot chose to focus in places, especially clothing and hairstyles. But Eliot does rise up from the mundane every once in a while, and when she does, this becomes a fascinating little work. Most of these times are when the girls are at their worst and give in to whatever desire each happens to be fighting. When Eliot's writing the bad stuff, she really takes off. It's the connective tissue in between that could have used some work.

But still, she considered the fat girl. And that's worth checking out, for its rarity if nothing else.