`Stick Figure' follows girl on dangerous path of weight loss
-------------------------
"Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self"
by Lori Gottlieb
Simon and Schuster, $22
-------------------------
What happens when a young girl from Beverly Hills trips on the fallacies of family and friends, then gets saturated by society's worship of the too thin? She almost dies.
Using excerpts from her diary as a preteen, writer Lori Gottlieb recreates the yearlong journey from an average home where she would bake chocolate-chip cookies with her mother to a hospital bed near death suffering from anorexia nervosa.
We meet Lori in the winter of 1978. She gets good grades in school, likes sports but knows she just doesn't fit in, with her family or her friends. Her mother is a dieter who stays thin by "sharing" her food with her husband and son (never her daughter) and lives to shop. Lori hates to shop and doesn't understand why she has to save all the cookies she bakes for the men of the family.
Though she is smart, Lori's teachers see her as contrary and a problem because she disagrees with writing assignments, usually turning in a paper more interesting but not what the teacher ordered. Lori shares with her diary this lament. "I don't know, sometimes I wonder if maybe I am unique."
Lori hardly seems a candidate for an eating disorder - until you realize that, at 11, even the smartest girls want to fit in. In that quest, Lori throws all her talent and determination. In a place where girls and women hum the mantra, you can never be too rich or too thin, Lori sets her sights on the latter: to be the thinnest 11-year-old on the planet.
And while parents worry and send her to doctors for help, their actions counter all the TLC. Her mother diets and reads diet books constantly; she sees Lori's illness as a way her daughter tries to hurts her.
Gottlieb tells all this with an earnest narration that is funny at times but always tragic. And although Lori steps deeper and deeper into her illness, there is no self-pity. The mood is simply: This is what happened to me.
When Lori first starts losing weight, she wins new girlfriends at school who want the secret of her diet. (Easy. Skip breakfast, throw your lunch in the trash and refuse to eat dinner). By the time she gets professional help, Lori is seriously anorexic and "knows" the doctors want her to be fat. She believes that fat is failure, and knows that what real strength she has is because she can turn down food her body wants. She feels she is a winner.
In a desperate attempt to help Lori, her Beverly Hills parents set up a meeting with TV celebrity Jaclyn Smith, a star of the hit series "Charlie's Angles." The meeting is odd and uncomfortable for everyone - and clearly a wash as far as helping Lori.
Lori hits bottom and tries to kill herself with scissors (figuring she'll cut the now-imaginary fat off her stomach and be a better-looking corpse). In the hospital, she wakes up to wanting to live, and starts eating.
"Stick Figure" succeeds in interloping on the mind of a preteen confused, both by what is expected of her and what she wants for herself. But the book fails to investigate why and how Lori does turn her situation around toward a healthier life.
At the end of her yearlong diary Lori is still off kilter; she has a true fear of being fat or unthin. At her coming-home celebration, she confronts her own stick figure in the mirror of a restaurant, and is appalled by what she sees. She says it is OK to be different, but never repents her own self-destructive behavior. And why not? Everyone hates fat.
In the end, Gottlieb admits that the diary of her younger self points out several problems - young girls and women hating their bodies, dieting as a path to happiness and success - but offers no solutions. She simply begs a forceful scrutiny of the mindset.
The author (as her present self) is a student at Stanford Medical School, and a regular contributor to the online magazine Salon.