Stick Figure, A diary of my former self
 Lori Gottlieb
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2000 Simon & Schuster, NY
  ISBN: 0684863588


What would a girl growing up in Beverly Hills in 1978 wish for? “I wish to be the thinnest girl at school, or maybe even the thinnest eleven-year-old on the entire planet,“ so writes Lori in her first diary.

Stick Figure takes us on a gripping journey as this the child of her environment & the daughter of her age, ponders on what a girl is to do, during one horrible year when her friends get boring with their constant chatter of inconsequential things; when the very earth is threatened by aerosol sprays; when her outspokenness is no longer accepted as cute & being called different or unique has begun to sound like an insult. What she decides to do, at the dawn of her puberty, is to stop eating.

When her grades & her verbal skills can't get her the recognition she yearns; when her golden girl's award-winning image has tarnished; when there's no one to turn to, this eleveon-year-old turns to her diary & records the next months in painstaking & fluent imagery.

In three seasons this healthy youngster starves herself to the very brink & through her admissions & omissions in her diary, the reader will also be drawn toward that edge. When her parents are at their wits' end they admit her to a mental institution where she easily outwits everyone. Only when she faces the living & the dying around her is her trance broken. Then the shell around this well-bred & well-fed girl is cracked & the starving child inside escapes.

Her dreams about swallowing air are mind-blowing; her obsession with food made me squirm; her observations of the behavior of the adults around her are a script straight out of teenage Hollywood. What gave me so much to think about was her inability to realize that her fasting would lead to death. With her mind so busy on everything else, she simply doesn't see it coming & her reflection in the mirror never registers. Lori's 12 year old observations are both cynically child-ish & unconsciously prophetic.

For a slice of domestic Beverly Hills life in the late 70s - you can't get a better picture than from this brainy kid just before she hits puberty & watches the whole world with the weary sophistication of a middle-age movie star. Of course it doesn't help that she has a stereotypical mom & pop & older brother, nor an avid appetite for fashion magazines with all those new sayings about “thunder thighs“ & real women not eating dessert. She also has no financial worries & an immaculate nest to come home to with, apparently, not one chore to do.

What a lively, furious read! Fast, funny, fatuous & fearful by turns, Stick Figure: A diary of my former self is worth hunting up & grabbing. Not only is it a paean to journal writing,(& I'm an evangelist for the examined life!) it is an engrossing exploration of the makings of an eating disorder which, back then, didn't have a name.

This would make an excellent book for any girl around the age of 12 & for anyone older who has taken up dieting as a lifestyle. May I suggest you give a journal as well as a copy of Stick Figure?

Lori Gottlieb, now a medical student at Stanford University, is a former Hollywood executive. Her work has apperaed in Salon, Slate & Daily Variety.

Does this interest you? Then check out my Interview with this lively author!
(05/13/01)

Rebecca