Winter Girls
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
What does it mean to be a wintergirl?
The phrase "wintergirls" is one that Anderson has invented in order to symbolize the destcructive nature of anorexia. Coldness becomes synonymous with illness and pain, and Cassie and Lia both suffer from being wintergirls. The following quotes display the use of this phrase within the text.
"We held hands when we walked down the gingerbread path into the forest,
blood dripping from our fingers. we danced with witches and kissed
monsters. We turned into wintergirls, and when she tried to leave, I pulled her back because I was afraid to be alone" (99).
"She wipes a snowflake off my cheek. 'You're not dead, but you're not alive, either. You're a wintergirl Lia-Lia, caught in-between two worlds. You're a ghost with a beating heart" (195).
"Would that be worse than the grown women who lived on our hall but
didn't talk to us? Wintergirls who were twenty-five, thirty, fifty-seven
years old, walking around in their eleven-year-old bone cages, empty
caves with bleeding eyes dragging from one treatment to the next, always
being weighed, never being enough. One day the wind will carry them
off. Nobody will notice" (252).
Summary
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
tells a chilling story of seventeen year old Lia struggling to cope with the
unraveling of her life. Even before the death of her former best friend Cassie
that the novel opens with, Lia’s daily existence had been a fight for her life.
The two friends spiraled into the depths of eating disorders together; a pact
to become the skinniest girl in school had them bound to their drastic and
destructive lifestyles and to each other. The novel follows Lia through her
tumultuous struggle with the aftermath of Cassie’s death. Anorexia reenters her
life full force, and alongside that she must also attempt to deal with the
troubling presence of Cassie’s ghost, divorced parents that seem blind to the
issues in her life that are threatening to consume her, overwhelming guilt for
not answer the thirty-three calls in a row that Cassie left on her machine,
pressure to be a good example for her younger step sister – all of this amidst
the typical horrors of adolescence. Anderson takes readers on a journey from
the very depths of Lia’s mind through the frozen tundra of her everyday
life. Wintergirls is a haunting portrait of the destructive
nature of eating disorders, and keeps readers in a cold state of terror,
yearning with Lia to find warmth wherever possible.
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