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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.