"When it comes to writing about anorexia, the only truly radical move, as far as I can tell, would be..."

“When it comes to writing about anorexia, the only truly radical move, as far as I can tell, would be to show clearly just how profoundly boring it is—not sad or prurient or overdetermined… . I don’t know what a deliberately boring book about anorexia would look like. The closest Osgood gets is when she writes, “I used to sit in trigonometry class and calculate my intake obsessively in the margins of my notebook, each time coming up with the same answer, each time dismissing my mathematics as unreliable.” That is a much more accurate description of the disease than anything involving clavicles or frozen yogurt or sexual abuse or the fear of feeding tubes. If we really wanted to protect our supposedly susceptible youth, we’d paint anorexics as they are: slowly suicidal obsessives who avoid other people and expend ninety-five per cent of their mental energy counting the calories in green vegetables. We wouldn’t see them as worth reading about at all.”

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-Alice Gregory, from Anorexia, the Impossible Subject, in The New Yorker.

One of the reasons I was interested in depicting Dagny’s anorexia in The Bubble Gum Thief is that genre fiction gave me a chance to attempt exactly what Alice Gregory is talking about here. If I were using Dagny in contemporary literary fiction, the focus of the story would probably be about Dagny’s struggles with anorexia, which meant that anorexia would have to entertain the reader and keep him or her engaged. That would require either embellishment or romanticization. In a mystery/thriller, murders do that heavy lifting, which means that Dagny’s anorexia can exist as it actually would—as a facet of her personality that doesn’t define who she is, even though it affects how she lives.

When I wrote my first outline for The Bubble Gum Thief, Dagny wasn’t anorexic, and her character felt empty and flat. I thought about the protagonists of other thrillers that I loved, and the flaws that made them feel real. Some were alcoholics; some liked to gamble. Some just couldn’t get along with authority. None of that seemed like Dagny to me. (Maybe, maybe some of the last one, but that wasn’t enough).

If your thriller is set in the real world, it should feel like the real world, and the people in it should feel like real people. People tend to think anorexia is something that happens to young women in high school or college, but it’s increasingly common with women in their thirties (like Dagny) and beyond. As I delved more into Dagny’s character, I began to wonder whether Dagny might be anorexic.

Since I’m not a woman suffering from an eating disorder, it seemed terribly presumptuous to think that I could write about a woman suffering from an eating disorder. I watched videos about anorexia; I read medical studies about it. I went to the library and checked out every memoir about eating disorders I could find. Many of the women who wrote these memoirs were extremely intelligent and ambitious—just like Dagny.

I got to a point where I felt that I could relate enough to the impulses underlying anorexia and the emotions surrounding it to do it justice. Readers can judge for themselves how successful I was at capturing Dagny’s eating disorder, or balancing it with the plot of the book, but I believe the choice to take on this affliction as part of Dagny’s character was correct.  Again, eating disorders exist in real life, and should therefore be present in some depictions of reality.  Moreover, extending awareness about these disorders might make people more observant about those in their own lives who might need help.