Best Book for the Foreseeable Year :: Binary Star
God, is this book extraordinary.
Where do I even begin? The book���s plot revolves around two lovers, a young woman, our narrator, who struggles with bulimia and anorexia, who spins through tabloids and celebrity gossip, and her long-distance boyfriend John, an alcoholic who ignores his illness. Both are resigned to enduring their lovers and their own problems, linked together less by passion than loyalty, than the need to be loved and cared for by someone as fucked up themselves.
There���s SO MUCH in this book to use to declare Gerard the new alt-lit genius of modern times, but what drew me in most on a personal level is the way the girl can depict a woman with disordered eating and depict a strong, smart character in the same body. So many books, most with girls with eating disorders, show the woman obsessed only with vanity. She���s often average intelligence. She���s often anorexic for popularity���s sake only. She often knows exactly what���s she���s doing, seeing her disease as a means to an end like some kind of extreme diet the reader is supposed to use to connect to her with because we���ve all been on diets; this vapid character just takes it to the next level.
Gerard���s character, is, above all else, smart. She���s a scholar of astronomy, filling her mind with the scientific characteristic, of Red Dwarfs and Black Holes and above all else, Binary Stars, ���a system containing two stars that orbit their common center of mass,��� (a worthy metaphor for John and her own life: two stars orbiting a common dream of perfection they���ll never reach.) Her eating disorders are nothing about feeling too fat, not really. They���re about the desire to inhabit less space in the world, to, by becoming so small she nearly disappears, become the biggest star (read: celebrity) of modern times.
She pours over pictures of Nicole Richie���s clothes hanging off her collar bones, She watches Miley Cyrus shake her ass without a speck of fat shifting places. She reads the pounds celebrities gain and lose with a collegiate attention to detail. She devours click-bait articles promising to help her drop pounds overnight with insatiable hunger.
It���s something I don���t talk about often, but undeniably, this book hit me so hard because Gerard has absolutely, head of the nail, hit on what my own year of disordered eating was like. I didn���t think anorexia would make me popular, or even care if it did. More than anything in the entire world, I wanted to take up less space. I hated the way my hips demanded 25 inches while I wasn���t sure I as a person deserved that much space in the world. It���s so eerie to read an author write down some of the messed up thoughts that swam around my own brain, to hear for the very first time, that I���m not the only girl who followed that line of thought.
Even if the whole eating-disorder plot isn���t such an instant turn-on and you���re questioning if you���re gonna connect so strong / enjoy this book so much if you can���t cling onto that thread, I promise you, Gerard���s prose is so entirely beautiful and heart-rendering, you will, like me, be left breathless until you finish the whole thing. Excuse me while I quote some monologue from the narrator making a mental list of wants at excessive length:
���I want to be envied.
���������������������� I want to give out advice.
���������������������� I want to have so many things to say, suddenly there is a book of them.
���������������������� I want to look at the sky and understand.
���������������������� I want to feel small.
���������������������� But important.
���������������������� Massive.
���������������������� But beautiful. ���
���������������������� When I die, I want to have been on the covers of magazines like Vogue and Esquire. I want to have my own sex tape. I want there to be a star named after me.
���������������������� I want to be Paris Hilton six years ago.
���������������������� I want to have pictures taken with telescopes. I want someone to think I���m smart.���
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HOLY FUCK I can���t get over Gerard���s prose. Just retyping those words makes me envious with her command of the language, with the way she can capture HUGE HUGE emotions with little more than a 20 words.
Geez you guys. If that last quote didn���t make you want to find this book/devour immediately (Two Dollar Radio, again, get on it), stop reading my reviews because nothing I love about writing will be what you like about books, ever.
