Starving Hearts

by Lynn Ruth Miller

Starving Hearts is a novel about one woman’s struggle with anorexia and bulimia. The book won ninth place in the National Writer’s Club competition under its original title The Struggle and has the imprimatur of ANRED (Anorexia Nervosa & Related Eating Disorders). It describes how Susan Talberg overcame an addiction to food by recognizing the powerful forces behind them and her need to control the mother who uses her daughter as a whipping post.

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published May 1, 2000

Reviews

[Liralen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Particularly interesting for the setting: it's the 1950s, which is to say that for all that Susan has a good university degree, she still feels that, without a husband, she's a failure. Meanwhile, Susan's relationship with her mother has always been fraught. Her mother grew up in poverty in the Depression and has never outrun her fear of starvation, but she also fears being fat...which means that she praises Susan (who is thin) for eating a lot and criticises Susan's younger sister (who is overweight) for the same. It's...complicated. I'd have liked to see a bit more complexity in terms of how Susan's mother treats her (hint: terribly, most of the time), but her character is made complex by her backstory: trapped in a marriage that doesn't give her what she thought it would, watching Susan speeding towards something similar.

Susan develops anorexia and bulimia in an era when these illnesses were all but unheard of. Her loved ones see that she is starving but don't understand why. She doesn't understand why. She just sees that she's single when she wants to be married, and then she's a working wife when she wants to be a mother and housewife, and she's aimed for some of the same things her mother wanted and landed in some of the same (unhappy) places her mother did. It's messy, and although there are places where I really would have liked it to go deeper (see, again, her mother's constant criticism, which felt a little one-note), this genuinely feels like it's doing something that I haven't previously seen in a novel about eating disorders.

[Kristen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poorly written. Bland.