| Biography & Autobiography |
| Eating Disorders |
| Psychology |
| Personal Memoirs |
| Psychopathology |
Summary
Summary
She devoured their memoirs and magazine articles, committing the most salacious details to memory to learn what it would take to be the very best anorexic. When she was hospitalized at fifteen, she found herself in an existential wormhole: how can one suffer from something one has actively sought out? With attuned storytelling and unflinching introspection, Kelsey Osgood unpacks the modern myths of anorexia as she chronicles her own rehabilitation. How to Disappear Completely is a brave, candid and emotionally wrenching memoir that explores the physical, internal, and social ramifications of eating disorders.
Author Notes
Kelsey Osgood is a Brooklyn-based writer. She has contributed to The New Yorker's Culture Desk blog, Salon, New York, and Gothamist, among others. She is a graduate of Columbia University and Goucher's College's MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. How to Disappear Completely is her first book.
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Growing up in a happy family in a privileged suburb, Osgood, experiencing adolescent awkwardness and feeling ordinary and ugly at age 14, craved attention and sought "artistic greatness" through anorexia, using its extensive confessional literary genre (memoirs, magazine articles) as a guide. In her first book, an intelligent but grim memoir, she attempts to deromanticize anorexia, to "show the bloody, blue innards of the monster, as opposed to its gleaming, sharp fangs or elegant, black cloak. To reveal it as messy and disgusting and awkward and sad and pathetic." She vividly portrays the creepy phenomenon of the "pro-ana" movement and the claustrophobic, self-involved, achingly lonely world in which young women compete to be "perfect" anorexics. Although Osgood avoids "prescriptive" content such as her daily calorie count, from which she believes "wannarexics" might "garner self-destructive inspiration," the narrative is still imbued with a pathos and tenderness that angst-ridden girls may find attractive. Only the single section proposing practical solutions fully succeeds in shedding the charged, tragic atmosphere that permeates the text, despite Osgood's good intentions. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
