The novel “Wintergirls” is dark story about a girl named Lia and her struggle overcoming a terrible eating disorder. Throughout the novel, we see Lia struggle with her eating disorder, recover from the death of her best friend, and restore her relationships with everybody around her.
The story starts off with sixteen year old Lia getting ready to head out the door for school. Lia lives with stepmother Jennifer, her father, and younger stepsister Emma. Lia adores Emma, does anything to make that little girl happy and is the only one we really see Lia show true emotion and compassion towards through the majority of the novel.
Right off the bat, we see Lia hiding her feelings. Her stepmother Jennifer nonchalantly told Lia that her best friend passed away; or rather was found dead in a motel room. Lia pretends she does not care and pretends she does not feel a thing. In reality, she is just cold. Cassie and Lia had not been friends in a long time, and the night before this, Cassie had called her 33 times, each time Lia sending them straight to voicemail.
Since the day Cassie’s family moved across the street from Lia’s mother’s house, Lia and Cassie were best friends. They did everything together, and were basically joined at the hip! That was all fine and safe until one year when they were twelve. Cassie had just come back from summer camp, and it was Labour Day weekend. Everyone on their street was partying and celebrating. There was so much food around, and Cassie was stuffing her face. Lia had left her for a minute to get a sweater, and came back to find Cassie throwing up in the bushes. Turns out, the girls Cassie met at camp were weight obsessed. While there, Cassie learned all about purging, binging, and how to eat as m...
... middle of paper ...
...hat the next few minutes were going to suck. Cassie told Lia she was dying. Lia’s liver had shut down hours before this, and her lungs were filling up with liquid. It was not until now that Lia realized she did not want to die.
Cassie wanted Lia to die, so they could be reunited, however Lia wanted to live for once, so she painfully wrestled away from Cassie, and dragged herself to main office to call her mother. Within minutes, the ambulance showed up, revived her heart, and transferred her to the New Seasons hospital. Unlike her previous visits to New Seasons, Lia wanted to get better this time. She did not resist the treatment or argue with doctors and nurses. She wanted to live, and started seeing reasons why she should. There was still a long journey until she was one hundred percent better, but the wintergirl Lia as we all knew her, was starting to thaw.
In “The Coldest Winter Ever” by Sister Souljah, her overall purpose in writing this book. Was to show the reader the real “ghetto” life and answer questions many of her loyal readers had. But to also represent the honest truth about living in the ghetto. This type of literature is an urban fiction novel, and the main point
Sister souji has her participate in her meeting that she has for the young girls and older adults on how to make life better and fix the neighborhood talks some sense to them but winter seems to think it's just a waste of time and hates it there . She seems to feel sick and runs out the meeting and packs her stuff because she is tired of being there , goes into sister souji room and gets midnight file and see her file and it had newspaper articles of her father and mansion and her . She knew all along of who she really was and played it cool . Then stops by the Doctor room and steals money where she stashed her cash , steals it and puts it in her sports bag but they get switched up and noticed once she was already at the bus station that she had no money . Someone in her past seems to recognize her in a lexus which was bullet the guy she spent her seventh birthday with while her father was arrested
all she has been through. Ivy as a character goes through a lot in her
In Andre Dubus’ The Fat Girl, Louise is a young adolescent with detrimental eating habits and broken self-esteem. Her lack of self-confidence stems from her atrocious emotional habitat. Louise receives constant criticism from her mother regarding her weight. Her mother states “If you are fat the boys won’t like you.” That kind of ridicule being said by a mother to her 9 year old daughter creates an atmosphere of self-hatred and self-loathing. It is not only her familial environment that contributes so greatly to Louise’s destructive behavior. She has few friends and the one’s she does have agree she needs to change. The society in which she lives also is a contributing factor; the society is laden with stigmas positioned on appearance. That manner of daily ridicule only introverts Louise even more, causing her secretive, binge eating to deteriorate. In research conducted by Ursula Polli-Potts PhD, Links between Psychological Symptoms and Disordered Eating behaviors in Obese Youths, she explains the correlation between psychological, emotional factors and eating disorders in overweight adolescents. Potts states, “The association between binge eating symptoms and eating in response to feelings of distress and sadness with depression/anxiety symptoms corresponds with the results of other studies.” Potts and her colleagues took overweight adolescents and placed them into control and variable groups to ensure correct data. The outcome of their research was that there is a direct correlation with emotional binge eating and psychological factors. Although more extensive research needs to be implemented, Potts and associates were pleased with the results of the case studies.
Described within the vignette is a nineteen year old teenager named Brandy. Similar to girls her age, Brandy has difficulties dealing with her body image and self-esteem. For instance, she experiences hopelessness, isolation, sadness, and anxiety that all contribute to Brandy’s acknowledgement of her physical appearance. She completely overestimates her body size to the point of taking dieting pills then defaulting to purging. During the typical day, the meals are scarce but healthy compared to a bad day full of unhealthy snacking. Lastly, her family predicament is not a supportive one at that. Her mother was obese so she constantly dieted while Brandy’s father illustrated signs of sexual interest although he never physically touched her.
The novel starts out with seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe, young and handsome, and without a care in the world. He’s still dating his high school sweetheart with plans to get married right after they’ve both finished college and his entire family seems to be the exact representation of the American dream. Unfortunately, all that dramatically changes when Ian’s older brother brings home a mysterious beauty, announcing that after only two weeks of having known Lucy, he plans to marry her right away. At first, Ian didn’t seem to mind her and he barely seemed to take notice of her two children from her previous marriage. However, Ian starts to notice Lucy behaving suspiciously, for example...
Madeline was locked away just at the beginning of the full moons half cycle. In other words, Roderick knew that this was the worst time for his sister to die, she could easily comeback, using the moons dark power.
Mourning occupied the town and it became necessary that every person must cry for one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. Ling had little difficulty weeping; she wept for Mrs. Wong, her apartment the Red Guards had demolished, the food she lacked, and above all, her father. Gao did not stop bullying Ling during this time. One afternoon after the teacher had left the room, Gao attacked Ling with scissors, but this time she fought back, "I swung my schoolbag fiercely against Gao's head. Cluck! Cluck! My abacus hit him. His eyes grew wide in surprise and pain." (181) Ling was proud of her actions; however, her mother was not. She was scared Gao's father, a power official, would take matters into his own hands and punish them. Days later, Ling is forced by Comrade Li to publicly apologize to Gao, but she refuses. In a matter of seconds, before Ling is further punished, Li is surrounded by soldiers and arrested. "'We are here for you!' Belly jabbed at Comrade Li's chest with a baton, bearing his broad teeth. ‘You are under arrest for being in Jiang Qing's gang'" (238) Finally amalgamated as a family, Ling, her mother, and her father who was released from prison, vow that one day they will reach true freedom in the United States.
Loung's realtionship with Pa makes her committed to her own survival. Pa and Loung had a inseparable bond and she really looked up to him.
“The soul-caller in Lia’s healing ceremony, began to chant, “Where are you? Where have you gone? . . . Come home to your house. Come home to your mother . . . Come home. Come home. Come home.” Ironically and tragically, Lia would never come home, because her brain had been lost forever.
To conclude, with the Lees being Hmong and not wanting to conform to society and abide by the way things works, I feel Lia’s fate was inevitable. The doctors did as much as they could, but in the end, it still wasn’t enough to prevent Lia from going brain dead. Language and communication may have been the one thing that caused Lia to suffer because the doctors couldn’t understand the Hmong and the Hmong couldn’t or refused to understand the doctors.
Presumably, complications start to revolve around the protagonist family. Additionally, readers learn that Rachel mother Nella left her biological father for another man who is abusive and arrogant. After,
...self exaggerated stories. One thing she tells herself is that her mother was kidnapped by a lunatic. On another occasion a classmate asks where her mother is and she says that her mother is on a business trip in London. Their similarities help each other to grow and mature and eventually come to terms with their situations.
...inds that she can be happy and content having her own life, without being treated like a doormat by others. She is finally truly happy with her life and the way it is going, except for one thing. Her life is complete when, after years of wondering about her sister, and then years of waiting, Nettie finally comes home, bringing “their” children, and Adam’s wife from Africa. As Celie puts it, “I feel a little peculiar around the children. For one thing, they grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sophia and Jack and Odessa real old and don’t know much what going on. But I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.”(295) With her long lost sister, and her kids reunited with her after so much time, there really wouldn’t be any other way to feel besides young again, except for maybe an urge to make up for lost time. Now that she’s being treated like she should be, it should be easier to make up the time to her family, because she can be herself, and be happy about it. That’s saying a lot after all she’s been through, and Celie will surely make the best of her from this point on.
Julia Alvarez. “Snow”. Portable Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. Ed. Lauren G, Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. 8th ed. Boston, Wadsworth 2011. 75-76. Print