What Is Normal, What Is Healthy? A Comparative Study of Anorexia Nervosa Through the Lens of Autobiographical Illness Narratives
Summary
In my thesis, I compare three memoirs written by recovering/recovered anorexics: Wasted (1998) by Marya Hornbacher, How to Disappear Completely (2013) by Kelsey Osgood and An Apple a Day (2012) by Emma Woolf. I read these works within the framework of the illness narrative/autobiography and compare the ways in which they represent the lived illness experience of anorexia nervosa. For this comparison I borrow ideas and concepts developed by theorists working on disability, mental illness/health and anorexia, which enables me to explore the portrayal of illness, diagnosis and recovery in the memoirs while also investigating the underlying notions of health, normalcy, disability and difference that precede the general understandings of these terms. In this way, I can determine to what extent the general explanatory models of anorexia have either been internalised or subverted in these autobiographical narratives, as well as form an understanding of how the practice of diagnosis influences the experience of living with anorexia and the ways in which recovery is conceptualised by these authors. In interpreting the various representations of illness, diagnosis and recovery, I employ concepts from the field of autobiography that can aid me in reading the narratives from a literary perspective, as well as works about the illness narrative as a genre in order to place these three memoirs in a context of other illness life writings.