The Winter I Refused

The Winter I Refused is a nonfiction memoir of my hospitalization for anorexia nervosa in 1998. The 14-year-old speaker intimately describes the physical and psychological experience of anorexia. The retrospective voice, interwoven throughout the text, discovers that while the cause of her illness remains mysterious, the nature of it reveals a profound sense of alienation that has little to do with weight and food. Compelled toward self-destruction not by trauma but overwhelming boredom, the speaker discovers the dangers of an idle sensitive mind. Her recovery involves reinventing her relationship with consciousness itself. Anorexia, in this memoir, becomes a metaphor for introversion gone haywire, for discovering passion for life only after toying dangerously with existence itself.