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A review by root
How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia by Kelsey Osgood
0.5
Osgood has exactly two points to make in the entirety of this nearly 300 page book: the first is that we societally normalize and even praise disordered eating in our every day lives which naturally contributes to the development of eating disorders as well as the ability for people with EDs to go undetected and without help because people fail to notice how serious the behavior is. The second is that eating disorder focused media, while claiming to have the goal of spreading awareness of the reality of eating disorders, tend to function more as guides full of tips and tricks or triggering material to those that engage in or are wanting to engage in disordered eating habits due to the amount of excessive detail in the media, and tend to romanticize the disorder.
The rest of the book is essentially just beating your head in with those two points over and over, combined with a frankly impressive and embarrassing amount of projection from the author. It would be fine if this were simply a memoir describing her personal experiences, but she makes many broad and general claims about everyone with eating disorders.
The author claims that everyone who has ever written or talked about their eating disorder is doing so "to brag" about their eating disorder as competition to be the "best" at anorexia, and then later reveals that when she found out that someone she knew was writing a book about anorexia at the same time as she was, she had a breakdown about how the other person she knew "had better stats" than her and was "better at anorexia" than her as well as generally talks about how she views/viewed everyone with eating disorders as competition to the point of assuming anyone who confides in her about their disordered eating habits must be competing instead of simply seeing her as a friend they can trust. She condemns adding excessive detail in ED related media (which I do agree with) but then turns around and adds a lot of detail about her own disorder as well as the disorders and appearances of other people she's met. She claims everyone with anorexia has the eating disorder for "vanity" reasons and that everyone with anorexia just copied their behaviors from various ED related media and specific celebrities and that anorexics "study" to have their disorder only to reveal that she, in her own words, "wanted to become anorexic" and researched anorexia and copied the behaviors. The author is obsessed with the validity of her experience while judging the validity of everyone else's experiences including claiming some woman from the 1940s who she couldn't have possibly ever met "probably didn't meet schizophrenia criteria" and was only doing it for attention and in the next sentence states that this woman was diagnosed schizophrenic at a ward without knowing what schizophrenia was. The term "attention whore" is thrown around quite a lot for someone motivated by attention to the point of wishing she had been "kidnapped or something."
Overall, a pathetic author in both writing quality and personality, and this book could have been 2 paragraphs maximum. I wish many wonderful things to the people she's treated horribly in this book.
The rest of the book is essentially just beating your head in with those two points over and over, combined with a frankly impressive and embarrassing amount of projection from the author. It would be fine if this were simply a memoir describing her personal experiences, but she makes many broad and general claims about everyone with eating disorders.
The author claims that everyone who has ever written or talked about their eating disorder is doing so "to brag" about their eating disorder as competition to be the "best" at anorexia, and then later reveals that when she found out that someone she knew was writing a book about anorexia at the same time as she was, she had a breakdown about how the other person she knew "had better stats" than her and was "better at anorexia" than her as well as generally talks about how she views/viewed everyone with eating disorders as competition to the point of assuming anyone who confides in her about their disordered eating habits must be competing instead of simply seeing her as a friend they can trust. She condemns adding excessive detail in ED related media (which I do agree with) but then turns around and adds a lot of detail about her own disorder as well as the disorders and appearances of other people she's met. She claims everyone with anorexia has the eating disorder for "vanity" reasons and that everyone with anorexia just copied their behaviors from various ED related media and specific celebrities and that anorexics "study" to have their disorder only to reveal that she, in her own words, "wanted to become anorexic" and researched anorexia and copied the behaviors. The author is obsessed with the validity of her experience while judging the validity of everyone else's experiences including claiming some woman from the 1940s who she couldn't have possibly ever met "probably didn't meet schizophrenia criteria" and was only doing it for attention and in the next sentence states that this woman was diagnosed schizophrenic at a ward without knowing what schizophrenia was. The term "attention whore" is thrown around quite a lot for someone motivated by attention to the point of wishing she had been "kidnapped or something."
Overall, a pathetic author in both writing quality and personality, and this book could have been 2 paragraphs maximum. I wish many wonderful things to the people she's treated horribly in this book.