I'm sort of the exact target audience (john green fans who like listening to him in a sort of extended podcasteverything kinda IS tuberculosis, guys.
I'm sort of the exact target audience (john green fans who like listening to him in a sort of extended podcast format). Probably not it if you want a detailed account of tuberculosis but I found lots of this very fascinating!...more
bri lee is one of australia's most exciting young writers - I've now read all her works. eggshell skull was excellent, who gets to be smart had momentbri lee is one of australia's most exciting young writers - I've now read all her works. eggshell skull was excellent, who gets to be smart had moments of brilliance even if it lost steam by the end, and even though her fiction debut the work was a letdown this book - beauty, is the one I was most worried about reading. I knew the content would at best annoy me, at worst trigger me.
I think this is a very hard book to rate - and even to talk about. at the end of the day, a lot of it is taken from her personal experiences with anorexia and bulimia, and I think some of the reviews calling her 'self-absorbed' ect are missing the very point these essays are making which is that disordered eating, body image issues ect are much more about control and turning perfectionist tendencies inward than it really is about weight, looks and the good or bad things you have in your life. So I found her honesty and rawness to be somewhat impressive, she admits things in here you'd never ever pull out of me, and such harsh, uncomfortable self-criticism and voyeurism cannot have been easy to write, and the fact it made me extremely uncomfortable at times it probably a testament to how raw it was. I actually think Lee's willingness to admit to horrible thoughts, such as the scene in which she watches a woman eat dumplings and worries that if she did such a thing she may end up "fat like her", is sort of a strength of her writing. I think it's this brutal honesty that makes her non-fiction writing compelling.
And that said, I couldn't help but find this book frustrating at times. Lee's work is very inward-looking, and as soon as it became time to connect this theme to the larger topic of beauty, I found it fell flat. There was a certain lack of self-awareness that I, as someone whose definitely bigger than this author (literally, she gives you the numbers!), found annoying. Perhaps it's just hard for me to sympathise with someone whose entire body image issue is around having to buy size 10 clothes, oh the horror!!
And maybe I'm in the wrong for finding that frustrating - but I do think a book on a topic as wide as beauty should have a little bit more of an external focus. I don't think she adequately examined or covered the topic, aside from a few surface level gestures toward marketing, race and class and feminism and how this connects with the perpetuity of beauty culture and impacts different people in different ways.
Perhaps this book would have been more successful if it was written in a different way, pitched as more of a personal exploration with eating disorders rather than a larger analysis of beauty and how it connects to Bri Lee specifically.
So while I found moments of this interesting and compelling I'm not sure I would ever recommend it. It's not the best work on this theme, I don't think it's actually successful at analysing it's theme at all - and as a personal memoir, while I do admire her brutal honesty, I'm not sure if I exactly gained much out of reading it.
That said, will I be seated for her next book? Of course I will....more
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