Hunger point

Food has always been a pleasure and a curse for 26-year-old Frannie and the women of her family. Raised by a mother obsessed with the ritual of dieting, a woman seemingly more in love with food than with her daughters, Frannie and her younger sister, Shelly, have undergone a lifetime of fat camps and Weight Watchers programs and have experienced the sugar high of consuming a box of Girl Scout cookies, the illicit thrill of midnight binges, and the triumph of fitting into a pair of size 6 jeans. Frannie's family acts as if this fascination with food is normal, until Shelly takes dieting too seriously and descends into the nightmare of a life-threatening eating disorder. With devastating insight, Jillian Medoff looks deep into the heart of an American family and emerges with a first novel that is at once heartbreakingly honest, wickedly funny, and wonderfully life-affirming: a warm, witty, and perceptive look at a tough yet tender young woman struggling to understand a younger sister battling anorexia and bulimia, bewildered parents who have grown apart, and her own despair at ever finding the right job, boyfriend, or place of her own.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Mental Health, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.