Before We Were Blue: A Review and Reflection by a Demisexual and Recovered Bulimic

There are a lot of books about eating disorders out there. If you’ve never looked for a book about an eating disorder before, congratulations — you have a lot of books to choose from! These include recovery workbooks, memoirs, and fictional narratives starring characters with eating disorders. The phenomenon arguably started with Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, an autobiographical memoir that pulls no punches in its graphic descriptions of her struggles growing up pulled between the two, much like someone might be pulled between two abusive lovers until she nearly died from it. Since its publication and success in 1996, multiple other attempts at books about eating disorders, fictional and nonfiction, have stolen the spotlight. It seems every few years some new book about someone’s experience with an eating disorder or a new fictional book about a forlorn young woman forced into a recovery center is the hot topic. Questions are asked over and over, usually the same — are these books triggering? Is it a good idea to pen works that reinforce that little voice in our heads if they are? Should you read them? And lastly, what makes this book worth picking up when there are so many like it?

When I was asked to review Before We Were Blue, all of these questions went through my mind…