Not even five years ago, I went through a compulsive addiction to taking up less space. I wanted to inhabit less of the world, to see my bones show through the skin and be pared down to my skeletal size, maybe less. My eating disorder had so much less to do with eating than with a desire to be less. It wasn’t about vanity, even. On some level I knew I looked terrible all angled, washed out, and cold. Anorexia is supposed to be such a common disease, yet, deep in the throes, I never found a book that understood me and my disease, that didn’t paint me as a cheerleader or the desperate Queen Bee of high school. Nobody saw me as more than a cliché.
Enter Sarah Gerard’s parse new novel, Binary Star. The tale of addiction as told through two lovers, an unnamed girl struggling with an eating disorder and her boyfriend, an alcoholic, the story traces our inner desire for perfection and the methods we use to numb ourselves upon realizing we may never make it. Binary Star is the first thing I’ve ever read that understands eating disorders, I imagine less than coincidentally because Gerard herself has found herself in the depths of the disease. For the first time in my life, I saw on paper a character who wanted to inhabit less physical space, to have her clothes orbit around her frame, in the same terms I thought were entirely unique to my own disordered line of logic. I read the whole book in a couple hours, unable to steady myself until I knew how it would end. Continue reading
