THIN GIRLS

A first-time novelist explores the abuse women inflict on themselves, the abuse others inflict upon them, and the intersection of the two.

When they were small, Lily and Rose were essentially indistinguishable—even to themselves. As they approached adolescence, though, Lily, the outgoing, people-pleasing twin, had become everyone’s favorite while obstinate, awkward Rose became her sister’s shadow. Their relationship to each other changed again when Rose discovered a talent for enduring the fad diets imposed by the leader of their clique. As Rose stops eating altogether, Lily starts eating more and more. Rose recounts this history as she embarks on her second year in a clinic where she is supposed to be recovering from anorexia but is really consuming just enough calories to avoid force-feeding. She likes the comforting routine of the clinic and the company of other “thin girls.” It’s only when Rose realizes that Lily is in a dangerously abusive relationship that she becomes determined to return to the outside world. Rose is a strange and prickly character, constantly interrupting her narration with bits of trivia from the random assortment of books available at the clinic. She is both truthful and wily, and her powers of insight are prodigious—except when she’s analyzing herself. It takes her a very long time, for example, to discover that her efforts to shrink her body down to nothingness are related to her unwillingness to accept her own sexuality. The story she tells is as gripping as a thriller, but it’s Clarke’s language that truly makes this novel special. She writes with a lyricism that not only encompasses the grotesque and the transcendent, but also sometimes commingles the two. When Rose finds a collection of short fiction Lily has written, these harrowing little fables bring the latent otherworldliness of the novel as a whole to the surface.

Incisive social commentary rendered in artful, original, and powerfully affecting prose.