Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Disturbing and Dissapointing, 7 Jun 2008
I bought this book thinking it would help me with my disordered eating and give me hope for my future. Instead it just made me feel worse about everything. This woman still has SERIOUS issues with food. She is still obsessed with it, she still skips breakfast and looks to me like she has not really healed from her eating disorder.
She talks about knowing the pain of being fat but her highest weight at 5'5" was 11 stone 3lbs!!! That is only a few pounds away from the medical limit for her height. Hardly fat.
There is also an enormous amount of discussion about her family, which again seems to me to be way off the point of the book.
I would not recommend this book. It saddens me that this woman still thinks of herself as fat. If I was anorexic I would find this book triggering. As someone with disordered eating I just found it depressing.
I never write reviews but I had to for this one.
Highly disturbing. Disempowering.
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12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Frustrating, 24 Jul 2006
I read the excerpts of this book in the Times and thought it sounded fascinating. It was - occasionally. Some of Candida Crewe's revelations are jaw-dropping; about the way she arranges food on her plate so it looks as if she's eaten something, about the way she dresses, her ability (and need) to assess the weight of every other woman in the room. Full marks for honesty.
However, this is also a deeply frustrating book. Firstly, it's badly written. I'm amazed that so many people praised her writing, because I thought it was truly awful. She can write elegantly, but she is also crude, lobbing in swear words and crass phrases (jacksh**t is one of her favourites.)Is this how she speaks or is she trying to sound trendy? There are some terrible howlers ('of coarse' and 'balled' instead of 'bawled') and it's very, very repetitive. Several anecdotes are repeated, told only slightly differently.
Most of all, though, this book is frustrating because here is an intelligent, wealthy, happily married woman with three healthy children who spends a large part of her time obsessing about her appearance. She won't take exercise (she seems almost proud of this) but she thinks her stomach is fat. She spends a great deal of time thinking about her stomach. To be fair to her, she knows this is ridiculous, but she seems incapable of doing anything about it. We are never told whether she has a life outside her work, her family and her eating disorder - whether she has ever spent any time helping people who have real problems, whether she worries about people who are genuinely starving, or animals who are mistreated, or any other of the million and one causes to which she could usefully devote some of the time she spends worrying about her waistline. Because, when you come down to it, the size of your stomach is so totally irrelevant that it pales into insignificance.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Elegant writing, subtle ideas, 12 May 2006
I thought this was marvellous, far better than The Hungry Years, and considerably more subtle. Crewe writes superbly and vividly evokes the extreme oddity of women's relationship with food and with thier own bodies. It made me think very hard about myself and my prejudices. Why do we so dislike fat? Even sofas have to be flat and square now! Crewe provides no glib answers, but what she writes will make you question the sheer amount of time we all spend trying to duck out of our own bodies as if this could make us immortal, and the waste of energy and love that results. I have often sat at all-woman lunches, watching everyone compete to eat as little as possible, with everyone thinking so hard about calroies that we forget to love each other and to laugh. This isn't self-obsessed; it's generous and kind, and it stretches a friendly hand across such frozen lunch-tables. Highly recommended.
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