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ISBN 13: 978-1-4683-0668-2
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Overlook
11/14/2013
Book Description
At fourteen, Kelsey Osgood became fascinated by the stories of women who starved themselves. She devoured their memoirs and magazine articles, committing the most salacious details of their cautionary tales to memoryโhow little they ate, their lowest weights, and their merciless exercise regimesโto learn what it would take to be the very best anorectic.
When she was hospitalized for anorexia at fifteen, she found herself in an existential wormhole: how can one suffer from something one has actively sought out? Through her own decade-long battle with anorexia, which included three lengthy hospitalizations, Osgood harrowingly describes the haunting and competitive world of inpatient facilities populated with other adolescents, some as young as ten years old.
With attuned storytelling and unflinching introspection, Kelsey Osgood unpacks the modern myths of anorexia, examining the cult-like underbelly of eating disorders in the young, as she chronicles her own rehabilitation. How to Disappear Completely is a brave, candid, and emotionally wrenching memoir that explores the physical, internal, and social ramifications of eating disorders and subverts many of the popularly held notions of the illness and, most hopefully, the path to recovery.
Praise for How to Disappear Completely:
โWhy do countless young women (and not so young women, and some men, too) starve themselves to the brink of death? Do not read Kelsey Osgoodโs uncompromising memoir of her own anorexia unless you really want to know the truthโunvarnished by moral, therapeutic, or redemptive pietiesโabout this epidemic. How to Disappear Completely gives new meaning to gutsiness.โ โJudith Thurman, Staff Writer at The New Yorker, and prize-winning author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
โAll addictions are alike, but not anorexia. The looking glass malady covertly twists even the language of healing to its own ends. In this brilliant book, Kelsey Osgood breaks this demonโs code.โ โSuzannah Lessard, former New Yorker staff writer and author of The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family
โIn How To Disappear Completely, Kelsey Osgood achieves a paradox: she writes beautifully about anorexia, without beautifying or poeticizing an affliction that is anything but. Instead, her gripping story and smart analysis lay anorexia bare for what it isโgreedy, cunning, and wasteful, its logic tedious, its damage too often permanent. This is important reading for parents of teenagers, and friends and loved ones of anorectics, and an education for anyone whoโs felt the troubling allure of the waif archetype.โ โKatherine Sharpe, author of Coming of Age on Zoloft
โWhat sets Kelsey Osgoodโs memoir apart from the existing literature on anorexia is the authorโs commitment to stripping the glamour and romance from the illness. Yes, Osgood suffered from anorexia, but she refuses here to play the game of โeating-disorders pornโ, focusing instead on how we must learn better ways to discuss anorexia in order to โundermine its currencyโ, to save ourselves and our loved ones from the nightmare that it is. Intelligent, moving, beautifully written, Osgood has written a paean to wellness, and taken a forthright look at everything that anorexia, โbastard child of vanity and self-loathingโ, took from her life.โ โMolly McCloskey, author of Circles Around the Sun
โHow To Disappear Completely is a wholly original and thought-provoking meditationโpart-memoir, part sustained essayโon the coded culture of anorexia, what it purports to mean, and what it really signifies. I didnโt think I wanted to read another word about eating disorders, but Kelsey Osgood made me reassess the way I consider this illness, its genesis, and the suffering that underlies it.โโDaphne Merkin, author of Enchantment and Dreaming of Hitler
โKelsey Osgood has written a consequential book about an important subject: the ways in which the stories anorectics tell themselves and others about the disease can be as dangerous to them as their own behavior . . . Carefully considered and delivered in finely wrought prose, itโs a book that should find a large audience.โโCaitlin Flanagan, author of Girl Land and To Hell with All That
โClear-eyed, compassionate, and courageous, How To Disappear Completely deepened my understanding of anorexia and those who suffer from it. Kelsey Osgood is a terrific writer.โโRosie Schaap, author of Drinking With Men
Kelsey Osgood received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. Her essays have appeared in the NewYorker.com, New York Magazine, Self, and Tablet, among others. How to Disappear Completely is her first book. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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