Product Description

Based on diaries written in 1978, when she was eleven years old, the author offers a chronicle of her battle with anorexia and the pressures from family, peers, and society that led her to starve herself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98074 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Entertainment Weekly
A smart, funny, compassionate journal ... stands out as a fresh, edgy take on that perilous time in a girl's life...

Washington Post Book World
Poignant...Gottlieb is dead-on about society's irrational attitudes towards women's bodies.

Boston Globe
It reads like a novel - funny, touching, and absolutely gripping.

Customer Reviews

A portrait of a desparate girl!
What would a girl growing up in Beverly Hills in 1978 wish for at her birthday party? This chess-playing, math-loving whiz of a kid wishes to be the thinnest girl at school, maybe even the planet!

Lori is a brainy kid used to being cute to the adults in her life, except now they're calling her "different" & "unique". Now her school friends have turned their minds to the mush of makeup & boyfriends, what's a girl to do? Out shopping with her mother, Lori comes across a diary & starts on the journey of her life.

In three seasons this healthy youngster starves herself to the very brink & through her admissions & omissions in her diary, the reader will also be drawn toward that edge.

A lively, furious read! Fast, funny, fatuous & fearful by turns, Stick Figure is worth hunting up & grabbing. Not only is it a paean to journal writing(& I'm an evangelist for the examined life!), it is an engrossing exploration of the makings of an eating disorder which, back then, didn't have a name. NB. this diary has been expanded by the woman Lori did survive to become.

This would make an excellent book for any girl around the age of 12 & for anyone older who has taken up dieting as a lifestyle. May I suggest you give a journal as well, it could save their life!...

very good
I found this interesting as Lori's age was significantly younger than those of the characters in other popular novels and autobiographies on eating disorders, and this gives the book an interesting slant. At times the 11-year-old Lori is so naive it becomes annoying, but all in all this is a very insightful view into an eating disorder. This is also the only book of its nature that I've come across that really places an emphasis on the role of the parents in the development of anorexia in the adolescent. It's very easy to hate Lori's mother. To conclude, a poignant and darkly funny insight into an 11-year-old girl's desperate wish to be thin.