Books I've read: Elena Vanishing

 

This is another of the books I stumbled upon on the Libby app when I finished something else I was reading.  It's a memoir, written by a mother and daughter team about the daughter's struggle with anorexia. I read a lot of books like this in the late '80s and early '90s, but it's been a long time since I read a new anorexia book.

Elena is kind of the perfect child.  An over-achiever who has her goal of being a nurse firmly entrenched and does everything she can to ensure she gets there.  She's studies hard, volunteers at the hospital and makes sure every minute of her day is used productively.  The only thing that isn't perfect, is her body and when she turns her determination, focus and over-achieving nature to that, she's as successful at losing weight as she is at everything else.

When the book starts, Elena is already deep in the throes of anorexia.  It started when she was away at boarding school, out of sight of her parents, so by the time she goes back to living with them again, the behaviors and the secrecy surrounding them are well entrenched.  Lying is a constant thing, telling her parents she's eating elsewhere as a way to avoid family mealtimes at home.  

The problem is, not eating is starting to make Elena sick.

When she complains of chest pains, her mother takes her to a doctor and the extent of her weightloss and the effects of her binging and purging become coming to light.  She's shipped back to the States to a hospital specializing in eating disorders, but this. is only the beginning of the journey for Elena.

The book follows her through her last year of high school and her attempts to go to college to get her nursing degree.  She goes through treatment after treatment, yet the voice in her head is stronger than any therapy and she finds herself at its mercy again and again, her face back in a toilet bowl and her body on the verge of collapse time and time again.

This was a particularly harrowing book because of how often Elena failed to get better.  Most other anorexia books I've read almost make the doctors saints in the way they get their patients through their treatment and back to health.  The doctors here fail as often as Elena does, and with each failure, she becomes more resitant to treatment or any kind of help.

I wouldn't say I enjoyed this one, but having lived for over 30 years with a friend who suffers from an eating disorder and has failed treatment more times than I can count, I feel like this is a very realistic look at what it feels like to be locked into a disease that's literally consuming you.  So if you're into that...

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb: 

Seventeen-year-old Elena is vanishing. Every day means renewed determination, so every day means fewer calories. This is the story of a girl whose armor against anxiety becomes artillery against herself as she battles on both sides of a lose-lose war in a struggle with anorexia.

Told entirely from Elena's perspective over a five-year period and co-written with her mother, award-winning author Clare B. Dunkle, Elena's memoir is a fascinating and intimate look at a deadly disease, and a must read for anyone who knows someone suffering from an eating disorder.

Weekly Goals 17-11-25

 We had our staff Christmas party yesterday and it made me realize how little time there is left until the end of the year.  And how much I work I have to get done before then.  So, I'm going to need to really get going on some of that stuff because I'm away on tour with the orchestra for a week as well, and I'm not sure I'll get much work done over that period.  At least, not the kind of desk work I'm talking about here.  I'll be dong other work which is just as important, but it's not going get the stuff I need to get done for 2026 done.

I need to think a bit about what I want to give people for Christmas presents this year.  I don't have a ton of money and I usually try to make my gifts anyway, but I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have to do that this year.  Maybe I'll just bake for everyone...

I'm going to try and keep up my flash fiction writing this week and continue not to look at the new book.  I think agents must be trying to clear out their query boxes ahead of the holidays because I've had quite a slew of rejections for Stranger over the last week.

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 14-11-25

 

It's the end of the week so what am I celebrating?

It's the weekend!

It's felt like a long week, so I'm glad.  Even though I have some work stuff on tomorrow.

I've done a lot of teaching this week.  One of the other instructors is sick, so I've covered a bunch of her classes on top of teaching my own.  Plus, the weather has finally been good enough to ride my bike to work most days.  So I'm celebrating all that extra exercise.

I still haven't touched the new book.  I'm thinking I might leave it until the holidays now.  Then I'll have a nice long stretch of time to read through and make notes.

I've been writing flash fiction most days.  Just 1000 words, to a prompt, but it's keeping my imagination and my writing muscles in good order.

I saw Bugonia and it's definitely one of the best films I've seen in a long time.  Great acting and genuinely surprising storytelling.  You really didn't know where the story was going to go next and that's so unusual these days.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've Read: Okay for Now

 

I finished the book I had loaded to my Libby app and needed something else to read, so I browsed around a bit and found this one that looked like it could be interesting.  Within about five minutes of starting, I knew I was in good hands with this one.  It's as voicey as all hell and I was in Doug's pocket from page two or three.

It's set in the late sixties, during the Vietnam War.  Doug is in junior high in New York, loves the Yankees and his prize possession is a cap that was given to him by Joe Pepitone when he came to throw a ball around with some of the kids on the school team.   Unfortunately, Doug has two older brothers and the one who still lives at home - the other is in Vietnam - is kind of jerk and bullies him mercilessly.  So it's no big surprise when this brother finds the cap, steals it, then passes it on for cash.

This is the very efficient set up for the story which actually begins when Doug's father loses his job and they're forced to move to a small upstate town where he's found work at a factory.  A tough bully of a man, he doesn't take any of his family's feelings into account when he uproots them from their home and takes them to a dump of a house in the sticks.

Dough doesn't think he'll ever fit in there.  Everyone looks at him suspiciously, especially after a wave of petty crime sweeps the town and all eyes are on his older brother as the perpetrator.  But then Doug meets Lil outside the library and she doesn't seem to care that he's a weird outsider.  And inside the library he discovers a book of paintings by James Audubon than make his feel things he's never felt before.

With the support of the few new friends he makes in his new home, Doug begins building a life for himself, discovering he has talents he never suspected he possessed, finding the strength to stand up to his abusive father and to cope with living with his oldest brother who comes back from the war a very different man.

I really enjoyed this book.  Doug is exactly the kind of scrappy underdog character I love and his way of talking about the world he lives in and the people around him is both touching and hilarious at times.  He's a character you can't help but root for,  even when you want to scream at him not to do things you know he's going to do because he's a fourteen-year-old boy.  The supporting characters are all really well drawn too, even really incidental ones like the old guy who Doug delivers groceries to and needs his lightbulbs changed every week.

So I'd recommend this one.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Midwesterner Gary D. Schmidt won Newbery Honor awards for Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boys and The Wednesday Wars, two coming-of-age novels about unlikely friends finding a bond. Okay For Now, his latest novel, explores another seemingly improbable alliance, this one between new outsider in town Doug Swieteck and Lil Spicer, the savvy spitfire daughter of his deli owner boss. With her challenging assistance, Doug discovers new sides of himself. Along the way, he also readjusts his relationship with his abusive father, his school peers, and his older brother, a newly returned war victim of Vietnam.

Weekly Goals 10-11-25

 I have been very good and I haven't been near the new book.  Things keep occurring to me about it at odd times, but rather than dive back into the draft and implement them, I just make a note of what I'm thinking and I'll look at them all after I do my read-through of the draft in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I'm keeping my writing muscles in good working order by writing flash fiction most days and kind of tootling about with the book for younger readers (maybe) that I'm playing with.  And I'm reading.  I'm reading a lot.

This week my goals are to try and write a flash fiction piece every day, to finish reading at least two, maybe three books and to review a few more chapters for people in my crit group.  I'm also reading through an older manuscript to see if I think it might be ready to send to my publisher.   And still sending out queries for A Stranger to Kindness.

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 7-11-25

 

It's the end of the week so what am I celebrating?

It's the weekend!

My partner is housesitting up the coast for a few weeks, so I'm going to go up and spend the weekend by the beach.  It's probably not quite swimming weather yet, but it does look like tomorrow is going to be gorgeous day, so you never know.

Unfortunately, I have gym tuition on Sunday morning, so I'll have to come back into town for that which means I don't get to spend Sunday up there too.  But to be honest, that's probably not such a bad thing - I'll need to get some stuff done around the house and coming home on Sunday will let me do that.  I can pretty much guarantee that even if I ask my son to clean the house, it won't get done.  Plus, I have some writing work I'd like to get done too.

It's been an okay week.  Nothing too exciting has happened.  I did go and see the Spinal Tap sequel which I enjoyed very much.  Probably not quite as much as I enjoyed the first one, but I was only 13 when I saw that, and like so many other people, I wasn't 100% sure if what I was seeing was a documentary or not.  It seemed far too silly to be real, but at the same time, at 13, I didn't know much about the music industry or documentary, so...

Not much to write home about really...  What are you celebrating this week

IWSG- November

 It's the first Wednesday of the month so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group.

Our IWSG hosts this month are Jennifer Lane, Jenni Enzor, Renee Scattergood, Rebecca Douglass, Lynn Bradshaw, and Melissa Maygrove!

This month's question is a goodie!

When you began writing, what did you imagine your life as a writer would be like? Were you right, or has this experience presented you with some surprises along the way?

When I first started writing seriously, I was a teenager.  A young teenager.  I pictured myself getting published and becoming a bestseller before I was 20, my films being made into successful movies and my life in the lap of luxury beginning.

Guess what?

It didn't happen.

This was back in the days before email, so sending off a manuscript, especially from Australia or New Zealand, was a massive undertaking.  Paper weighs a lot and the decision had to be made whether to send the package by air or sea.  I entered contests, sent manuscripts direct to publishers and surprise, surprise, I never heard anything back.  I got a bit discouraged and stopped writing for a while, but by the time I was in college, I was back at it.

And I never really stopped.

Fast forward to the early 2000s and things changed.  I joined an online writing group and suddenly had a fabulous group of critique partners and a community of other authors who were also striving to be published.  They pushed me to be a better writer, encouraged me to branch out and write things outside of my comfort zone.  I wrote and published a large number of short stories with this group encouraging me, and when a bunch of us decided we were ready to move onto novels, we started a new group to focus on that.

We queried and consoled one another as the rejections rolled in, rejoiced together when someone got a partial or full request, and celebrated hard when one after another, people started getting what we all dreamed of: agent representation and publishing contracts.

Yet, despite having published six novels to date, my writing career looks nothing like what I imagined as a teenager.

I'm not a bestseller.   My books get great reviews, but very few people buy them.  If I get enough money in a quarterly royalty check to buy a coffee, it's cause for celebration.  Hollywood isn't beating down my door to adapt my books.  And I'm sure not living in the lap of luxury. 

I have two day jobs to keep afloat and have to squeeze writing time out of what little leisure time that leaves me. I had an agent for a few years, but lost that partnership when she left the agency.  So, I'm back in the query trenches, hoping for an opportunity to publish the next book with a publisher with greater reach than the one I'm currently with.

So, I guess it's safe to say my writing career is nothing like what I expected.  There's been a lot more disappointments than highlights, a lot more rejection than I ever thought I'd face and a lot less personal connection with people in the publishing industry.

But despite all that, I keep writing.  I keep querying.  I keep publishing.  I keep hoping that one day I'll get that one 'yes' that will transform my writing career into what 14-year-old me always beleived it would be.