Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women's Writings by Lucille Cairns (review)

Reviewed by: Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women's Writings by Lucille Cairns Kaliane Ung Cairns, Lucille. Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women's Writings. Liverpool UP, 2023. 9781802077957. Pp. 320. Lucille Cairns' posthumous monograph is focused on first-person women narratives that describe "the phenomenological, lived, embodied and affective experience of eating disorders (ED) from the point of view of ex-sufferers, rather than from the point of view of clinicians, medical researchers, and theorists" (6). Cairns' method favors a timely approach that centers patient experiences in a world that displays (and often promotes) eating disorders across different media. Cairns builds on a growing literature on ED that remains devoted to anorexia nervosa (14) and adds bulimia nervosa (or bulimarexia) and binge eating disorder to her vast corpus comprising 45 literary texts written by women. The proposed intellectual synthesis is particularly meticulous and poignant, as well as informed by the author's first-hand experience of ED. Cairns studies the three variants separately, but also explains what ties them together, namely the "impression of being dominated and driven by a tyrannical, anthropomorphised force exterior to the self" (209). Delving into very close reading, she offers a comprehensive analysis of many French and Francophone novels and testimonies to investigate how the trauma enacted by and through the ED transforms both the female body and the experience of textual narration. Cairns illuminates the complex process of articulating what is ailing the female body at odds with social norms. She analyzes Valérie Valère's Le pavillon des enfants fous (1978), in which the narrator ventriloquizes the clinical discourse on the anorectic (38). Then, she examines the mind-body dualism in Camille de Peretti's Thornytorinx (2005), which transforms the novel into vomit, a textual mixture in which the author experiments with writing the abject (162). Cairns' analyses are particularly fascinating as they distort common misconceptions about ED and probe the distasteful aesthetics of the narratives beyond the therapeutic gesture of writing the self. As in the case study of bulimarexia, only a partial recovery is allowed by a society that continues to "promote unnaturally thin body 'ideals'" (187). In the chapter on binge eating disorder, Cairns' original approach explores "the motif of EDs as a form of language" (203) and displays a rigorous literary critique that emphasizes empathy with the women behind the chosen corpus, without leaving out the most monstrous or taboo aspects of this literature. Despite the morbid undertones of the narratives, the monograph is a celebration of female agency and the beneficial aspects of scriptotherapy in the process of recovery (258). Eating Disorders in Contemporary French Women's Writings will be a compelling read for any scholar working on the female body in contemporary literature, as well as a valuable addition to health humanities courses, to favor a better understanding of ED and a more humane approach to current treatments. End Page 183 Kaliane Ung University of Pittsburgh (PA) Copyright © 2024 American Association of Teachers of French