Thin- Grace Bowman

"Powerfully written, beautifully articulated, gripping" Independent on Sunday.

"If I share a secret with you, do you promise to tell everyone?"
Grace Bowman lived a perfectly ordinary life as a pretty, popular teenager until one day, aged eighteen, she went on a diet- and didn't stop. Then couldn't stop. Her weight plummeted to less than six stone. Starving herself had become an addiction.
A poignant account of surviving the urge to self-destruct, and growing into a shape of her own, Thin exposes the secrets and dispels the myths that surround anorexia nervosa. An extraordinary account of one young woman's courage to face up to her illness, it is also an inspirational story that reaches out to others lost in the wilderness- those still suffering and those who just want to understand.
I loved this book. I have read many memoirs of those, suffering and recovering from eating disorders and this is the most honest and insightful that I have come across. It seems that as well as trying to explain to others, Bowman herself is trying to make some sense of her journey to hell and back again. It is a rare and brave account of the workings of the eating disordered mind, one which sufferers and carers alike will identify with. Especially effective is Bowman's use of the inner voice, the anorexic voice that drives her. She deviates from a straightforwrd narrative with play extracts, and medical fact which I found very innovative. Her work shows huge amounts of self-awareness, but unlike other memoirs of this kind, never descends into self-pity.
Everyone should read this book.

"Bowman describes her descent into anorexia with clinical skill; if you heven't understood it before, you will now...brave, revealing and shocking." William Leith, Guardian.