Bokrecension: the best little girl in the world av Steven Levenkron

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the best little girl in the world.
The main character is Fransesca Dietrich. She was a regular looking girl, she went to school (great in school) and took dance classes (ballet) in her spare time until one day when Madame, -her dance teacher-, wanted to talk to her after dance class. She said to Fransesca that her dancing was improving but she needed to lose some weight if she wanted to get better.

After Madames words she put her self on a diet. She started counting the calories in her food very carefully. She would say to her parents that she had already eaten or that she didn’t like the food, everything to get out of the burden of eating. Every day she examined herself carefully to se how much weight she had lost. She imagined that she was someone else, a new person who she called Kessa and everytime she felt insecure she chanted her new name, she didn’t want to be the fat old Fransesca.
Kessa starts seeing a psychologist, but doesn´t like it, so she quits. ( to get Kessa healthy again,) her parents send her to another psychologist, Sherman, who becomes her greatest support during her sickness.

When Kessa drops some more pounds they put her in a hospital. She dislikes being there and drops even more. One night at the hospital, when she tries to get up from the bed, her body can´t stand the pressure anymore, and she faints. Her room-mate wakes up and calls in the doctor, who finds her lying on the floor and realizes what has to be done. Next morning they put a tube in her to make her gain weight and to keep her alive. All alone in the hospital, Sherman is her only way back.

After taking off her robe, Kessa lay down on the bed. Kessa always felt her cleanest and thinnest right after she had showered, and tonight she felt especially good. True, she had been forced to eat dinner, but she had gotten rid of dinner. There was no food in her body. She was clean and pure and lean. Now for the test of how lean. Kessa ran her fingers over her stomach. Flat. But was it flat enough? Not quite. She still had some way to go. Just to be safe, she told herself. Still, it was nice the way her pelvic bones rose like sharp hills on either side of her stomach...

She was a five-foot-four, ninety-eight-pound monster!
That''''s how Kessa saw herself, at any rate.
She began tearing out the photographs of the thinnest models from her fashion magazine. Soon I''''ll be thinner than all of you, she swore to herself. And then, I''''ll be the winner. The thinner is the winner.
She felt a contraction in her stomach, almost as if it were echoing her words, but she would not be intimidated by hunger pans, despite the fact that it was two o''''clock and she had eaten nothing so far today but half a grapefruit. The thinner is the winner, she repeated, and smiled menacingly at the models, who grinned back at her in vacant pride at their own appearance.

I think that the book was really great. It described the sickness in a good way, that made it easier to understand what Kessa was going through. It was rather (fairly) disgusting in the chapter when they put the tube in her, you could almost see it before you. After reading the book, I understand anorexics in a different way and why people ...