Wintergirls

I picked up Wintergirls because Speak had stayed with me for years, and I wanted to see what Laurie Halse Anderson would do with a harder subject. This one is shorter in pages but heavier to carry. Published by Viking in 2009, 278 pages in hardback, ISBN 9780670011100, it follows Lia Overbrook, eighteen, through a winter after the death of her ex-best friend. I read it slowly, a few chapters at a time, because the voice gets under your skin and stays there.

Lia is living with anorexia that has already put her in treatment once. She counts everything. Calories, bites, minutes on the treadmill, the space between her thighs. She cuts herself too, thin lines she hides under sleeves. The book opens with news that Cassie Parrish is dead. Cassie was Lia's best friend since childhood, then her rival in hunger, then a stranger she stopped calling back. Cassie died alone in a motel room after bingeing and purging, with pills in her system, her esophagus torn. The medical term that comes later is Boerhaave syndrome, a rupture from violent vomiting. Lia hears the outline first and fills in the rest in her head for weeks.

What broke me early was the number 33. Cassie called Lia 33 times the night she died. Lia did not pick up. She saw the light on her phone and let it go to voicemail. She tells herself Cassie was dramatic, that there had been false alarms before, that she was tired. All of that is true and none of it helps. Anderson does not stage this as a single decision. She shows Lia listening to the messages later, deleting, replaying, trying to find a place where a different choice would have been obvious. There was no such place. That is why it festers.

The calls she did not answer

Lia and Cassie had been inseparable as kids. Sleepovers, swimming, trading clothes. Then middle school shifted into competition. Who was thinner, who could go longer without lunch, who got noticed. By high school they were wintergirls together, pale and brittle and proud of it. Then Cassie pulled away into a louder crowd, drinking and hooking up, still vomiting but calling it partying. Lia went the other direction, quieter, more controlled, admitted to New Seasons, a treatment clinic, for her anorexia.

Their fallout was not one fight. It was a slow freeze. Lia felt Cassie had betrayed their private rules by making hunger social. Cassie felt Lia was fragile and judgmental. They stopped sitting together. They texted less. When Cassie called that night, Lia was already telling herself the friendship was over. Anderson writes those missed calls without melodrama. Just a girl in bed, phone glowing, choosing sleep. Then waking to police and parents and a name that will not leave her alone.

Cassie's ghost arrives quickly. Not a polite memory. A voice that nags, begs, mocks. Lia sees her in mirrors, in the back seat, at the foot of the bed. Ghost Cassie is bloated and angry, then thin again, then crying. She says Lia let her die. She says they promised to be thin together forever. She says do not eat. Lia argues out loud and then feels crazy for arguing. I found these scenes convincing as grief and guilt, not as horror. When you have not answered, your mind keeps calling back.

Funeral clothes and counting

The funeral is awful in the specific way real funerals are. Lia has to find something to wear that hides her arms and her collarbones at the same time. Her stepmother Jennifer fusses over tights. Her father tries to be steady. Her little stepsister Emma, nine, does not fully grasp that Cassie will not come back. Emma loved Cassie because Cassie was fun and painted her nails. Now Emma watches Lia for cues on how sad to be.

At the service Lia counts. Pews, hymns, calories she did not eat that morning. She watches Cassie's parents break down. She watches old friends cry who had not spoken to Cassie in months. She feels both invisible and exposed. Someone hugs her too hard and feels bone. Someone else avoids her eyes because she looks sick. Anderson captures how eating disorders warp even mourning. Lia cannot grieve without measuring. She measures her grief against Cassie's, wonders who was sicker, who won. It is ugly and honest.

After that, days blur into rituals. Lia wakes, weighs, runs water in the bathroom so no one hears her spit out toothpaste. She cuts cereal into tiny pieces and moves them around. She keeps a calorie ledger in her head down to single digits. She lies to her treatment team about intake. She lies to her father about feeling dizzy. She tells the reader the truth in flat numbers. 400 calories. 200 calories. 100. The precision is chilling because it feels like control when it is collapse.

Self-harm is part of the same loop. Lia uses a razor she hides in a music box. She does not describe it to shock. She describes it as release, then shame, then bandages and long sleeves. I appreciated that Anderson does not turn this into a lesson paragraph. She just shows Lia doing it after a fight, after a binge urge, after seeing Ghost Cassie. The pattern is clear without a lecture attached.

Jennifer, Emma and the split house

Home is split in two and Lia lives in the crack. Her parents are divorced. Her father, a professorial type who loves her but freezes when things get messy, is remarried to Jennifer. Jennifer is pregnant for much of the book, tired, trying to keep a normal house with rules about dinner and homework. Emma adores Lia and follows her around, braiding hair, asking for stories, stealing Lia's socks. Lia loves Emma fiercely and also resents how easily Emma eats toast with jam.

Her mother, Dr. Marrigan, is a cardiac surgeon turned researcher, brilliant and cold in the way busy people can be. She left the daily parenting to others and now swoops in with plans and referrals. Lia spends weekends with her mother in a clean apartment that feels like a waiting room. Her mother stocks the fridge with safe foods and watches every bite. They talk past each other. Her mother talks about potassium and heart risk. Lia hears only judgment.

What Anderson does well here is show love misfiring. Lia's father pays for treatment and drives her to appointments, but he cannot say the word anorexia without flinching. Jennifer tries to feed her and Lia reads it as attack. Dr. Marrigan offers an intensive outpatient plan and Lia reads it as control. Everyone is scared. No one says I am scared you will die like Cassie. So they say clean your plate, or you missed curfew, or your grades are slipping. Emma is the only one who says plain things. Are you going to die too. Will you stay for my birthday. Those lines land harder than any clinic speech.

School is background noise. Lia is supposed to be applying to college, keeping up with history, smiling at teachers. She drifts. Old friends from the Cassie era avoid her. New friends do not know how to approach a girl who faints in the hallway. She vomits in school bathrooms and rinses her mouth and goes back to class. Teachers mark her present and miss the point.

Elijah at the motel

Elijah is the one new person who gets close. He works at the motel where Cassie died, a lanky boy with a sad past of his own, living in the seams of the town. Lia goes back to the motel again and again, first to understand how Cassie died, then because Elijah listens without trying to fix her. He gives her soda she does not drink. He shows her the room, Room 213, and tells her what the paramedics said. He does not flinch when she cries.

Their bond is tender and risky. Elijah likes Lia. Lia likes being seen by someone who knows the worst address in her life. They kiss. They talk late. He tells her about his own family falling apart. She tells him pieces about New Seasons, about the feeding tube threats, about how hunger feels like static clearing. But Elijah cannot hold her illness. No boyfriend can. He brings her food and she throws it away. He says you look tired and she hears you look fat. Anderson lets this almost-romance stay small. It is not rescue. It is two lonely kids sharing a bench in winter.

The motel itself becomes a character. Stained carpet, buzzing vending machine, a payphone outside that still works. Lia stands there trying to imagine Cassie walking in, buying chips, asking for a room, vomiting for hours while waiting for Lia to call back. The image replays with changes. Sometimes Cassie is laughing. Sometimes she is begging. Sometimes she is already a ghost. Lia leaves flowers. She steals a towel. She sits in her car until the windows fog. Grief makes her superstitious. If she visits enough, maybe the 33 calls will make sense.

Elijah also connects to the darker pull in Lia. He knows dealers, knows girls who purge in restrooms, knows how to get pills. He does not push, but proximity matters. When Lia wants to disappear, she knows where to go and who will not ask questions. That danger sits quietly under their sweet scenes. I kept wanting someone to interrupt, to drive Lia home early, to break the spell before it hardened.

The night she almost dies

It builds, not all at once. Lia eats less and less. She exercises in secret, doing crunches in her room with the door locked, running in the cold until her chest burns. Her hair thins. Her skin grays. She faints and says she stood up too fast. Jennifer finds bloody tissues. Her father finds the razor. Dr. Marrigan gets labs back with numbers that scare even her. New Seasons says come back inpatient. Lia says she is fine.

The suicide attempt, if you can call it that, is tangled with the disorder. Lia does not write a note saying goodbye. She takes pills, a lot of them, after a day of almost no food, after Ghost Cassie screams that she should join her, after a fight where Jennifer cries and her father goes silent and Emma asks why Lia is always cold. Lia lies down and waits. Part of her wants to die. Part of her wants to be found and forced to stop fighting. Part of her is just exhausted and cannot tell the difference.

What saved her, in the plot, is messy. Emma finds her or hears something wrong. There is panic, vomiting, an ambulance, a stomach pump, bright lights. Anderson does not make it noble. Lia is angry at being saved. She is ashamed in front of Emma. She hates the hospital gown and the IV and her mother's face cracking open. The scene in the ER, with monitors beeping and nurses asking what she took and when, felt true to how medical crisis flattens drama into forms and vitals.

After, Dr. Marrigan pushes an intensive plan. No more bargaining. Weight restoration, therapy daily, no unsupervised time, no treadmill, no razor, no motel. Lia's father finally agrees instead of deferring. Jennifer clears the house of triggers where she can and sits with Lia at meals even when Lia screams. Emma makes cards and leaves them on Lia's pillow. Lia hates all of it and also leans into it a fraction. That fraction matters.

I want to pause on how triggering this middle stretch can be. Anderson includes specific calorie counts, weights, tricks for hiding food, details of vomiting and cutting. For readers who have lived this, those details may feel seen. They may also pull toward relapse. I wished the book had a touch more distance in two or three passages, a summary instead of a play by play. The honesty is the power and the risk. Younger readers should go in with support, not alone at midnight.

Ghost fight and thawing

The last movement is Lia fighting Cassie, which means fighting herself. Ghost Cassie grows more demanding as Lia starts to eat. Do not betray me. Do not get fat and live. Stay winter with me. Lia starts to answer back differently. You died and I am still here. I miss you and you are wrong. The ghost scenes turn from haunting to argument. Lia screams in her room. She throws the music box with the razor. She tells Emma the truth in kid-sized words. Cassie was sick like I am sick. She did not get help in time.

The payphone call is the hinge. Lia goes back to the motel one last time, in daylight, with a clearer head. She picks up the payphone outside Room 213 and calls for help, not Cassie, but the living. She calls her mother and her father and says she needs to go back to New Seasons. She says she does not want to die. It is not a grand speech. Her voice shakes. Coins clank. Elijah stands nearby and does not interfere. That restraint felt right. He cannot save her. She has to dial.

New Seasons the second time is not magic. Same bland walls, same meal plans, same Scale of Dread in the morning. What is different is Lia. She eats the toast even as Ghost Cassie hisses. She tells her therapist about the 33 calls without editing. She lets Jennifer sit beside her. She lets Emma visit and draw on her cast of bandages, metaphorically speaking. She writes Cassie a letter she does not send, saying I loved you and I could not save you. Recovery is shown as thawing, which is the book's central image. Wintergirls are frozen. Thaw hurts. Fingers tingle. Feelings return. Lia cries more, not less, as she gets better.

The final pages do not promise cure. Lia is still counting, but she adds instead of only subtracting. She notices spring smells, Emma laughing, her own hands steadier. She chooses a college brochure without panic. She eats dinner with her family and stays at the table. Ghost Cassie quiets, not gone, but thinner, farther. Lia says goodbye without forgiving herself fully. That felt honest. Guilt does not vanish because labs improve.

What holds up most is the voice. Lia narrates in fragments, lists, crossed-out thoughts. Anderson uses white space and repetition to mimic hunger brain. Phrases loop. Numbers intrude. A paragraph about Jennifer's soup can collapse into a calorie calculation mid-sentence. I found that form deeply effective. It puts you inside obsession without explaining it from outside.

What feels thin is the adult world beyond the parents. Doctors at New Seasons blur into one kind voice and one strict voice. Teachers barely register. Even Dr. Marrigan, vivid as a type, gets little backstory for why she parents through medicine. Lia's father is loving but vague. I wanted one scene where he sits with Lia and names his fear plainly, not as a lecture but as a father. The book keeps adults at arm's length because Lia does, which is psychologically right but leaves the second half a bit narrow. Everything depends on Lia deciding, which is true and also a lot to place on eighteen.

Still, I closed the book moved. Not because it ties grief into growth, but because it lets Lia be angry and ill and loved at once. Emma asking for a bedtime story while Lia sips supplement drink. Jennifer crying into laundry. Dr. Marrigan holding Lia's hand while blood is drawn. Elijah waving from the motel lot as Lia leaves without going in. Small continuations. Winter does not end all at once here. It thins. A patch of bare ground. Then another. Lia steps onto it, unsteady, choosing to stay.

Facts kept straight: first published 2009 by Viking in the United States, 278 pages in hardback, ISBN 9780670011100, author Laurie Halse Anderson. Story follows eighteen year old Lia Overbrook after Cassie Parrish dies from bulimia complications with pills and a torn esophagus, amid family strain with stepmother Jennifer, nine year old Emma, mother Dr. Marrigan and her father, with Elijah and the motel, ghost haunting, a suicide crisis, a payphone call for help and return to New Seasons.