Used book – The Little Pea's Hunger - Anorexic Chronicles, Alexia Savey, Marina Carrère d'Encausse

Here is a book that will not leave you indifferent. Firstly, because it addresses a serious topic, a disease: anorexia nervosa. But also because it's not just another scientific work written by some therapist. No, this is the precise and detailed diary of a young girl, herself anorexic, who has managed to detail, describe, and even explain the symptoms of her illness, its consequences, and the physical and psychological mechanisms that characterize it. An essential testimony, a truly well-documented clinical analysis, experienced from the inside. The author has thus particularly well understood the reasons for her suffering and the helplessness of the medical profession in this matter, which continues to believe that it is enough to feed an anorexic to cure them. All while explaining that one never truly recovers. Sometimes dark, sometimes full of hope, the syncopated writing plunges us almost immediately into a kind of trance, irresistible, sometimes even suffocating. We no longer read Alexia; we become Alexia, through the magic and hypnotic rhythm of words that come from the gut. A true x-ray of her inner state, her rhythmic prose gives form and life to anorexia, transforming it sometimes into a monster, sometimes into the author's evil twin, even suggesting a substitute entity for the father she never knew. Not a book, finally, but rather five in one: - A demonstration book to understand what anorexia nervosa REALLY is. - A therapy book for the young aspiring writer whose powerful literary breath we can only feel. - A support book meant to give a voice to anorexics, but also to all those who, whether or not confronted with the illness in a loved one, often find themselves bewildered by behaviors they don't understand. - A documentary book that intelligently and sensitively exposes all the constraints anorexia generates, dissecting the ambiguity of conflicting relationships with oneself and with others in a perpetual and unfulfilled quest for love, also revealing the mass of physical and psychological suffering felt by the anorexic who nevertheless refuses the idea that they are ill. - A reference book, finally, which offers real avenues for reflection and suggestions for better management of this perfectly real pathology, a true cancer of the soul for which the patient is neither guilty nor even responsible, despite what most people, doctors and shrinks included (!), would tend to believe.