13 Quotes by Christine Heppermann

The Anorexic Eats a Salad Mountains rise, fall, rise again. Stars complete their slow trek into oblivion. A snail tours the length of China’s Great Wall twice. All those pesky cancers – cured. Somewhere in Lower Manhattan, a barista finally smiles. Roundworms evolve into ovals. Flatworms get chesty. Molasses, a tortoise, and sedimentation run the fifty-yard dash. Results pending. Temps plunge in hell. The devil waxes his skis. She has almost made it through her first bite.

Once there was a girl who longed to be brave enough to stick her finger down her throat, to measure herself by the teaspoon, to shrink to the size of a serving. Once.

And those women were sneaky. They understood that including fantastical elements in their tales- golden eggs, signing harps, talking frogs- worked to mask a deeper purpose... it made the stories look on the surface like ‘a mere bubble of nonsense’ within which it was possible to ‘utter harsh truths, to say what you dare’ about the state of women’s lives. Because they were just stories, right? Harmless little fantasies?

To avoid reproach, I learned how to pose as a Good Girl, but even that persona couldn’t completely shield me. It seemed that, for girls, there was no such thing as “good” enough.