How to Disappear Completely - Kelsey Osgood

My first non-fiction review. Go me. This is a memoir, kind of anyway,  and when it comes to memoirs I hate to be critical. This is someone's story and as such, needs to be treated with a certain degree of sensitivity. These are real things that happened and in this case, it's about Anorexia Nervosa. What attracted me to this book was the different stance the author was taking about writing of this disease. 

Osgood's intention in this is well realised. She had noticed that other memoirs of eating disorders were often fixated on numbers, weight, and graphic descriptions of extreme thinness. She set out to write a book about Anorexia where this wasn't the case. This is in my opinion, highly commendable. I've never suffered from this disease but have a personal and professional interest in mental health. It's a fantastic thing to do for two reasons. I think she mentions herself in the book that the obsession with numbers can encourage other sufferers of Anorexia to become more unwell and fixate on losing weight. I also found it interesting as it made the memoir less clinical, not so focussed on the physical weight loss and more interested in the thought processes of the Osgood herself. 

The first half of the book has you desperately wishing the author recovers, and feeling for her when recovery is not going quite so well. However, as I moved through the book I started to feel we were just getting 'more of the same'. This probably reflects the fact that constant hospitalisation of different kinds and similar regimes designed to encourage weight gain were monotonous and a little boring. 

I also was unsure of what kind of book it wanted to be. Occasionally the writer would slip into what seemed like long chapters of polemic about how to treat sufferers and how other books have got the portrayal wrong in the past. There seemed to be a general non-fiction book in there somewhere as well as a memoir.  I found the parts of the book about how technology, particularly the internet influences those with eating disorders particularly interesting and would have liked a whole book about that perhaps. I'm of the opinion our online lives are often ignored by those in the mental health profession and not enough has been written about this effect.

I think I would have liked this better as two separate books, but it's Osgood's own thoughts and feelings and I can't criticise those. As I'm not exactly an expert, it's hard to say the best audience for the book and I have liked other similar memoirs better but perhaps this is because it skimps on the 'details' that it's human to want to hear whether you suffer from this illness or not. It's a very dignified and intelligent account, but if you read it, be prepared that you may not get what you perhaps you are very reluctant to admit you want - gory details.