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REVIEWING TODAY: THIN, AND I BY ANDRIJKA KELLER
Sometimes, demons might wear suits. In Andrijka Keller’s rawly candid memoir of her necessarily tension-fraught teenage years, her personal companion is such a cultured fellow. Named ED. Who first supports her great desire to be thin, then encourages and applauds all of her persistent efforts, and finally demands that Andrijka purge herself of any contrary inclinations. Automatically declared abnormal by the adult arrogance she encounters, Andrijka’s personal guide to maturity is this personified aberration, who still manages to make the most cogently thoughtful observation of the book: “I’m trying to tell you that as society changes, what classifies as a mental disorder changes with it!” Those classifications have become so numerous, one might well ask: What is your disorder? Or, as Ms. Keller asks right from the start: Who are you?
The defining feature of Andrijka Keller’s book Thin, and I, as distinctly different from other supposedly confessional memoirs, is her adamant ownership of two conflicting self-perceptions. She accepts herself for who she is. She wonders constantly what is wrong with her. But Ms. Keller is acutely self-aware and brilliant as a writer, and her book – a massively compelling, assertively “diaretic” journal – recognizes the surest danger overlooked in life: the power of the “other” to control one’s self-perception, and the irrefutably bad consequences of surrendering to such power. ED makes only an ambivalent villain in this piece. The true demons are those arrogant adults who diagnose abnormality as disease, proceed to prescribe for it oblivion, and then applaud the vegetable that results.Better, maybe not, the demon that you know.
A. KELLER
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