Atlas Girl

August 11, 2014
Canadian blogger and journalist Wierenga addresses eating disorders and parental illness in this meandering, uneven memoir. Maddeningly, the book is not organized chronologicallyâdarts from 2007, to 1998, to the early 1980s and back again. The patient reader who is willing to piece things together will learn that Wierenga grew up in a Christian family and developed an eating disorder at age 9; that her maternal grandmother committed suicide and her mother developed brain cancer; and that after marrying her late-adolescent love, Trenton, Wierenga eventually moved home to care for her mother. There are some well-written scenes: descriptions of her sexually awkward wedding night, as well as tending to her sick mother. But Wierenga has an unfortunate taste for slightly off-key imagery coupled with breathless sentence structure: "it all caught in the back of my throat, all the love songs and all the loneliness, it caught like a big wad of gum." At the end of the book, the reader will have traveled to a lot of places, but will not really know what the journey has added up to.