Anorexia isn't about being fat, it's about having fat.

The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.

That's when I wanted to cut. I cut to quiet the cacophony. I cut to end this abstracted agony, to reel my selves back to one present and physical whole, whose blood was the proof of her tangibility.

She ran her hands over her body as if to bid it good-bye. The hipbones rising from a shrunken stomach were razor-sharp. Would they be lost in a sea of fat? She counted her ribs bone by bone. Where would they go?

Emma says her illness was a kind of self-hypnosis which obliterated the outside world, a way of escaping life and reducing its proportions to what she could manage.

Every time a girl refuses to eat, she one-ups Eve.