Welcome to Silver Lake Hospital.
The alcoholics are sobering up.
The druggies are getting clean.
The crazies can have all the drugs they want.
The bulimics wish they had more food.
The anorexics have all the food they need, but they would rather starve.
In the eating disorder unit, one of the inmates is smart-mouthed, unapologetic, yet broken, Marty Black.
In More Than You Can Chew, we learn that Marty’s parents are divorced. Her mother is an alcoholic. Her father is a work-a-holic. Her boyfriend breaks up with her. As her world crumbles around her, she finds one way to regain control in her life – shechooses not to eat.
Sometimes, life isn’t always about surviving the elements. Sometimes, your worst enemy is yourself. A memorable scene in the book is when Marty forfeits her one-hour session with her therapist, and then her mother goes into his office to find out the verdict. The therapist tells her that Marty needs to get help straight away. Though, Marty’s mother doesn’t seem to agree. She argues she cannot submit her daughter to an institution because Marty needs to finish school first. To make his point, the therapist says, “Dead girls don’t graduate.” Marty’s anorexia has become so life-threatening that she is more likely to be sent to an early grave than to walk the stage. So off to Silver Lake Hospital she went.
The narrative is written in first person. Marty is real and brutally honest. The reader knows more about Marty’s fears and insecurities than her own family and friends. The audience feels closer to her than her own family does and even root for her or laugh a little when she lashes out snappy comebacks or quick-witted remarks to the patients and the staff. She’s an admirable character, saying things we’d probably wish we could say out loud too, but it is also a defense mechanism. She wears a stone-cold shell for everyone around her.
Marty is not totally heartless. She befriends an eight-year-old anorexic girl named Lily. The little girl and some of the staff slowly chip away at Marty’s seemingly impenetrable armour. Eventually, she realizes she doesn’t have all the answers, and she isn’t perfect nor are the people around her. As she copes with her past, she learns not to wait for someone else to save her and that she can’t always fix the people around her, but she learns to save herself.
More Than You Can Chew by Marnelle Tokio is one of my favourite books. It is a semi-autobiographical novel. In interviews with Tokio, she mentions she integrates some of her own life story into the book. Like Marty, Tokio was anorexic and even attempted suicide during her teen years. Along with Marty, the author Marnelle Tokio can be deemed a strong woman, having overcome her battle with anorexia. She grew into a stronger person and admits part of her healing came from writing this novel.
I highly recommend this book.
Check it out & tell me what you think!
