Publishers Weekly
04/20/2020
Clarke’s raw debut explores the ravages of eating disorders and extreme dieting on identical twins Rose and Lily. As the twins enter high school in the mid-2000s, Rose tries to fit in with a group of popular girls who pressure each other to commit to an apple-a-day regimen. Lily is ostracized from the group and turns to overeating while her sister starves herself. Rose, now 24, narrates from inside the walls of treatment center for eating disorders, detailing the twins’ lives leading up to that point in sections headed by year, age, and weight, and highlighting Rose’s growing insecurity in relation to her sister (“I was her stunt double.... People looked at me and saw almost-Lily”). After Rose is discharged and assigned to live with Lily for a probationary period, it’s Rose who feels the need to offer support: Lily is in a relationship with the husband of a lifestyle guru and subjecting herself to a diet consisting of zero-calorie bars, and her life seems to be falling apart despite her excitement over her weight loss. While Clarke’s prose slips occasionally into pedestrian observations, the sisters’ bond is strongly palpable. This page-turner makes for an illuminating, ultimately hopeful look at the constant struggle women face regarding their body image. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House. (June)
From the Publisher
Dark, poignant and gripping, Diana Clarke’s Thin Girls is sure to be unlike anything else you’ve read. . . . Thin Girls is a captivating story of the Winters twins’ road to recovery as they work to help each other through issues of body image, love, identity and sexuality. . . . Clarke has fashioned a world that feels almost dystopian, yet its power lies in the fact that Rose and Lily’s experiences are all too common and all too real.” — Associated Press
“Thin Girls is a sharp, cutting debut, ostensibly about the traps of anorexia and body dysmorphia. But its true concern is with the trappings of being a woman. Full of dry dark wit, the world Clarke has created would almost feel absurdist if it weren’t so dangerously real. This book made me feel so much: fear, dread, the flush of young love, the joy in small things, hope. Thin Girls holds it all between its covers.” — Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature and The New Wilderness
"The story [protagonist Rose] tells is as gripping as a thriller, but it’s Clarke’s language that truly makes this novel special. She writes with a lyricism that not only encompasses the grotesque and the transcendent, but also sometimes co-mingles the two. When Rose finds a collection of short fiction Lily has written, these harrowing little fables bring the latent otherworldliness of the novel as a whole to the surface. . . . Incisive social commentary rendered in artful, original, and powerfully affecting prose." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Diana Clark has written a lightning bolt of a book, one that electrifies with its powerful insights into women, their relationship with their bodies and with each other. I was instantly drawn into Clark’s dark vision of sisterhood, and emerged changed.” — Danielle Trussoni, bestselling author of Angelology and The Ancestor
“In Clarke’s raw debut . . . the sisters’ bond is strongly palpable. . . . This page-turner makes for an illuminating, ultimately hopeful look at the constant struggle women face regarding their body image.” — Publishers Weekly
“Diana Clarke has written an edgy, deeply moving and original book. Her writing is beautifully poetic and tinged with dark wit, and she moves us elegantly between the past and present lives of two complex and fascinating sisters. This is a queer story, a female story and a story about identity shaped around pain, and yet it has the fearless depth of a story about all of us.” — Lexi Freiman, author of Inappropriation
“This debut novel is a breathtaking and sobering account of eating disorder treatment and mortality.” — Booklist
“A stunning debut novel…gorgeously crafted…From one sentence to the next, Clarke leaves her readers splayed open, throbbing with the most beautiful, necessary ache. She writes with unyielding honesty and breathtaking tenderness. Thin Girls is a brutal, and unrelenting examination of what it means to be a woman in a body, wanting, needing, wanting, needing so much. With her assured, elegant prose Clarke makes you hope against all hopes that both Rose and Lily can find a way to satiate and save themselves and each other.” — Roxane Gay
Booklist
This debut novel is a breathtaking and sobering account of eating disorder treatment and mortality.
Danielle Trussoni
Diana Clark has written a lightning bolt of a book, one that electrifies with its powerful insights into women, their relationship with their bodies and with each other. I was instantly drawn into Clark’s dark vision of sisterhood, and emerged changed.
Lexi Freiman
Diana Clarke has written an edgy, deeply moving and original book. Her writing is beautifully poetic and tinged with dark wit, and she moves us elegantly between the past and present lives of two complex and fascinating sisters. This is a queer story, a female story and a story about identity shaped around pain, and yet it has the fearless depth of a story about all of us.
Diane Cook
Thin Girls is a sharp, cutting debut, ostensibly about the traps of anorexia and body dysmorphia. But its true concern is with the trappings of being a woman. Full of dry dark wit, the world Clarke has created would almost feel absurdist if it weren’t so dangerously real. This book made me feel so much: fear, dread, the flush of young love, the joy in small things, hope. Thin Girls holds it all between its covers.”
Associated Press
Dark, poignant and gripping, Diana Clarke’s Thin Girls is sure to be unlike anything else you’ve read. . . . Thin Girls is a captivating story of the Winters twins’ road to recovery as they work to help each other through issues of body image, love, identity and sexuality. . . . Clarke has fashioned a world that feels almost dystopian, yet its power lies in the fact that Rose and Lily’s experiences are all too common and all too real.”
Roxane Gay
A stunning debut novel…gorgeously crafted…From one sentence to the next, Clarke leaves her readers splayed open, throbbing with the most beautiful, necessary ache. She writes with unyielding honesty and breathtaking tenderness. Thin Girls is a brutal, and unrelenting examination of what it means to be a woman in a body, wanting, needing, wanting, needing so much. With her assured, elegant prose Clarke makes you hope against all hopes that both Rose and Lily can find a way to satiate and save themselves and each other.
Booklist
This debut novel is a breathtaking and sobering account of eating disorder treatment and mortality.
Library Journal
06/01/2020
DEBUT Lily and Rose share a special bond reserved for twins, acutely feeling and sensing each other's pain. Beginning in their teens, both women struggle to fit in while contending with family issues and opposite eating disorders. Lily overeats to try to fill a void and mask her pain, and she eventually becomes more than three times her anorexic sister's size. Rose attempts to gain a sense of control over her life by monitoring what she eats (or doesn't eat). Each twin needs the other's help, and each tries to save the other from self-destruction while really needing to save herself. Told from Rose's point of view of past and present events, this debut novel is an often dark and difficult read. Clarke adeptly makes readers feel the sisters' pain using blunt and vivid descriptions of eating disorders and strained (and sometimes abusive) relationships while suggesting that hope and unconditional love might allow them to recover, both physically and emotionally. VERDICT Recommended for readers who like well-drawn, character-driven stories but can also handle detailed descriptions of eating disorder behavior. [See Prepub Alert, 12/2/19.]—Samantha Gust, Niagara Univ. Lib., NY
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-03-29
A first-time novelist explores the abuse women inflict on themselves, the abuse others inflict upon them, and the intersection of the two.
When they were small, Lily and Rose were essentially indistinguishable—even to themselves. As they approached adolescence, though, Lily, the outgoing, people-pleasing twin, had become everyone’s favorite while obstinate, awkward Rose became her sister’s shadow. Their relationship to each other changed again when Rose discovered a talent for enduring the fad diets imposed by the leader of their clique. As Rose stops eating altogether, Lily starts eating more and more. Rose recounts this history as she embarks on her second year in a clinic where she is supposed to be recovering from anorexia but is really consuming just enough calories to avoid force-feeding. She likes the comforting routine of the clinic and the company of other “thin girls.” It’s only when Rose realizes that Lily is in a dangerously abusive relationship that she becomes determined to return to the outside world. Rose is a strange and prickly character, constantly interrupting her narration with bits of trivia from the random assortment of books available at the clinic. She is both truthful and wily, and her powers of insight are prodigious—except when she’s analyzing herself. It takes her a very long time, for example, to discover that her efforts to shrink her body down to nothingness are related to her unwillingness to accept her own sexuality. The story she tells is as gripping as a thriller, but it’s Clarke’s language that truly makes this novel special. She writes with a lyricism that not only encompasses the grotesque and the transcendent, but also sometimes commingles the two. When Rose finds a collection of short fiction Lily has written, these harrowing little fables bring the latent otherworldliness of the novel as a whole to the surface.
Incisive social commentary rendered in artful, original, and powerfully affecting prose.
