How We Haunt Ourselves: The Pro-Anorexia Fandom Around Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls

In this thesis, I will trace the reception of Laurie Halse Anderson’s 2009 Young Adult novel Wintergirls by pro-anorexia (“pro ana”) online communities, exploring not only the specific ways these communities reproduce the text to subvert its anti-anorexia project, but how the text itself inadvertently lends itself to these readings. I will demonstrate that, far from almost inevitably misreading the text due to their illness, many pro-ana readers simply prefer the parts that shore up their own prior commitments to their illnesses, a reading practice that is then validated and replicated through participation in online communities. Furthermore, I will examine how Wintergirls’s structural and rhetorical decisions undermine the book’s therapeutic project. Despite these missteps, its reception—however misguided—proves the value of its stylistic and ideological approaches to anorexia, which present the disorder both as a process of continuous, painful self-revision and as a still-meaningful attempt to manage one’s emotions.