My Secret Family

By Leet, John

Book Id: WPLBN0100003184
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 0.5 MB
Reproduction Date: 5/1/1997

Title:	My Secret Family
Author:	Leet, John
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Non Fiction, Fine Arts, Eating and Personality Disorders
Collections:	Authors Community, Literature
Historic Publication Date:	1997
Publisher:	Swann Books

Member Page:	John Leet
Citation APA MLA Chicago Leet, B. J. (1997). My Secret Family. Retrieved from http://www.self.gutenberg.org/

Description
My Secret Family aka Sugar Crash is a cult novel about personality and eating disorders, originally written as a short story in 1991 and published as a novel in 1997. The novel went viral in 1997. By 2005 the characters in the book, each represented by a personality disorder, were considered a 'pro-ana' secret language by the media, even though the book has no 'pro-ana' message. The story spread in an unusual fashion because it was originally published, not in book form, but as a collection of stapled pages in the form of a found diary, which readers copied and distributed at their own expense. The book has no copyright and an estimated 60 million copies have been made.

Summary
My Secret Family is one story told from the viewpoint of five college students whose eating disorders have brought them together in a somewhat unexpected friendship. Each character has their own opinion on what transpired. Sophie is haunted by her past, so when her friends offer her and escape and challenge her to a dieting competition, life becomes complicated. Max, an odd artist with an odd smile, stages a work of performance art to lose weight himself, to show Sophie what she is doing to herself and those around her. Sophie is difficult to convince when her secret family are always whispering in her ear and her controlling boyfriend is always watching, plotting.

Excerpt
Suffer to be Beautiful By Ana I don't eat bread or chocolate cake, in dinners and breakfasts I do not partake, there's cherry plum pudding cooled fresh on the sill, it may as well sit there – to me it's all swill. I cannot remember the taste of dessert, when I climb out my dress my ribs creak and they hurt, I'm down three sizes to a minus 2, I need to put cotton in the sides of my shoes. I cry in my sleep for one last little bite, a glass of tap water stays my appetite, my lips have not tasted a real crème Brule, in so long my taste buds have just withered away. my doctor and mother share the same phobia - that my skin will stretch tight and eventually tear. I suffer and diet and look like a rake, but oh! What a beautiful corpse I will make!

Table of Contents
The Escape Artist Art House of Ana The Arc This Broken Art of Mine Stalking Luke Mall Rats The Poser Sugar Crash Ana Mia Sue Sophie The Riders of the Apocalypse House of Sophie