Analysis Of My Sister's Bones By Cathi Hanauer
The Bottom Line: If you're looking for her sister's bones, you'll have to dig deep.
Back in the summer of 2002, I was curious about Cathi Hanauer's 1996 novel My Sister's Bones, so I picked it up at a Border's book store. I'm a sucker for books about eating disorders, although I'm starting to outgrow that particular interest. I was thinking this book might be interesting because it promised a story about a person with an eating disorder told from a different point of view other than the afflicted.
In Hanauer's book, readers do get a novel that is marginally about anorexia nervosa, but only marginally. In this case, the story is told through the eyes of fifteen year old Billie Weinstein, younger sister of eighteen year old Cassie Weinstein. On the front cover of the book, there's a quote from The Village Voice that reads "My Sister's Bones works a miracle... funny and idiosyncratic, elegant and simple... Hanauer gives power and dignity to the subject of anorexia." But as someone else wrote in their opinion of this book, anorexia is not really the main theme of My Sister's Bones. I think that Hanauer originally had anorexia in mind when she started to write this novel, but then somehow when she got cranked up into writing the book, she got off track and started writing about Billie's relationships with her friends and boyfriends instead. Then …show more content…
For example, she made them non practicing Jews who celebrate Christmas. That was interesting in my opinion. When Billie starts hanging around her boyfriend, Vinnie, a very Italian, Catholic guy who assumes that Billie celebrates Hannukah because of her Jewish last name, Billie corrects him and says that she celebrates Christmas. She tells him her family prefers it to Hannukah. I wondered if that little tidbit came from Hanauer's own life. It's gems like these from authors' own lives that make novels and other stories much more interesting than pure fiction would
Back in the summer of 2002, I was curious about Cathi Hanauer's 1996 novel My Sister's Bones, so I picked it up at a Border's book store. I'm a sucker for books about eating disorders, although I'm starting to outgrow that particular interest. I was thinking this book might be interesting because it promised a story about a person with an eating disorder told from a different point of view other than the afflicted.
In Hanauer's book, readers do get a novel that is marginally about anorexia nervosa, but only marginally. In this case, the story is told through the eyes of fifteen year old Billie Weinstein, younger sister of eighteen year old Cassie Weinstein. On the front cover of the book, there's a quote from The Village Voice that reads "My Sister's Bones works a miracle... funny and idiosyncratic, elegant and simple... Hanauer gives power and dignity to the subject of anorexia." But as someone else wrote in their opinion of this book, anorexia is not really the main theme of My Sister's Bones. I think that Hanauer originally had anorexia in mind when she started to write this novel, but then somehow when she got cranked up into writing the book, she got off track and started writing about Billie's relationships with her friends and boyfriends instead. Then …show more content…
For example, she made them non practicing Jews who celebrate Christmas. That was interesting in my opinion. When Billie starts hanging around her boyfriend, Vinnie, a very Italian, Catholic guy who assumes that Billie celebrates Hannukah because of her Jewish last name, Billie corrects him and says that she celebrates Christmas. She tells him her family prefers it to Hannukah. I wondered if that little tidbit came from Hanauer's own life. It's gems like these from authors' own lives that make novels and other stories much more interesting than pure fiction would