Kristina’s and Peach’s Addiction

Kristina’s and Peach’s Addiction Both Diary of an Exercise Addict by Peach Friedman and Crank by Ellen Hopkins, have a common theme of personal struggle that shows that it can be easily obtained through a number of ways that can make one’s life go downhill from the moment the personal struggle takes place, and on. In Diary of an Exercise Addict, exercise addiction and bulimia take over the author/ main character- Peach Friedman’s life, and this memoir is written as if it is a diary and has different entries, dates and emotions. This memoir explains how Peach started her personal struggle, experienced it and overcame it. In Crank, drugs and addiction becomes Kristina’s life, and makes her shun out everything she once valued. This novel is written in a long series of poems and is read as if the main character is telling her story. In the memoir Diary of an Exercise Addict, the first minor theme that plays into the major theme of personal struggle is love. How love makes the main character Peach move further into her personal struggle is that when Peach begins to lose weight, she felt that love came to her easier. She also finds it easier to find love when she gains barely enough weight to look like she is okay and not ill. But, she stops gaining weight and tries to maintain the weight she is at but begins to lose it again. “All these men are looking at me. They are, they are all looking at me and I know it’s because I’ve gained enough weight that my face looks normal and my body looks skinny, which means I look like a supermodel and that’s why they’re looking,” (Diary of an Exercise Addict, page 72). So when she felt that men were easily attracted to her, she believed this is because she was losing/ gaining. The novel Crank has a minor theme of love that pushes the main character Kristina, into her personal struggle of drugs and addiction. Love pushes her into the corner of addiction to drugs because when she meets her first love- Adam, she wanted to impress