book talk

Alicia Kenison
EDU 330
Clarissa Thompson
10-18-10

You Remind Me of You
By: Eireann Corrigan

Close your eyes

Imagine a girl who weights 80 lbs. She’s a sophomore in high school. She eats and eats and eats. And then, she runs and runs and runs. She forces herself to hit that 80 lb mark again. Her father follows her in the station wagon, in case, she faints on her run. She showers when she gets home and sometimes her father has to come and pick up her naked body from the wet tub. He has to listen for the tumble and quickly switch the water from hot to cold.

Do you see her?

Do you feel her pain?

Now, imagine a boy. This girl was in love with him. They were going to go to prom together, but one of his friends’s called her and told her the rumor. Daniel thought she was fat. That word stabbed her like the kitchen knife she was washing.

How would you feel if you had to force feed the girl you loved?

How would you feel if your second home was a chair next to her bedside?

Would you get sick of holding her hair back as she puked up everything she just ate?

After awhile wouldn’t you feel guilty? Daniel did. He started doing drugs. He got so depressed, he attempted suicide while his sister was upstairs and she was chatting on the phone to their mother, who was on a business trip.

Eireann and Daniel were going to be seniors in high school and now they were in two different hospitals. This love brought them closer. They visited each other all the time hospital to hospital. They kept each other alive.

This is a coming of age story with love, harm and recovery. This is a poetry memoir of real life and is incredibly more emotional than other issue book because it is real. Her poetry flows from happy to sad or sad to happy. She has a way of keeping the audience focused and brings raw emotion into our lives.

I don’t feel this is a book for everyone and I would definitely not teach it unless I feel my students could handle it.