This is a review of a book by Evanna Lynch. Evanna is best known as Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter movies.
A review comment on the cover describes the book as "Magical storytelling", and I have real problems with this description. It is not magical in any sense - it is gritty and real. And the "story" - looking at it as a properly plotted piece of work - has all sorts of problems. So I really don't think this description works.
I would also like to point out that the character of Luna Lovegood - and her portrayal by Evanna - is one of the most enduring of the Harry Potter series. She really deserves her own book.
Having said that - this book is extraordinary, and is without doubt my book of the year. Evanna is telling primarily of her struggles with anorexia, and is telling her story from deep inside. Which makes it an intensely personal, but amazingly relateable and true book.
So often, we read stories of people with mental health issues that are told from outside. Sometimes, they will step out of their struggles to relate as they think they are seen by others. Or they are telling from a position after they have recovered, and are remembering back.
Evanna doesn't do this. She tells her story of being in a urgent, radical care facility, not in practical terms, but how it felt to her, how she responded to this (not well). She talks of her time filming the movies in an almost distracted way, because her focus is on her feelings about her mental health problems. This was her absolute dream job, and yet she tells of it as a nervous young girl and her constant inferiority complex, not as the most exciting time she could ever have.
She talks honestly about how her "recovery" - where she was not longer considered in a critical condition, and was doing her ideal job - from the very real position in her head that she was not "cured". There was a narrative that Harry Potter saved her from her anorexia, and she is clear that this is a mistaken perspective. She was starting the recovery process from her most life-threatening state, but she was still anorexic - in a mental health way, if not in a weight way.
And this is the most insightful aspects of this book. That mental health problems don't go away when you get your dream job. When you get a partner. When you appear on Dancing with the Stars (why did we not sign her up in the UK to Strictly?). Through all of this, she was still ill, she was still struggling with the inner voice chiding her, telling her off, demeaning her. The healing is ongoing. She seems, but the end, to be in a much better place. But it is not over - it is unlikely ever to be completely over for her.
But another critical aspect of her writing is the deep insights of the mental health side of anorexia. It is not just about getting someone to eat - that is the physical part of it. But without resolving the mental aspect, this will never be a solution. The person may no longer "look" ill, and we may believe we have therefore resolved their eating problem. But if the inner voice is still there, it will reappear in some form or other. Dealing with the inner person - the mental part of the illness - is the only way to help a person come to a better place.
Evanna is incredibly honest about this. By the end, she is not looking back and saying "Oh, that was a difficult time, but I am over that now". She is saying "This recovery, and this recovery from recovery, is ongoing". It is a fearful place to leave her - she is an incredible person through all of this, and when I saw her on Between the Covers (which is where I heard about the book), she seemed happy and lively. But this is an outside view, not an inside one. She is, I am sure, still struggling with these demons.
In the end, this is my (tenuous) justification for including this on a Quaker-focussed blog. Because Evanna tells us to look inside, not outside. To see a person not just from what they present, but from where they are inside their own heads. That is so often a more intensely challenging place to see someone from. But it is also a true picture.
