Nervosa

by Karol Kovalovich Weaver

Hayley Gold’s Nervosa traces the author’s experience with and treatment for anorexia nervosa. The graphic memoir illustrates Gold’s anorexia, her hospitalizations, and her attempts to navigate relationships and school as she deals with the disease and its symptoms and complications. Using color and imagery, Gold educates the reader about the disease and how it affected her. Although a difficult read due to its discussion of eating disorders and self-harm (trigger warning) and its justified critique of the health care system, especially psychiatric care, Nervosa shows that Gold is an accomplished artist and a skilled author, identities that she struggled to claim alongside the eating disorder that consumed her hopes and dreams.

Gold’s anorexia began at an early age and followed her into adulthood. The memoir describes the symptoms of anorexia, including fainting, the absence of menstruation, lanugo, excessive exercise, and irritability, and complications from osteoporosis among others, that accompany the disease. Gold’s descriptions of anorexia and other eating disorders are revealed as she documents her experiences and her encounters with her fellow patients during multiple and often long hospitalizations. In the midst of dealing with anorexia, she records her interactions with her parents and comments on their marriage and their parenting. She also chronicles her relationships with classmates, friends, and health care practitioners including nurses, aides, residents, psychiatrists, and doctors.

The skillful use of color and imagery broadens the reader’s understanding of anorexia and Gold’s experience of it. Gold employs color to indicate spaces as well as the struggles that occur there. For example, she uses green to indicate social spaces in which she struggles with others.  The reader sees this color when Gold interacts with members of her family, especially with her father, with medical professionals during office visits, and with fellow patients during her hospital stays. Blue represents her inner turmoil. An image of Gold’s eyes is shaded in blue and she writes, “It’s strange how things can look a certain way in your mind, even though, in reality, they’re completely different” (80). Gold also associated her blue inner voice with the night, and, over the course of the book, the inner voice is personified and appears alongside her as her twin holding a glue gun, an image that appears to represent Gold’s being stuck in the midst of anorexia. When used to burn others, like medical practitioners, the glue gun designates when Gold feels as if her pain and emotions are being disregarded by those health professionals.

Nervosa is a difficult read. Gold acknowledges that when she states, “I don’t like to write, I don’t like to draw. But I think I will anyway, if it means I can show people what’s underneath. I’ll leave the bars on the window” (194). Those “bars” include anorexia, the health care system, family dysfunction, and her own negative self-talk. In addition to the sensitive topics discussed, the graphic memoir is long, over two hundred pages. The length of the memoir corresponds to the lengthy, often life-long, struggle that individuals with anorexia confront. Readers willing to face the raw subject matter and the book’s length will be rewarded with a complex, well-written, and rich work.

Website consulted: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/anorexia-nervosa/symptoms-causes/syc-20353591

Karol Kovalovich Weaver is a professor of history at Susquehanna University. She teaches US history and the history of medicine. Her research focuses on the history of medicine. She is the author of two books, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (University of Illinois Press) and Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1880-2000 (Penn State Press).