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Early on in Charlotte Bellows’ memoir, The Definition of Stunning, the Calgary teenager recounts a traumatic incident involving a smoothie, a blender and a small cup of yogurt.
The chapter, entitled Ribs, begins with a 15-year-old Bellows brushing her hair within the mirror and noticing that clumps had been falling out. She rationalizes the hair loss by telling herself it was simply tangled. However a couple of minutes later, she is in her kitchen in full breakdown mode, screaming and sobbing and threatening her mom after she makes an attempt to drive yogurt into Charlotte’s breakfast smoothie.
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“My solely job is to guard my smoothie,” Bellows writes. “Nothing else issues. I can’t let her sugary yogurt into it.”
The incident ends with Bellows throwing the blender on the ground and escaping to her bed room. She calms herself down by pulling her shirt over her head and her reflection, pondering the great thing about the “human skeleton.”
“It carries all of the class of an angel,” she writes.
The Definition of Stunning is a memoir and actual life doesn’t typically current these symbolic, gift-wrapped moments of readability to push alongside a plot. However Bellows says the yogurt incident was actually one second when she started to understand her anorexia was actual.
“I acknowledged one thing was mistaken once I began performing very irrationally round meals,” says Bellows, in an interview with Postmedia from her Calgary residence. “I might get very upset and really aggressive if I used to be ever in a state of affairs the place meals was being compelled upon me. There was a degree once I mentioned, ‘It is a bizarre factor to be shedding my sh-t over. It’s meals, it’s not a giant deal.’ Besides I spotted it was a giant deal for me as a result of there was one thing very mistaken with my relationship with meals.”
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“Everybody refers to that,” Bellows says when requested concerning the harrowing yogurt passage in Definition of Stunning. “That was a giant second for certain within the story.”
Bellows is now 18 and about to review psychology and English literature on the College of Victoria. However she can also be a broadcast writer. The Definition of Stunning was launched by Calgary’s Freehand Publishing earlier this month. The award-winning literary imprint describes the memoir as each “achingly acquainted and devastatingly new” and compares it to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Francois Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, a 1954 coming-of-age novel written when the writer was 19.
Bellows says she had dreamed of being a broadcast author, however her determination to chronicle her consuming dysfunction got here whereas the world was locked down as a result of pandemic.
“I’ve at all times been writing since I used to be younger so I believed I’d perform a little mission for myself about consuming problems,” Bellows says. “It was extra like a journal or a diary within the type of a narrative. That’s the way it began.”
The Definition of Stunning offers a first-person account of Bellows’ struggles and eventual street to restoration, which was helped alongside by remedy and counselling at Calgary’s Juno Home. The e book mixes pressing, first-person reporting with a extra literary strategy. Her consuming dysfunction, as an example, is personified by Ed, a “lanky boy” with razor-blade bones, glowing white pores and skin and an oddly disproportionate physique. Ed is extra a literary machine than an autobiographical tidbit, an apparition that’s each soothing and horrifying to our protagonist, she says.
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“Lots of people have lots of misconceptions about what it means to have an consuming dysfunction and the way it can impression you and the way it can enter your life,” she says. “I used to be questioning how I might painting that and I felt like that entire dreamscape factor was the perfect metaphorical strategy to do it.”
“All through the e book, my character tries to battle this boy but in addition has an intuition to search out consolation in his presence,” she provides.
The e book covers Bellows’ life from ages 15 to 17. So there are additionally some coming-of-age hallmarks to be discovered. She writes about how her first girlfriend, a romance in Grade 8, positively helped her growth regardless of its brief life. She chronicles the tip of one other lengthy friendship that happens alongside the way in which and writes about her household dynamics and the way they had been affected by her dysfunction.
All of that is taking place when she is in each the throes of anorexia and locked down throughout a pandemic, providing a extra common story about transcending isolation and despair.
“The lockdown was actually troublesome [for] me, as I’m certain it was for lots of people,” she says. “It was very detrimental to my psychological well being as a result of I couldn’t reconnect with the issues that I get pleasure from in life. I couldn’t join with my mates, I couldn’t do all these enjoyable actions that I might often do through the summer season. I used to be left alone to grapple with the worry of the state of affairs, the worry of rising up that simply comes naturally once you’re an adolescent. I didn’t actually have any of these particular, significant moments due to the pandemic. It simply wasn’t doable. I undoubtedly imagine that it was vital that we had been in lockdown, but it surely was very troublesome.”
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There got here a degree within the writing course of that coincided with the early glimmers of her restoration. Bellows realized she wasn’t simply documenting a collection of unhealthy experiences however forming a narrative that is likely to be useful to others. She requested a household good friend who can also be a author for recommendation. She was advised to rent an editor and Calgary-based novelist Rosemary Nixon was introduced on board. Freehand had printed her 2013 novel Are You Able to Be Fortunate? and Nixon advised Bellows submit the manuscript to the writer.
Bellows hopes to take some artistic writing programs in college however says she is in no rush to pen a follow-up e book. When she does get to it, she suspects her subsequent writing mission shall be fiction.
However she additionally is aware of that sharing her story can have an effect on others who could also be struggling. Earlier this week, Bellows held a non-public e book launch at Juno Home, the counselling service for adolescent women the place she acquired remedy.
“It was extra of a therapeutic surroundings, specializing in the psychological well being facets of the e book versus the literary facets,” she says. “It was the sweetest factor. There was a woman who advised me that she thinks my story goes to assist her and we had a hug. It was such a particular second. I used to be like ‘Oh my gosh, perhaps my writing might help folks.’ ”
The Definition of Stunning: A Memoir by Charlotte Bellows is now obtainable from Freehand Books.
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