Word: reader
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...women, use everything from irons to scissors to inflict pain upon themselves. Many have highly ritualized cuttings, in which they set out the instruments of their own torture as carefully as a surgeon setting out her tools. The images in the book are unnervingly graphic, and Strong spares the reader as little as the victims spare themselves. In one chilling episode, a woman "sliced one [arm] open from wrist to elbow down to the muscle and burned herself so badly she required a skin graft...
Strong intersperses these kinds of nauseating descriptions with psychological analysis. This style is reminiscent of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher. Even though she allows the reader access to the most intimate details of the people she profiles, the scenes are so repetitively horrific that one loses perspective on the problem. Inured to the scenes of physical trauma, the reader has the sensation of watching a car crash, repulsed, but unable to look away...
...many of the people Strong interviews have had such incredibly traumatic childhood, that their stories become distended from reality for the reader. A typical testimony begins, "Cherie doesn't remember when the abuse began." While Strong does a good job explaining why people having gone through this kind of trauma in childhood would turn to self-mutilation affects those who have experienced more subtle traumas in their childhood, traumas that can be more easily overlooked by parents and caretakers...
...density. Perhaps some things are not meant to be understood. Like Luke's bizarre join-the-dots form of pornography, the strength lies in what is actually missing--to be wide open is to be exposed, to be "wide open as a can of worms." Revelation, for the reader as much as the characters, is best in limited quantities...
...caught fire.") and with unusual imagery (Lily is called "every inch a Sea Monkey... Pale and alien and underwater"). But while the bleak humor is generated by the peculiarities of the characters, there is a definite authorial love for the seemingly unlovable characters, a love which transfers to the reader...