aimee liu

"I ought to be perfect. I could be perfect if I'd just try harder, and whenever I let myself slide it disappoints everyone involved... The answer is always the same. I have got to be harder on myself. I have got to eliminate the distractions."

Originally published in 1979*, when Aimee Liu was just 25 years old, SOLITAIRE is America's first memoir of anorexia. At a time when few doctors even knew the term anorexia nervosa, Aimee was fourteen years old when she reduced her body weight by one fourth. Her periods ceased. She became obsessed with counting calories. Though accepted by the world-class modeling agency, Wilhelmina, she soon lost too much weight to fit into the clothes she was supposed to showcase. For seven years, her compulsion to restrict her eating overshadowed her social, family, and school life. Yet, like most anorexics of her day, she was never diagnosed or treated. In SOLITAIRE Aimee chronicles the events that preceded her eating disorder, as well as the day-to-day realities of living in the grip of this self-defeating syndrome.

Though this original text is more than twenty years old, the anorexic experience is largely unchanged, and SOLITAIRE remains one of the most honest accounts ever written about life with an eating disorder.

* Note: The text in the 2000 re-reissue of SOLITAIRE is unabridged and unedited from the original.