WINTERGIRLS is about a young woman that is emotionally frozen. The author, Laurie Halse Anderson, expresses that her main character “Lia” is “not dead, but not alive". She is like the fairy-tale princess Snow White after she eats the poison apple. She is waiting to be loved in order to be alive.
Lia loves to make a distinction between her NOW and “when she was a real girl”, when did Lia stop being "real"? If she isn't real, what is she? Have you ever felt as though you weren’t real? Why?
When life seems hopeless, a feeling of numbness can take over, as reality becomes shrouded in a gauzy haze. Sometimes I feel as if some adults become sleepwalking in a kind of pseudo reality they have built for themselves, over years and years of hiding true feelings. Sometimes, in new places, when things are displaced from what is known, and everything is new and unknown, I have felt a sense of disequilibrium, and a feeling that everything around me was unreal.
ReplyDeleteI feel as though when it says she is emotionally frozen it is referring to her not being able to grow up. When people go though something difficult in their lives and they are not able to get over it or work through it properly they get stuck in the age that they were when it happened emotionally. They are not able to mature beyond that because they that’s all they know to be safe. If that makes sense.
ReplyDeleteTrue. Peter Pan syndrome, right?
ReplyDeleteI also believe it is a symptom of the depression she suffers from, along with her feelings of inadequacy etc... Since the story is told from the her point-of-view, I naturally wanted to "side with her," but, as the story unfolded I felt the pain that the mother was suffering too. Lia models her mothers reactions to emotions. I found Lia's cutting symbolic of her mother's profession. Her calorie counting and keeping track of numbers was clinical.
ReplyDeleteOh...yes, and I have felt that way. About a month after my son was born, I suffered a few panic attacks. It was a very strange sensation, depersonalized.
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