Apples, carrots, bread, chicken, cereal, granola bars, milk, peanut butter, potatoes, and rice: These are the only 10 foods that Zillah Scriven will eat. Her extreme pickiness is one of several attributes that make the 23-year-old Zillah feel like a child. She\u2019s also only five feet tall and still lives at home with her mother, Paula, whose obsession with safety causes her to indulge her daughter\u2019s dietary restrictions, much to the chagrin of nutritionists and Zillah\u2019s absent father. Zillah is slowly working her way through college\u2014her fear of using public bathrooms limits how many classes she can take per day\u2014but she\u2019s hoping to land an internship and move in with her boyfriend, Cliff. One day, while sitting in her bedroom, Zillah hears a sentiment, spoken in the next apartment, that closely matches her own: \u201cMy life revolves around fear and the fear keeps me stuck here at home.\u2026I want my adult life to begin.\u201d She realizes that she\u2019s listening to a neighbor\u2019s conversation with her therapist. Zillah begins to regularly eavesdrop on these therapy sessions, soon learning that the stranger is an agoraphobe who hasn\u2019t left her apartment in months. Zillah begins to recognize that she shares several anxious tendencies with this woman and even wonders aloud about seeing a therapist herself, although Paula quickly shuts down the idea: It\u2019s \u201ccalled \u2018being an adult,\u2019 and you don\u2019t need to pay some therapist to do it for you.\u201d When Zillah unexpectedly befriends her mysterious neighbor\u2014a woman named Lise\u2014she begins to explore the reasons for her own diet and how they\u2019ve been keeping her from living the life she wants. <\/p>\n
Kinn brings Zillah to life with an idiosyncratic narrative voice, capturing the revulsion and neuroses that dominate her life. Here, for instance, Zillah describes the horror of eating a strawberry: \u201cI imagine the slippery spatter and viscera in my mouth. Invading my throat. Choking me. Leaving a taste I won\u2019t be able to get rid of\u2026My stomach tightens like I\u2019ve drunk from a cup of dirty paintbrush water. It flows through me, turning me to brackish yuck.\u201d Kinn is a clinical psychologist and takes pains to accurately portray the condition known as ARFID (avoidant\/restrictive food intake disorder) as well as the treatment strategy ERP (exposure and response prevention therapy), which uses lighthearted activities and games to help patients confront their problems. The novel often feels like an enactment of such therapy, placing readers convincingly in the position of Zillah in order to move them toward a state of understanding and catharsis. The book explores the protagonist\u2019s realization that her intense pickiness isn\u2019t pickiness at all, but a peculiar regimen forced upon her\u2014the result of a family history that she knows nothing about. Although the book lacks some of the sharpness that one might expect in a literary novel, the reading experience is nonetheless transformative.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Apples, carrots, bread, chicken, cereal, granola bars, milk, peanut butter, potatoes, and rice: These are the only 10 foods that Zillah Scriven will eat. Her extreme pickiness is one of several attributes that make the 23-year-old Zillah feel like a child. She\u2019s also only five feet tall and still lives at home with her mother, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6707,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6706"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}