Review: Hayley Gold’s ‘Nervosa’ Teaches As Much As It Tells

Welcome to the table,

What our parents do to us can, and often does, affect us for the rest of our lives.

Nervosa by Hayley Gold not only serves as another example of this, but is also a compelling look at one person’s experience navigating life with Anorexia nervosa in our broken medical system and our biased society.

If you have not spent prolonged amounts of time in a hospital, it can be difficult to understand what kind of places they actually are. I’m sure in the same way that to some effect every restaurant is different, every hospital has something going for it, but for the most part in this country’s horrible broken medical system, they are less than ideal places to spend time in.

I don’t often see an honest take on this sentiment in media, but Nervosa really nails it home. Nervosa nails a lot of things home. It explores, in what feels like full transparency, the life of a person trying to navigate a medical condition that has been lampooned by everything from Saturday morning cartoons to crime procedurals.

What’s more, it does it in a way that feels honest and educational for the sake of just having others understand the author’s life experience. It’s got some fantasy bits but they are all used as avatars of internal dialog so the work never feels inauthentic.

Nervosa is a work that teaches as much as it tells, in a memoir-like, dark humor-laced romp through the formative years of a woman who is failed by every system. That woman still somehow managed to find her coping mechanisms and rise to her own standards to make something great. It’s dark, it’s funny, it’s sad, and it’s reaffirming all at the same time.

I feel like I have learned something about a part of the human condition that so often gets shown as a trope or weakness. Eating disorders are no joke, but this book still manages to find moments to be funny.

Until next time, listen to other people’s stories. It’s important, and you may learn something.