Thought Train to Pusan

Upon first seeing the title of The Art of Starving , I thought there could only be two major things it would be about; either following the trials of a person struggling through famine/poverty/war, who struggles to survive these hardships while literally starving, or it would be some romanticized tale of an eating disorder, possibly with some “love heals all” thrown in there too which I’ve seen far to many times when regarding stories about mental illnesses. But while perhaps The Art of Starving is closer to the latter, it definitely isn’t a sanitized or pretty thing: this novel is ugly, which is ultimately both a strength and a weakness for it. In Sam J Miller’s acknowledgements at the end of the novel, we see him mentioning his own eating disorder as a teen, and reminiscing about how seldom this is recognized in teenage boys vs girls, hence the subject for his novel here: The Art of Starving is about a teenager named Matt, who suffers from an eating disorde...