Binary Star by Sarah GerardTwo Dollar Radio, 2015

Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star is often an uncomfortable read, but it should be: its narrator is an astronomy grad student with an eating disorder, and she’s in a long-distance relationship with a guy dealing (or rather not dealing) with alcoholism. The binary star of the title is the book’s metaphor for their relationship—two stars orbiting a common center of mass. Gerard captures her narrator’s obsessive thinking—food, her body, the numbers on the scale, diet pills, celebrity gossip magazines with lists of “diet tricks,” food—the litany of brands and products at the supermarket. (Some of this is based on Gerard’s own experiences, as described in this New York Times piece.) The narrator talks about a road trip she took with her aforementioned boyfriend, John, and about their increasing mutual interest in ethical veganism/veganarchism/animal liberation (though for the narrator, veganism also provides an excuse: rules around food, reasons not to eat). The book’s sentences are mostly short, declarative, stripped down, the narrator doing to language what she does to herself: “I have basically starved myself of will,” the narrator says, and then, on the same page, “I am mostly devoid of feelings on purpose” (71). She cultivates emptiness. “The total mass of a star is the principal determinant of its fate,” she says on the book’s first page, and then: “A star is held together by its own gravity.” Her center doesn’t hold. “If I wander far enough into the desert, I may become a dune,” she says, and then: “And winds will blow across and reshape me, and I will see that my form has always been and will always be indefinite” (55-56).