100 Days of Bulimia
Perzine, Janet Ford, 105 pgs, @fordjanet, Moniker Press, monikerpress.ca, $20
The stuff we carry with us every day is nearly impossible to convey in just a word, sentence, or even a book. Yet, Janet Ford comes close in just 100 pages of words and images in her painful, beautiful, comic, and truthful 100 Days of Bulimia. Each page contains an anecdote, a moment, or a feeling from the author’s life lived with bulimia.
As I read 100 Days of Bulimia, I was struck by how intensely I felt the passage of time while flipping through the pages. Not just a hundred days, but a hundred life-altering, traumatic moments over many years that add up to what feels like a life. From the book’s design, like a page-a-day calendar flipped from bottom to top, to the scope of the experiences in both time and intensity, the pages build into a lifetime of stories in a short and powerful read.
Reaching the end of Ford’s book is not reaching the end of the story. Between every page and beyond the confines of the book untold stories. The ones Ford chooses to lay bare are sometimes specific, sometimes universal, and always moving. People with bulimia may get the most out of this zine, but Ford graciously allows the rest of us to bear witness to something personal and unknowable, and does so with humour, earnestness, and staunch vulnerability. (Nicole Partyka)
