Anorexia

Riveting and exhilarating: Miss Julie, at Park90, reviewed

Some Demon by Laura Waldren is a gem of a play that examines the techniques of manipulation and bullying practised by shrinks on anorexics. The setting is an NHS referral unit where Sam, an 18-year-old philosophy student, arrives with a minor eating disorder. Like every patient, Sam is told that her personality is immersed in a civil war and that two implacable forces – the ‘diseased self’ and the ‘whole self’ – are fighting for control of her destiny. It’s a brilliantly simple trick that any bully can learn in a few minutes. If the patient says something unwelcome, the shrink ascribes the statement to the ‘diseased self’ and adds:

Mommy issues: Milk Fed, by Melissa Broder, reviewed

This is a novel about ‘mommy issues’. Rachel is a Reform Jew, ‘more Chanel bag Jew than Torah Jew’, and her mother has always been preoccupied by her daughter’s weight. ‘Anorexics are much skinnier than you’, she tells Rachel when she develops the condition as a teenager. ‘They look like concentration camp victims.’ Rachel’s therapist, Dr Mahjoub (who, we are told, fills her consultation room with elephants in trinket form) recommends a total break in contact between mother and daughter for 40 days. Before this begins, Mahjoub makes Rachel perform an art therapy exercise: to create a sculpture of how she sees herself out of modelling clay. ‘I made massive