Killing Esther: A Memoir of Love and Hunger

I think there’s something wrong with me. My sister has lost the roundness in her face that has plagued her so since our trip to Sweden to visit our mother’s birthplace. And she hardly takes up the little space between my chest of drawers and her side of our closet. She seems disturbed, in need of my sympathy, which I am quick to give though I have only two ugly dresses in that closet, her hand-me-downs, while her side is crammed with pretty little skirts, cashmere turtlenecks and buttoned-down blouses from Plain & Fancy. Esther is and always will be the favorite, and that’s okay with me. But Esther is disappearing. Esther was 16 when she began her descent into the madness of self-starvation, but her self-destruction didn’t begin there. Our parents had laid the groundwork for her neuroses with years of histrionics and melodrama long before Esther considered her first calorie. Killing Esther is a tragicomic tale of a toxic childhood. It is a bold memoir that is sometimes maddening, sometimes amusing, and will stay with the reader a long time after the last page is turned.