What’s Eating You: Partial Manuscript Feedback

@November 16, 2024 5:05 PM (EST) – @November 16, 2024 8:05 PM (EST)

The One Thing

This book is about you and bulimia. So, leave out anything that is only about you or bulimia.

• By this, I mean that this book is about your experience with bulimia. It’s not about your experience, and it’s not about bulimia. So, use that as a razor as you revise: Is this about me and my bulimia?
• This serves many purposes: it sets clear expectations with your reader, provides context for all the beats of your story, and involves the reader in deciding how each story beat relates to your bulimia.
• If you stick to this rule, you can rely more on subtext, and you won’t have to explain your emotions as much, or the cause-and-effect relationship between things.
• If you limit the scope of this book to your experience with bulimia,
• To be clear, the current draft is not far off from this. There a few times I was taken out of it, when you started to comment on society (e.g., COVID) or bulimia as a condition, rather than focusing on your story. If it’s not about you and your bulimia, cut it.

Notes on Structure

Almost all of the chapters have a really strong internal structure and flow, but the manuscript on the whole is definitely out of order at the moment. I know you know that. Here are some suggestions, to have their be as much tension, suspense, resolution, and as much teaching as possible.

• Oppa is a very important character in this story. He needs his own entire narrative arc (but obviously less of a focus than yours).
• He is the Yang to your Yin. You grew up under the same circumstances and felt similar pressures, but there were key differences between you that changed how you responded to the adversity of immigration, your parents, and learning English, especially age and gender. Oppa is also the manifestation of silence, and his violence is the consequence, which is analogous to your bulimia (almost the inverse kind of behavior). As I see it, here are the main beats in your brother’s story (to be told in this non-chronological order):
• Immigrating to the US as a teenager, struggling in school and socially, resigning to his bedroom
• Getting upset with you and making you feel guilty for eating the ice cream, and even more self-conscious of your body
• Relying on your parents as an adult and struggling still with depression and getting confused and delusional, like thinking he saw Elon Musk
• Threatening Umma with a knife, and then even then her refusing to address it or find a way to help him — embodied in the silent breakfast the next morning
• The narrative definitely should be non-linear. As I see it, there are two timelines moving in parallel, and you’re sort of cutting between them: your childhood and your adulthood.
• Both should move forward, and each should build in tension and emotion and stakes toward the climax. Cut between them to achieve this.
• For example, cut from your supermarket-bakery binge to your childhood in Korea and your immigration to the US.

Reverse Outline

As I see it, all the material in the partial draft of the manuscript makes up acts I and II. You’ve yet to write Act III, which marks your transformation and the resolution of your story.

Act I: Bulimia is your normal.

1. The Supermarket Bakery
2. What’s Eating Me?
3. Lessons from Coco

Act II: You want to beat bulimia.

4. Cupcakes at Work
5. Mandu wtih My Mom
6. Table Tales
7. Love Medicine
8. Love Medicine, Part 2
9. Eat the Dessert, Gently
10. Umma
11. The Glass if Refillable / Getting Past the Tyranny of Gym Class (ideally, you’d be able to combine and compress these two)
12. [Oppa] (split out the parts from “Umma” and “Silence” that are about Oppa into its own chapter, where this is about empathizing with Oppa and uses sleep (not silence) as the symbol)
13. The Weight of Silence (this chapter should be where the knife incident happens)

Act III: You’ve binged and purged for the last time.

This act is currently missing from the manuscript. This is where you mark your transformation and resolve any open loops in the story. I think a great way to do that would be to discuss your marriage, divorce, and the final time binged and purged.

• [Your marriage] (This should be written as the climax — as if you succeeded in life and found happiness and love despite your family and your bulimia.)
• [Your Divorce] (The beauty in this is that it hasn’t wrecked you. Because of all the work you’ve done on yourself, for yourself, you have handled this gracefully, even though it’s been difficult and painful.)
• [The Final Time You Binged and Purged] (which is before your divorce, and that’s significant. You’ve dealt with your divorce without “relapsing.” Bulimia is no longer eating you.)

Notes on Style/Content/Themes

I love your writing, Sasha, and I enjoyed my entire time reading this. You have a great control of language, imagery, and emotion. I was gripped by this story, and the only times I stumbled were because of structural issues or there being too much telling. Here are some notes on that.

• Don’t show and tell. Your reader will constantly be looking for connections between your experience/upbringing/career/relationships and your bulimia (because they expect everything to be about your bulimia). So, let trust them to make those connections. Don’t take the fun out of it for them, as you do here, for instance (from the “Umma” chapter):

Showing:

Umma joyously responded, “Thank you! Yes, she looks a lot like me, but she has only one ssang ka pul - on her left eye. When she gets older, I’m going to take her to get the other eye done, and to make her nose smaller. She unfortunately has big nostrils.”

Telling (the next paragraph):

Ah… thank you, Umma, for giving me the gift of self-critique. Because of my one-sided ssang ka pul, and my nose that was too big for you, I grew up thinking my face needed to be fixed.

Your reader is already inferring how this comment and your relationship to your mother contributes to your bulimia. So, you could accomplish the same by cutting the telling:

Umma joyously responded, “Thank you! Yes, she looks a lot like me, but she has only one ssang ka pul - on her left eye. When she gets older, I’m going to take her to get the other eye done, and to make her nose smaller. She unfortunately has big nostrils.” Ah… thank you, Umma.

1. The really good news here is that you are very good at showing, and in most cases of telling, it’s redundant. The fix is often as simple as cutting the telling, because you’ve already communicated it implicitly; you’ve already done the hard work of showing, as in this example where you show in one paragraph and tell in the next.
2. Both of these paragraphs convey the same information. One is implicit, the other explicit. And you want a mix of both, with more being implicit (since this is a story and not an article). You can really lean into your telling voice in the “Tips” sections.
• Here are some other examples of telling and showing, where you can simply cut the telling part:
• Ch. 2:

Coco didn’t seem to care too much about food. Every morning when I fed her a bowl of her kitty mix, she’d sniff it, take a few bites, then she’d stop and walk away. Usually, she left her bowl half full. This amazed me, because I never left anything on my plate, even when I was full, or beyond full, when my belly felt like it would burst. Clearly, my cat had healthier eating habits than I did, and I wished I could adopt her manner of stopping when I’d had enough. She intentionally left her bowl half full, enough to graze on for the rest of the day until I fed her again in the evening.

I flushed the toilet and wiped a trail of vomit drool off my chin. I felt so ashamed. Coco continued to meow, this time in short, staccato sounds, as if to scold me. “Meow, meow, what the fuck is wrong with you? Meow!”

• The Main Theme that I see (besides the subject matter of bulimia): Self-Critique & Self-Love / Guilt & Gratitude
• Some Motifs to play with:
• Silence
• The power of words (e.g. “I love you” and “I love myself” — also reading the dictionary and the “prime factorization” problem with Umma’s simple English)
• Being seen (by Coco, by the cat-calling girls, by men, by your coworkers, by the kind yoga woman in the locker room)

Feedback by Chapter

Resources

Mark Manson’s "The Responsibility-Fault Fallacy"

Responsibility and fault often appear together in our culture. But they are not the same thing. If I hit you with my car, I am both at fault and likely legally responsible to compensate you in some way. Even if hitting you with my car was an accident, I would still be responsible. This is the way fault works in our society. If you fuck up, you’re on the hook for making it right. And it should be that way. But there are also problems we aren’t at fault for, yet we are still responsible for them. For example, if you woke up one day and there was a newborn baby on your doorstep, it would not be your fault that baby was put there, but the baby would now be your responsibility.

Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you’re currently making every second of every day. You are choosing to read this. You are choosing to think about the concepts. You are choosing to accept or reject the concepts. It may be my fault that you think my ideas are lame, but you are responsible for coming to your own conclusions. It’s not your fault that I chose to write this sentence, but you are still responsible for choosing whether to read it or not.

Charlie Bleecker’s podcast Memoir Snob

And this Substack Post on The Glass Castle:

Transparent Tuesdays

Issue 190

charliebleecker.substack.com

All her prior stories evoked a similar surge of adrenaline—not the best bedtime routine—but I finally realized what made this book stand apart. She did not write thoughts or feelings.  All she wrote was dialogue and action. Without anyone’s thoughts or feelings it was like I was experiencing what Jeannette had experienced, which left me hot and throwing the blankets off and sometimes holding my breath.