A Psychoanalytic Reading of Aimee Liu's Solitaire--Redo of Midterm Paper

Solitaire, America’s first memoir of anorexia nervosa, was written by Aimee Liu at the age of twenty-five. Beautiful, ambitious, and extremely bright, she fought a war within her teenage self that at times made her feel alone and solitary. Only by owning her identity apart from her attachment to codependent boyfriend, Ken, and shedding the ideals of society and her ideal self, does she slowly regain her womanly physique and health. Let us start from the beginning when this monster of a disease took hold of nine-year-old Aimee.

The fear of fat began at a party when Aimee’s grandmother says to her, “My, you’re a chubby little girl, aren’t you?” (23). Anorexia often begins with a careless comment about a girl’s weight that buries itself within her unconscious and becomes the mantra she feeds off of for the rest of her life.

Being told you’re fat by someone who supposedly loves you is a devastating blow to a budding girl’s ego. A tall pubescent teenager at 130 pounds seems healthy, but Aimee feels like an obese monstrosity that must be erased or undone. She is unhappy with everything about herself which morphs into a hatred of her body. She wants to be somebody else, and that “somebody” is thin.
So often when we hate ourselves, we do something about it, either by killing ourselves or by killing something within ourselves. By killing the very thing we despise within ourselves, we give birth to what we love, relishing this very potential of perfection within our bodies, the essence of beauty.

There is so much excess in pain that denial, starvation, and abstinence are the way out of excess, depravity, and decadence. That to be less than what we are is to be more, because this society has taught us that in some respects, less is more.

Anorexia is about regaining an identity that was always shaky to begin with. When Aimee entered high school and lost connection and intimacy with her brother, Scott, she needed to fill the void and replace it with a fascination with food and thinness. But an equal contributor was that she was afraid of becoming a woman. Eleven-year-old Aimee states, “I . . . detest myself. My body is developing faster than the other girls. I am curvaceous and tall and, though not obese, am still my grandmother’s chubby little miss. Just before Christmas I have my first period. I’ve been dreading this since fifth grade . . .” (33).

Menstruation is a horrible affair. It is a duty and responsibility that a young woman is not ready to take on, the whole idea of being fertile and a sex object. It makes a girl realize that all she has to sell in this world is her sexuality and beauty, and if she feels less than beautiful, why be sexual at all? Because fertility is a mark of competence, strength, and maturity, a floundering young girl is not ready to cross over and will do anything to rid herself of breasts, curves, and her period. A young girl is afraid of herself which is why she can never envision herself growing into a bigger monstrosity, her mother. Aimee even fears that if she eats, “I would probably look and function just like my mother” (80).

A girl fears desperately to become her mother, because she sees her mother as washed-up, old, terribly unattractive, and jealous of younger, lither, more beautiful women such as herself. Mothers are the ugly threat in a young woman’s life, a reminder that we all get old, fat, bitter, decrepit, and overbearing. So often anorexia is about the struggle between mother and daughter, the mother cooking and trying to feed her daughter and the daughter making every attempt to disobey her mother’s wishes. In the end, the daughter wins, because anorexia is stronger than anyone or anything.

Aimee says about her mother, “I want to surpass her, not follow her lead. Losing weight is the one task I can perform better than she. For years she has talked about reducing, struggled with diets and exercise, but has never had much success. When I began losing, of course, I wasn’t out to compete with her, but I must confess, it’s kind of exhilarating to manage something she’s failed. Now she pretends to worry about me, tries to convince me that I’m destroying my looks, but I know she’s just saying that because she’s jealous. I don’t care, I enjoy being thin. This is the one time I won’t let her control me” (80).

Aimee feels that her mother is trying to take away her only power, her most accessible identity, the thing that separates her from her mother. Aimee’s father is always in the background, floating in the distance, a mere money-making machine, as if his absent role and love for her is replaced by her anorexia.

Aimee needs a father to adore and faun over, to feel secure with and protected by. Unfortunately, she lacks that security. So her next choice is to find something all her own that will love and protect her from the world and shield her from the threat of her mother. Her father is anorexia and her mother is the very monster that wants to tear her from the grip of this disease. Anorexia has become the staunch dominant paternal force in Aimee’s life and she will stop at nothing to defend this twisted father figure. She will not let her jealous mother break them apart. Anorexia is the only thing Aimee loves desperately, the only love in her life, and she’ll be damned if her mother comes between them.

Later on in the novel, Aimee meets her codependent boyfriend, Ken, the third phallic symbol in her life (the first shortly being her father and the second being anorexia). In college, she and Ken do everything together. Aimee states, “The setup seems too good to be true. Ken and I are like children together, intimate pals unwilling to let each other out of sight. We attend classes together . . . We study side by side at the library, read one another to sleep at night, and exchange moral support . . . Three times a day we troop to the dining hall for our version of meals” (193).

Instead of starving herself to death, Aimee now maintains a Spartan and odd diet regimen. She eats on funny terms, but at least she eats. She eats, because she has found her second power, the first romantic love of her life. So often anorexics become anorexic, because they have no passions or pastimes or people in their lives to cling to. They use anorexia as a substitute for all the integral things they lack. Now that Aimee has Ken to cling to, her prowess and phallus, she no longer needs her anorexia so staunchly and feverishly.

The ultimate leap Aimee makes is when she sheds herself of Ken. She doesn’t need an exterior penis to complete her, she has internalized her own penis and is strong and steady by herself. She no longer resents her mother or craves the wrong kind of attention. She can give to herself what she’s been searching for her whole life—her virility, empowerment, know-how, and the confidence in herself that she can right her own wrongs. She does not need to starve in order to feel powerful nor does she need men to feel loved. She is her own machine, she can be her own player in the game of Solitaire, she needs no one but herself and the strength that has brought her thus far.

In her breakup speech to Ken, Aimee states, “Ken, can’t you see how sick this relationship is? . . . The way we’re living, doting, depending on each other . . . God, we’re practically sucking each other’s blood. Before you came along I blinded myself to the world around me by dwelling on food, modeling, my weight, anything profoundly superficial. And now I’m blinding myself by living through you . . .” (206).

An anorexic’s recovery centers on realization, enlightenment, and self-empowerment. Aimee had the courage to turn her life around and go on to graduate from Yale, write a number of books, marry and birth two sons, and do great things. She eventually realized how much she loved her mother, how she tormented her poor mother, and apologized for that. She went on to accept her father. She accepted sex and her sexuality and truly fell in love with herself for the first time. She needed no one but herself, realizing that though we are social creatures who need love and affection, we begin and end with ourselves, players in the game of Solitaire.

Work Cited
Liu, Aimee. Solitaire. New York: Harper, 1979.