The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: A powerful memoir of overcoming an eating disorder

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Anorexic, my sister had said. The word hadn't stopped ringing in my head since she said it. When I first heard about anorexia, I never planned for it to become my thing. I didn't connect to it or dwell on it or decide to try it out for a while. All I'd known was that I was empty, unremarkable, unexceptional at everything, and that it would be hard to find love, friends, work, a place in the world at all, if I didn't find something by which to define myself – and then I'd found it. I am so tired of this game, the constant bargaining, the seemingly hourly negotiations to eat or not to eat. I just want to retire from eating, be done with the whole messy, unpalatable affair. Why do people have to eat so often, upwards of three, four, five times a day? Do they have nothing more interesting to do? Do people eat to live or live to eat? The last couple of chapters also reveal the up to date issues and the way in which this 31 year old actress faces up to her struggles. As well as charting her adolescent battle with anorexia, it offers a darkly compelling, highly topical account of journeying from girlhood to womanhood in the spotlight of global celebrity.' The Mail on Sunday

A raw and compelling new memoir from actress and activist Evanna Lynch about the battle between perfection and creativity. WOW…. This revealed me, broke me, and remade me. This is piercingly, heartbreakingingly, turbulently real. I don’t want people’s food or attention or sympathy or help. I don’t expect people to like or love me, and I don’t waste my time looking for it. If they could only feel all the self-loathing coursing through me, the visceral self-disgust, the ardent wish to be rescued from the unrelentingly awful reality of being in this body, maybe they’d be selfish too. All I want is to quietly withdraw from life – which is too difficult, too painful, too much for me to get a handle on – and all I am asking is that they leave me to it, to the safe, comfortable anaesthetising routine I’ve developed that feels much easier than living fully. Is it so selfish to self-preserve? Je to nesmierne intímna spoveď, ktorá sa musela písať strašne ťažko a o to väčší obdiv a rešpekt k nej pociťujem, pretože to chcelo obrovskú odvahu sa podeliť so svetom o svoje myšlienky, ktoré boli neraz strašné a bolestivé. Gradually, I began to feel this dawning awareness that womanhood was coming for me, that it was looming inevitably, and it didn’t feel safe…’my unfortunate body? They have their own lives and bodies, and I have never tried to interfere with those Gradually, I began to feel this dawning awareness that womanhood was coming for me, that it was looming inevitably, and it didn't feel safe...'

I firmly, firmly believe that J.K. Rowling had a hand in her casting as Luna, even though everyone involved keeps insisting that she didn't. What a coincidence that the troubled young girl who'd had frequent personal correspondence with J.K. herself was the one that finally got the role. The "She was promised the role by JK, and that's how she found the ~strength~ to beat anorexia!!" stories are definitely false, but I think that she saw the casting tapes of the finalists and recognized here there. Her getting cast completely independently, and then her penpal JK only learning that fact along with the rest of the world, is too good a story to be true imo. I was aware of Evanna Lynch only because she had starred as one of my favourite HP characters, Luna Lovegood, in the movie adaptation, and she did such an admirable job of bringing Luna to life. I had heard that this memoir dealt with her struggles with anorexia, something I hadn’t known about before. And I had assumed that this struggle started as an aftermath of her success in moviedom, as a result of the pressure to look well all the time. But I was wrong in this last point. Her battles with anorexia began when she was eleven, long before many kids even know what the word means.I had barricaded myself away from love, stripping away life’s most simple, frivolous pleasures one by one, until my world was completely boarded up from the affections of others, impenetrable and unforthcoming.

Creativity was this swirling wild mysterious language, but now I lived in a colorless angular world that promised me a certainty I valued above all else. And where before, I was just scribbling, writing, moving for the mere joy of it, now I tried to commodify my creativity. I tried to squeeze it out and make it do something worthwhile, be special, be important, be good. I could no longer see the point of art if it wasn’t good.Rovno poviem, že sa v ňom veľmi nedočítate o natáčaní HP, nenájdete tu veľa zaujímavých historiek a celkovo jej čas v Harrym Potterovi tu nie je opisovaný do detailov, čo je asi jediné, čo môžem knihe vytknúť, lebo samozrejme, že by som si priala, aby tam bolo toho viac. It’s soul-crushing whilst being redemptive and forgiving. It shows the worst but delivers such hope and love that you feel liberated and seen. And it's not even all about her ED, or all about the Harry Potter stuff, though they're the biggest chunks of the book; it's also about her insecurities about becoming both a woman and an adult, trying to find her way in life like everyone else, her creative spirit, her love for animals, it's got it all. She did a FANTASTIC job recounting everything and presenting it in an interesting, honest, and thoughtful way. I was never bored with the book, and that rarely happens with nonfiction. Evanna Lynch has long been viewed as a role model for people recovering from anorexia, and the story of her casting as Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter films has reached almost mythic proportions. Yet even after recovery, there remains a conflict at the very core of her being: a bitter struggle between the familiar, anesthetising pursuit of perfection and the desire to fully and fearlessly embrace her creativity. Evannu Lynch všetci poznáme ako predstaviteľku Luny Lovegood a ako človek s celoživotnou obsesiou Harrym Potterom som si nemohla nechať ujsť jej memoár.