Karen was so thin from starving herself that her clothes hung on her bones like flowing biblical robes. She couldn’t make peace with her own body’s curves. She would never get the love she craved from her mother, who favored her brother, or from her brother himself. Their approval meant everything. How was she not the quintessential woman in our culture, compulsively pleasing others in order to achieve some degree of perfection and power that’s forever just around the corner, out of reach? It was easier for her to disappear, to free herself finally from that body, to find a perfection in dying.