i love books & ranting

I really do love reading. It’s probably about time I explained the title of this blog, ‘the perks of being Lizzy May.’ For starters, my first name is Elizabeth & my middle name is May. The rest is stolen from a book: ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ by Stephen Chbosky. I can’t be bothered to explain the book write now so you can all go Wikipedia it if you’re looking for a good reason to procrastinate. In short, I seem to really fall for the ‘teenager in crisis/troubled childhood comes good’ genre. I’m really into autobiographies, and good fiction stories written in first person. I’ve kept personal written journals since I was 10, and although I’ve stopped that now, I still blog & livejournal. I will be honest and say that I DON’T like adding ‘academic references’ to university essays and/or writing university essays in general however I do love ‘reflective’ essays (most people I know hate them, or at least say they feel pretentious writing them). I love bullshitting on and on about opinions I don’t really have. . I love writing in first person (can’t you tell) and pretty much all my favourite books, with the exception of Harry Potter, are written that way.


One of my favourite books of all time is Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted. I’m quite embarrassed to admit this because the book is written as a memoir of anorexia, and while I relate to it and yada yada ya the way its written is fantastic. It’s an honest account, raw, not “set up” and full of bullshit. There was such a time when I read many eating-disorder related biographies/autobiographies/’memories” and there were some that were so fake and so “set up” and so fucking ridiculous (as an overall assessment) that I almost laughed. It’s so fucking sad for me to realise that some people read them & think they’re real. I mean, SHIT. These authors are doing a disservice to mental illness. DO they realise the young girls (and boys, maybe) reading them are at an impressionable age? That the people likely to pick up the book in first place may not give a fuck about how ‘true’ it is and just want something to trigger them? These books are what the pro-anorexic diehards read when they want to be seen reading something. Urgh. Sorry, but if journals are for letting it out, I just did.