Binary Star

by Sarah Gerard

The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity.

With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a road-trip circumnavigating the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism, and believe they've found a direction.

Binary Star is an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick (or at least inundated with quick-fix solutions); a society that sells diet pills, sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight or too much weight or put on weight, and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Mental Health, Literary Fiction, Novels, Mental Illness, Adult Fiction

172 pages, Paperback

First published January 5, 2015

About the author

Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State; the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize; and two chapbooks, most recently BFF. She teaches writing at Columbia University and for independent workshop series, including Catapult, Sackett Street, and Brooklyn Poets. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Baffler, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as in anthologies. She writes a monthly column for Hazlitt and is currently at work on several books, including a novel about love and a nonfiction book about a murder.

Reviews

[Eva · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first read Gerard in a NY Times Op-Ed piece "Anorexia and Escape" (see: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...). And frankly I think she does herself an enormous disservice in having written this ostensibly as fiction. Her autobiographical voice is much stronger and doesn't rely on a somewhat flimsy astronomical metaphor as a creative crutch.

Does this book lack authenticity? No. As someone who has in the past struggled with eating disorder behavior, all of this rang true as an accurate portrait of the mentality and pseudo logic behind the behaviors of anorexia/bulimia.

But I do believe that had she written this in the lucid and incredible style that characterizes her nonfiction essay writing that this book would have been much, much better. And somewhat contrary to instinct, I think as an audience we would have felt less at a distance or remove from the narrator had this been written in the past tense where we had the insight and objectivity of a speaker who exists beyond the sphere of their own obsessive microcosm of diet pills and purging.

This all being said, I look forward to reading more by Gerard and still have a lot of faith in her abilities as a writer.

[Tessa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Binary Star is so steeped in the narcissism of its main characters that there wasn't much for me to salvage. Our protagonist and her trust-fund baby of a boyfriend are unlikeable. He's clearly a jerk from page one but our protagonist is too preoccupied with ennui to notice.

I get that these characters are both suffering greatly from mental illness. But layered on top of that is a hipstery piousness that has nothing to do with their respective diseases. Yes, yes, I understand, America is drowning in a wasteland of strip malls and parking lots, we're all sheep being led to the slaughter by our corporate overlords, the end times are near, etc. So when we see those bad things happening we should do something about it, right? Maybe support local businesses, reduce our carbon footprints, vote for responsible political candidates? Even build a community garden or live off the grid or join the Peace Corps, for more adventurous types?

Well, no. See, our holier-than-thou main characters are just so overwhelmed by the decay of American culture that they can't help but alienate every well-meaning citizen they meet, ruin a road trip around America by complaining about the lack of authenticity (even though the only places they seem to stop are strip clubs and gas stations) and generally embody grown-up versions of those goth kids from South Park, chain smoking and guzzling Starbucks coffee because somehow those things are only bad for the environment when other people are doing them.

That's what really bothered me about the book: the apathy. It's as if the author is suggesting that the cause of Protagonist's and John's problems (bulimia for her and what seems like alcoholism/bipolar for him) are all rooted in our societal woes. As if every fat-shaming tabloid cover, unethical slaughterhouse, and string of chain restaurants on the highway have been personally ratcheting up their illnesses. It's an interesting idea in a way, to see a mental illness corollary to the way fast food has increased the threat of diabetes/heart disease/obesity. But the problem is, the characters in this book lack the resilience of real people. The people who realize they're dangerously overweight and lose it; or who realize they're anorexic and start therapy; or quit drinking, or smoking, or or or. The people who realize that even though society may have caused their problems, they don't have to let it ruin their lives.

Then there are the masses of us who see magazine covers touting the most popular celebrities and diets and say, "eh, that's bullshit" and go on with our days, or realize that eating animal products is bad and cut down WITHOUT attacking others about their own choices, or who sometimes shop local and sometimes eat at Burger King. The moderate majority. The huge mess of complicated, loving, clueless, terrible, wonderful individuals that are trying their best to navigate society.

This book ignores those people and focuses on two on the fringe. The problem with the fringe is that whether it's on the conservative or liberal end, it doesn't really make a difference; people with very extreme opinions tend to cover their ears and shout that they can't hear you when they refuse to vaccinate their kids or insist Obama isn't a citizen or join ALF or whatever. And that's what these characters are doing, the whole book long; criticizing everyone who isn't in their dysfunctional little club of two (god, how dare people weigh slightly more than average? Why did this lady who's hosting us for free in her home cook us a delicious NON VEGAN dinner even though she didn't know we were vegans? Why do people keep glaring at me and kicking me out of their parties when all I'm doing is shouting MEAT IS MURDER at them repeatedly and starting drunken fist fights?) while ignoring that they're the ones with a problem, the ones who could benefit from a little critique.

I think the author knows this, knows her characters are pathetic terrible rude people, and is making a point about how they're trapped and suffering in the sounding box of their own design. But as a reader, it's not really fun being stuck in there with them. Hearing this girl talk about downing Hydroxycuts every half hour and drinking Red Bull like water is so sad. Hearing about her boyfriend washing down Seroquel with 12 beers in a row and then falling asleep is likewise depressing (because that's what happens like 30 times in this book so you have to relive that scenario a lot). It's like a very nihilistic Jack Kerouac, meets an episode of Intervention but with no intervention, meets that poetry you wrote as an angsty teenager and promptly burned in embarrassment when you rediscovered it as an adult. It doesn't help that the writing style of the book is so esoteric you never know what the hell is going on (or who's speaking in a conversation; I hate that) and so pretentious you think you stumbled upon Gwyneth Paltrow's misanthropic counterpart to Goop.

So many books tackle these issues better. Animal rights? We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler, or Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser. Eating disorders? Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson. Mental illness? The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon, Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh. Philosophy? Siddhartha, Herman Hesse. These books all offer a nuanced approach and characters who teeter on the edge before landing back in reality, with the rest of us.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting little novel that only takes a couple hours to read.

Living inside a disease. That's what this novel is. It is, I think, about emotion and connection, but because the disease at the heart of the novel and the diseases at the core of the relationship it revolves around are so much about disruption and dissociating from those around you, it has a sort of flat style. These are serious emotions and moments happening in the novel but the voice is sort of clinical or detached.

It feels like the narrator is describing her life as it happens to someone else, which is odd and kind of awesome. It makes the disease more real and active and it kind of grows and swallows all that happens in the novel, because everything in the novel and in the narrator's life is about or caused by the disease.

This is the first realist novel I've read in a few months and it was pretty solid. It's not a favorite but it's good for what it does. It's a perfect blend of substance, style, and content, really. And this is from Two Dollar Radio, so you know it's going to be interesting.

I think it's about as long as it could possibly be, too. Had this gone on longer, I probably wouldn't have liked it. Though, having said that, it's the kind of novel that feels like you can read it forever. It reminds me of the lives of friends and people I've loved.

Also, that ending. It's brilliant.

Definitely recommended if you're interested in stories about mental health or if you've struggled with body image or its associated illnesses.

[Edward Goetz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was terrifying. Because she had an eating disorder and she is such a gifted writer, Gerard gets as close as possible to making you feel what it is like without having one yourself.

I read the author is doing well and it is my hope she continues to be successful in fighting this insidious disorder.

[emily compton · Rating 2 out of 5]

RATING: 2.5

generally, i give a rating based on a gut reaction immediately after finishing a book. in this case, it was a little more difficult because i had so many conflicting feelings while reading this, but my final thought was that i was pleasantly surprised by not hating it as much as i had anticipated--and did, for at least the first half. to start, i had really high hopes for this. it was on seemingly every list i read of books to look forward to in 2015, and its description was right up my alley. unfortunately, when a description says something is written in "lyrical prose," that can mean a lot of things. here's what i did not think it meant:

"This is what I want. I just want.
To cling to you.
To cling to your shoe.
What about the fish that die for rubber?
Follow your star to the dark horizon.
Redshift.
I just want all of you."

this is how the book is intermittently written throughout, and i'm sorry. it's not for me. i don't want to feel like i'm trudging through high school poetry. i found myself skipping chunks like this because they just weren't resonating at all. for this reason, i was planning on giving this a one star rating from the get-go, but in the end, there were some things i thought were really successful here. i did like the central metaphor about the life of stars vs. the life of the anorexic, and the relationship of binary stars vs. the relationship of two sick people as toxic and enabling partners. i also very genuinely felt that the author had suffered from this disease and could illustrate its all-consuming agony in a really effective way.

thanks for surprising me despite your flaws, binary star.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any novel that starts off with a quote from Raoul Vaneigem is OK with me. The quote: "Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased by the guarantee that we will die of boredom." This quotation sets the book in its proper light, considering the first person account of struggling with anorexia, as well as with her alcoholic boyfriend. It's an impossible book to put down. Both due to the writing, but as well as the force to go to from beginning to the end. To be honest I never could understand anorexia, but by reading Sarah Gerard's novel, I have a much clear view of what it must be like. The character's existence is barely existing - and it's not only due to her physical and mental condition, but also the way of the world. "Binary Star" is a tough little book. A great pleasure to read. Yet, still, she has a beautiful way of stating a crisis as it happens. A wonderful book.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book would have held greater appeal for me had it not been for its unflattering portrayal of veganism and its trivialization of the animal rights movement. These often-maligned ideologies already suffer enough from casual misunderstanding, negative stereotyping, and reactionary prejudicial thought. The entanglement of veganism with eating disorders is a problematic and highly nuanced issue that I would prefer not to delve into here other than to point out that making this association in a work of fiction without offering any contextual insight sends at best an ambiguous message about the issue, and at worst, a negative one. After 15 years of living as an ethical vegan and 5 years prior to that as a vegetarian, I have little remaining tolerance for any media that instead of attempting to reverse the continuous stream of misinformation about veganism, serves as a contribution to it, even in seemingly small, insignificant ways, and regardless of the creator’s intent, be it malicious or benign.

All that being said, Gerard points an accurate and unwavering finger at many of 21st century America’s societal ills: the drugging of the populace by the greedy monolith of Big Pharma, as aided and abetted by the complicit and delusional allopathic medical establishment (here only tacitly criticized); the incessant projection of perversely distorted ideals of body image, to the extreme detriment of women everywhere; the generic corporate-designed nature of the suburban landscape; the commodification of everything; and the general disconnection of people from one another, even the ones they profess to love. Gerard skewers all of this and more in a brief poetic text that propels itself forward at a chaotic Adderall-fueled pace.

The two characters in the book are hard to like, but presumably that is the point. They are so anesthetized to life that they don’t even know what they want for themselves, never mind from each other. The narrator is passive and vague, pointed excruciatingly inward as she wages a personal battle to achieve that elusive magical weight screamed at her from the magazines in the checkout aisle, one that will finally provide her with the coveted ‘thigh gap’. As she is in the throes of an eating disorder, she does engender a reader’s understanding that this is not how she wants to be. She communicates genuine signs of wanting to escape from the trap in which she is caught. But her boyfriend John is, as one of the narrator’s friends aptly describes him, a ‘tool,’ who also happens to have a drinking problem. He is a walking, talking list of side effects for the daily pharmaceutical cocktail he imbibes. Since we don’t have the benefit of his first-person viewpoint, though, it is harder to empathize with him. We only see his actions, nearly all of which present as misguided and often hurtful. There is little groundwork established for a personal connection to his thoughts and feelings, and as a result he comes across as one-dimensional.

Unfortunately for me as a reader, the ‘life-altering cause’ both of these casualties of society end up halfheartedly committing themselves to turns out to be one of my sacred cows. Otherwise I might have been more on board with this one.

*For background reading on the genesis of this novel, see Gerard’s personal essays about eating disorders and veganism posted on the NY Times Opinionator blog. As another GR reviewer points out in her review, Gerard’s story may have had a deeper impact had she stayed with her autobiographical voice in a nonfiction format.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Earlier this year I had an opportunity to interview Sarah Gerard for CCLaP's podcast while she was in town, which unfortunately I didn't get to do because I was so busy with the computer coding bootcamp I was in; and that's a shame, because now that I've finally had a chance to read her novel Binary Star six months later, I've come to realize how good it is, and it makes me realize that we would've had a lot of interesting things to talk about while she was in Chicago. But that said, before anything else, we have to talk about a big caveat right away that may turn you off this book altogether, which is that it's a deep character study of the kind of intolerable hipster couple you meet so often when living in a big city: you know, where he's an alcoholic pill-popper and she has an eating disorder, and they can't really stand each other but they're too morally weak to break up, so instead they just live lives of misery that then bleed all over their exasperated friends on a daily basis, with such a huge sense of middle-class entitlement and white privilege that you may not be able to see around it to the actual story on the other side. (It's telling, I think, that the plot's framework is based around a cross-country trip the couple is taking together, entirely funded by the boyfriend's enabling suburban parents simply for the purpose of the couple "finding themselves," and that they engage in such stereotypical behavior as camping in the woods instead of getting hotel rooms to save money, but then blowing a hundred bucks in an hour at a strip club on a whim. If that's not the very definition of "entitled worthless hipsters who you want to just hit in the fucking face as hard as you can possibly swing your fist," nothing is.)

Now me, I don't mind stories about people like these, as long as they're done right like Gerard has done here -- scathing, self-deprecatory, and with a kind of poetry to the prose that almost blends genres, Binary Star has all the insightful self-loathing of a Dostoevsky novel, a heartbreaking portrait of two people simply born without all the abilities needed to succeed in a modern world; but if this isn't your cup of tea, you need to stay far, far away from this book, or else risk the chance of setting this paperback on fire out of sheer frustration about a third of the way through. Not for those who like their prose quick and smooth, this is a halting read that gains much from the slowness Gerard has purposely inserted into the style, the kind of novel that will be loved by those who also love slow-moving European cinema of the 1970s.

Out of 10: 8.5, or 9.0 for those with a high tolerance for stories about hipster losers

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mmm, this is a strange one. Deeply affecting, Gerard’s pared-down prose – single lines, fragments, lists, snippets – makes for bruising reading. I was fascinated at how these two deeply damaged individuals emerge from the deconstructed text as two whole characters I came to care about deeply (and let us not forget Dog).

The sex scenes are particularly unpleasant, involving pain and degradation … but I suppose this is precisely Gerard’s point: that this dysfunctional couple’s self-destruction inevitably spills over to each other. Does that even make sense?

At the end though I was unsure if Gerard is actually championing ‘veganarchism’, or is highlighting the plight of bulimics and anorexics in general. In her Acknowledgements, she states: ‘And to all who have struggled and continue to struggle with food: keep fighting. There is a world for you’.

To me, this seems a pretty ambiguous comment on bulimia / anoxeria. Is Gerard conflating bulimia / anorexia with eco-terrorism? (This is definitely indicated by the ending, where the female narrator is painted with the soft tragic light of martyrdom).

Or is Gerard being satiric? The trouble with such pared-down prose is that it makes it very difficult to convey any sense of irony; I also felt that the rather endless astronomy metaphors run counter-intuitive to the anti-novel intention here, as they take some explaining, and therefore cause the fractured text to congeal in places.

Another unresolved issue here is the privileged position of the main couple, who the reader cannot help but feel are so fucked up largely because they do not have to worry about mundane things like paying bills or the grind of a daily job.

Nevertheless, I quite admire Gerard’s chutzpah here, as this must have been a real bitch to write. Conventional wisdom has it that the simplest writing is the hardest, so imagine how difficult that must be when you parse a novel down to this level, so that it hovers on the edge of intelligibility and coherence.

And then you must still draw your readers in or, as in this case, create a negative space with its own gravitational attraction so that that your readers are sucked in (and then spat out at the end of the experience). Difficult and uncomfortable as this book may be, it remains a finely crafted work of art.

[Allie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think I would have been as disappointed in this book if the buzz surrounding it hadn't been quite so loud.

Binary Star explores the destructive orbits of a young woman struggling with a severe eating disorder and her alcoholic, long-distance boyfriend. Gerard definitely has the chops for great prose. Certain passages, like the in-class exercises the protagonist submits (or imagines submitting) her students to, are fantastic. These moments, however, serve to highlight the rest of the novel's weaknesses. Most of the book is written in a fragmentary, steam-of-consciousness style that grows repetitive and increasingly dull. Despite its short length, the novel felt stretched too thinly over too many pages.

I burned through Binary Star in two days, and I was left feeling like there was great 30-page story lurking somewhere in this 170-page novel.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hopelessly privileged and self-absorbed characters. Nice prose. Cut out the people and it's a beautiful sky chart.

[Marc Kozak · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poetic prose -- sometimes it works for me, sometimes it doesn't.

This is a big swing and a miss, and particularly disappointing because between the themes and subject matter, this could've been so much more. A young woman with a severe eating disorder goes on a road trip with her alcoholic long-distance boyfriend, all the while playing up an analogy comparing the two people with binary stars (two stars orbiting around their common center of mass).

The biggest problem was the author's insistence on continuing to beat us over the head with the binary star analogy. It was interesting for a little while, but it got so tiresome and repetitive that it lost all meaning by the end. I starting skipping over sections where she brought up star-related imagery, because it started to take me out of the story. She revolves, she burns, she rotates, there is distance between them, she is a supernova, a black hole, etc etc. It started approaching levels of bad high school poetry. Not good.

Also I get the impression that the author thought her wordplay was a lot more clever than it really was. It read like a "Fun with Homonyms!!!" exercise. I don't have the book in front of me, but it was like:

His words burned me deeply.
My body was scaled by the burn.
We are two stars, burning in the night.
I burn.

And so forth.

At any rate, there were sections where I started to get all clenched up due to turns of phrases or build-ups of emotion, but inevitably some lazy writing took me out of it. This probably should have been a short story, and considering it's only a sparse 160 pages, that says a lot. Bummer.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed this for The Rumpus -- here's an excerpt:

There used to be a ride at my local amusement park called Time Shaft, a rotor ride where you got spun around with increasing speed, the centrifugal force pushing you against the wall as the floor dropped out beneath you. Reading Binary Star brought back some of that feeling of being spun into suspension. It feels dangerous and ecstatic; it feels sick.

Most literary narratives of female anorexia and bulimia are housed in either the young adult problem novel or the eating disorder memoir. With the exception of Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia, a hybrid text that describes Kraus’s anorexia as one strand of a complex narrative that also involves a long-distance BDSM relationship and the making of a film, most are mired in the psychiatric discourse on eating disorders, which locates the root of the disorder in individual psychopathology and/or family dysfunction, as opposed to culture and/or social/political depression.

Read the full review at http://therumpus.net/2015/04/binary-s...

[Bud Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one had me hypnotized. The narrator is stuck in a loop that is disintegrating her. There's a descent into near-madness and fanaticism that's hard to look away from, so much so, I read the whole book in one sitting, no interest in the real world for four hours. The prose is sharp, tragic, hurts. Walloping references to pop culture obsession and constant branding of products, drugs and alcohol, celebrities ... The world in Binary Star is a helpless, joyless world, but a true one. This is what art can do when it's used like a weapon.

[Georgia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was fucking weird, and stylistically probably isn't for everyone. It felt like a fever dream in which the author had climbed into my head and was writing down my train of thought

[Phillip Freedenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are screaming and lost inside of our own bodies searching for some type of perfect air to breath, that never quite arrives, as we seek to take refuge from the impossibly perfect melancholy of it all somewhere in the colossal fragility of each other and it is just then, in that moment that we project from our hearts the resilient will of something that may set us free, now known as Binary Star.

By what metric do we evaluate the essential value of our meaningful orientation to a world whose position often time feels so small, if even banal, and of little interest to such a behemoth surrounding cosmology, that the perceptions of how this all feels to us, to be human, full of flaws, failures, and fire, within it all, could feel so possibly small, noticeably nested within the painful, often times, cold vibratory expanse of it all.

Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star radiates with a profoundly glimmering beauty, pathos, and poetry which shines a beacon of light on what it feels like to be alive, whose astonishing new literary rhythms offer readers a hope that it is not our baffling proximity to the seemingly impenetrable vastness of the universe that isolates us but it is instead the magnification of our vulnerabilities, fears, and imperfections that illuminates the marvel of our ability to create a meaning so profound that what we leave behind us is an impression so brilliant in the stars around us that we are left with a book so densely packed with raw emotion and energy that we are left to thank Sarah Gerard for reminding us just what it felt like to be a human being somewhere, sometime in a world, no longer being nurtured, not unlike its hosts, in which thankfully we have a book like Binary Star, that if only even temporarily, illuminates the darkness that rests somewhere between us all as the “stars will shift from red to blue to red as each moves toward us, then away.”

In Binary Star, Gerard disarms the seemingly omnipotent mechanics of the struggle of everyday life with an inspiring, vulnerable lyricism, whose concerns are not only focused upon the dislocation we feel within the bodies that carry us, but also those that are focused on the perfunctory habits that we design in an attempt to dull the crippling uncertainty of the universe as it unforgivably expands around us, which illuminates the many reasons that we take refuge in the books we love, each of us in search of a common thread that binds us all together.

Gerard states that, “sometimes stars are fixed and some are not.” Sometimes in the world today we all may begin to feel untethered from the world around us, but by the time you leave the genius of Binary Star behind you, you will be reminded that in some way or another we are all fixed into our very human orbit, all together, as we share reflections of ourselves beaming brilliantly from the pages of the books that we share.

Phillip Freedenberg
Author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic

November 2021
Buffalo, NY

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

You haven’t eaten for hours. How are you awake? How can you drive?

I’m always awake. I’m always driving toward something.

Right now, I’m driving a line toward the void.

There is work to be done, but I won’t do it. I’ll circle my apartment elliptically burning calories from the kitchen to the bathroom.

I’ll eat a cup of grapes and purge, eat a cup of grapes and purge, eat and purge.

Fall into my hunger but never reach it.

Orbit its atmosphere.

Objects that fall into orbit around Earth can’t stay there forever. They must come down sometime.

These objects experience gravity but acceleration cancels gravity. Therefore, they are weightless.

They orbit for months or years, but without periodic bursts of energy, they start to slip.

Falling to Earth, burning up on the way down.

We never see them hit the ground.

***

Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star is a love story of mutually assured destruction. The nameless narrator, a young woman working as a student teacher studying astronomy, is in a troubling, long-distance relationship with a young man named John; he’s an alcoholic, she’s anorexic (bulimic, primarily).

As the novel begins, the two of them are on a road trip together. Their weaknesses are visible to one another—veritable beacons, to put it mildly—and so they promise to put themselves in check: for the duration of the trip, he won’t drink and she won’t purge. How long this truce of sorts lasts (or doesn’t) is indicative of the hard truth at the core of their relationship: they are their weaknesses; they have allowed their twinned self-destructive tendencies to affect each other—to devour each other.

What becomes clear very early on is that neither one of them wants to, or is willing to talk about their problems. Their weaknesses are crutches, and each is the other’s blockade—without them, they would be forced to actually be honest with one another. Gerard uses the metaphor of the binary star—of two stars destroying one another—to really drive this point home as, over time, the narrator’s obsession with achieving her goal weight of a deadly eighty-five pounds overwhelms her external influences and all possible outlets for support. And as the novella nears its conclusion, she turns increasingly inward, focused on just the one thing that matters—the thing that she believes, if achieved, will suddenly fill her with worth, or a fleeting sense of accomplishment.

While destruction is at the core of Binary Star, it is also a story of bargains—bargains made with a partner, with no intention of being fulfilled due to the bargains made with the self, which supersede all others. These self-made bargains take the form of never-ending one-sided conversations, wherein every piece of food is quantified, judged, and rationalized, with only the barest of necessities making it past one’s lips. The narrator survives, seemingly, on a diet of Adderall, Hydroxycut, and Red Bull; she clings to veganism (and later, veganarchism) as an ideal on which to suspend reason, to offer up as an explanation to anyone, friend or family, who questions the apparent changes to her body; she weighs herself five times a day, stands in front of a mirror, pees, and then looks in the mirror again, turning in profile, to see if in urinating, that unsightly, very human bulge around her midsection has suddenly vanished.

It’s in these details and so many others like them—these conversations and bargains and even occasional arguments with the self—that Binary Star succeeds. As someone who’s struggled with the constant presence of anorexia in my life for over fifteen years, Gerard’s truncated, bladed prose carves an emotional and very truthful swath over its unbelievably tight 166 pages. The narrator’s journey begins beautifully, with a section composed entirely of slightly abstracted poetic verse, before properly introducing readers to its two leads. It ends, however, with what seems like a dark parallel to the opening segment, as broken, nonsensical, somewhat paranoid abstraction—a reflection of a starved mind, a nutrient-skewed individual prone to erratic, dangerous behaviour. The evolution is stark and unflinching.

Several times this year I’ve come out citing my lack of love for narratives eschewing dialogue tags. Again, however, I’m forced to recognize the effectiveness of said tactic. The sense of distance created by the lack of quotation marks throughout helps to portray the narrator’s increasingly anxious, disordered mind. It becomes difficult at times to discern who is saying what, and which conversations are actually happening and which exist solely in her mind. In this way, the eating disorder itself becomes the novella’s unspoken third lead—it takes over, subjugates the narrator’s rational mind, and charts a new course all its own.

As the novella winds down and our narrator gets closer and closer to achieving her goal weight, and as her mind set devolves in tandem, she begins to see herself as shining, though it’s not light coming from within her but the light of the rest of the world passing through her as if she were translucent. She’s not a star; she’s collapsed, a black hole rapidly being swallowed by her own compulsions. I’m not entirely sure where her story ends, but I suspect that’s the point—in reaching her goal, she has in the process lost or destroyed, or aided in destroying, everything around her. To carry the metaphor a step further, her story concludes at the event horizon of the disorder. What’s on the other side remains a mystery.

This is a brutal read, one I related to far more than I anticipated. With a careful, attentive approach to the small quantifications, calculations, and justifications that, in my experience, make up so much of the anorexic experience, Gerard’s Binary Star is an intimate, much-needed window into a world I wish more people took the time to investigate and understand.

[Kati Heng · Rating 5 out of 5]

God, is this book extraordinary.
Where do I even begin? The book’s plot revolves around two lovers, a young woman, our narrator, who struggles with bulimia and anorexia, who spins through tabloids and celebrity gossip, and her long-distance boyfriend John, an alcoholic who ignores his illness. Both are resigned to enduring their lovers and their own problems, linked together less by passion than loyalty, than the need to be loved and cared for by someone as fucked up themselves.
There’s SO MUCH in this book to use to declare Gerard the new alt-lit genius of modern times, but what drew me in most on a personal level is the way the girl can depict a woman with disordered eating and depict a strong, smart character in the same body. So many books, most with girls with eating disorders, show the woman obsessed only with vanity. She’s often average intelligence. She’s often anorexic for popularity’s sake only. She often knows exactly what’s she’s doing, seeing her disease as a means to an end like some kind of extreme diet the reader is supposed to use to connect to her with because we’ve all been on diets; this vapid character just takes it to the next level.
Gerard’s character, is, above all else, smart. She’s a scholar of astronomy, filling her mind with the scientific characteristic, of Red Dwarfs and Black Holes and above all else, Binary Stars, “a system containing two stars that orbit their common center of mass,” (a worthy metaphor for John and her own life: two stars orbiting a common dream of perfection they’ll never reach.) Her eating disorders are nothing about feeling too fat, not really. They’re about the desire to inhabit less space in the world, to, by becoming so small she nearly disappears, become the biggest star (read: celebrity) of modern times.
She pours over pictures of Nicole Richie’s clothes hanging off her collar bones, She watches Miley Cyrus shake her ass without a speck of fat shifting places. She reads the pounds celebrities gain and lose with a collegiate attention to detail. She devours click-bait articles promising to help her drop pounds overnight with insatiable hunger.
It’s something I don’t talk about often, but undeniably, this book hit me so hard because Gerard has absolutely, head of the nail, hit on what my own year of disordered eating was like. I didn’t think anorexia would make me popular, or even care if it did. More than anything in the entire world, I wanted to take up less space. I hated the way my hips demanded 25 inches while I wasn’t sure I as a person deserved that much space in the world. It’s so eerie to read an author write down some of the messed up thoughts that swam around my own brain, to hear for the very first time, that I’m not the only girl who followed that line of thought.
Even if the whole eating-disorder plot isn’t such an instant turn-on and you’re questioning if you’re gonna connect so strong / enjoy this book so much if you can’t cling onto that thread, I promise you, Gerard’s prose is so entirely beautiful and heart-rendering, you will, like me, be left breathless until you finish the whole thing. Excuse me while I quote some monologue from the narrator making a mental list of wants at excessive length:

“I want to be envied.
I want to give out advice.
I want to have so many things to say, suddenly there is a book of them.
I want to look at the sky and understand.
I want to feel small.
But important.
Massive.
But beautiful. …
When I die, I want to have been on the covers of magazines like Vogue and Esquire. I want to have my own sex tape. I want there to be a star named after me.
I want to be Paris Hilton six years ago.
I want to have pictures taken with telescopes. I want someone to think I’m smart.”

HOLY FUCK I can’t get over Gerard’s prose. Just retyping those words makes me envious with her command of the language, with the way she can capture HUGE HUGE emotions with little more than a 20 words.
Geez you guys. If that last quote didn’t make you want to find this book/devour immediately (Two Dollar Radio, again, get on it), stop reading my reviews because nothing I love about writing will be what you like about books, ever.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Binary Star is a readable novel. I read it quickly and I found it interesting. It's different and odd and unique. Sarah Gerard is a good writer, and she definitely experiments with literary conventions.

Binary Star is narrated by an unnamed young woman. She has an eating disorder, and is consumed by her relationship with food and her obsession with stars and space. She studies astronomy and education at school, and is working towards becoming a teacher. Our heroine has a long-distance boyfriend named John, who is consumed by his alcoholism and all the pills he takes. When they go on a road-trip around America together, they both find a new obsession in veganarchism.

In the beginning, I found the stream-of-consciousness, lack of delineation of who's speaking and when, disorienting. But then I settled into the style, and things grow a little more clear as the novel goes on. It is sometimes impossible to tell which character is saying what, but I think that's kind of the point. We're experiencing the onslaught of the world through the narrator's jumbled mind. I enjoyed all the facts about stars, and the extended metaphor of the heroine comparing herself to a white dwarf star. This book really examines the bombardment of diet tips, celebrity body critiques, and unattainable body types that are present in magazines and media. The narrator sees these things everywhere, and they further cause her to spiral in her self-destruction.

I feel the ending could have been a little more clear. Don't read this if you are especially bothered by ambiguous endings. There were a lot of good ideas here and it held my interest. Binary Star is a good choice for a quick, well-written read.

[Jessica Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A young woman and her boyfriend, John, take a road trip across America, past all the strip malls and hotels and fast food chains. They are drifting apart. They are each self-destructive in their own way. She is anorexic, he is an alcoholic. She promises him over and over aging that she will eat. He promises her he won’t drink. They break their promises again and again. They are binary stars hurtling through space and time.

This is a distinctly American book, filled with prescription drugs and celebrity magazines and diet pills and name brands. It’s an indictment of the vacuousness of our culture, of all the ways that it feels futile to ever be okay.

[Jennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know when the author has you when the female lead has an eating disorder and you keep hitting the kitchen to eat.

Fraught with star symbolism poised against her eating disorder and relationship with her boyfriend.

Fantastic first novel I would have read it in one sitting had I not had other responsibilities.

Beautiful, painful, candid, brass, desperate and brave, I was sad to let it end.

Her style reminds me of Burroughs; poignant, sparse yet strong.

Must read!

[Henry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe someone else will get something out of this book but I just found myself constantly getting annoyed at the characters. After reading it I had an overwhelming urge to punch a hipster and have a steak dinner. At least now we know how James Joyce would write if he were an obnoxious teen girl living in New York City.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite read of the year so far. In the hands of any other writer, this book could not have been pulled off. In Gerard's, it is executed to perfection. It is magic. One of the most exciting voices I've ever read.

[Tori · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish this book. Got to page 72 and quit. The main character contradicts herself every other line. Gerard is trying to be poetic, but she’s not even the least bit successful with it.

[Christa · Rating 3 out of 5]

RATING: 3 STARS

[THIS BOOK IN ONE SENTENCE: An anorexic young woman falls deeper into her disease and veganarchism while engaging in a toxic relationship with an unemployed alcoholic.]

The format of Binary Star is not typical of most novels (excepting Ellen Hopkins of Crank fame and other dare-to-be-different young adult authors). This novel is written in poetic form, but more than that; it’s written as if you’re simply following the narrator’s train of thought. There are no quotations around the dialogue, so I had to figure out for myself if the unnamed young woman was just thinking, talking to someone, or being spoken to throughout the entire book.

Sprinkled around the dialogue are astronomical analogies; the main character desperately tries to relate almost every aspect of her life to what’s going on in space. She’s an astronomy student, after all; so she thinks about her mental illness, relationships, and society in terms of the galaxy’s status quo.

For non-astronomy students such as myself and a large portion of the population, these analogies seem excessive and (forgive me) yawn-inducing. Yes, I get it. Gravity. Mass. Binary Stars. Red Giant Star. White Dwarf Star. Black Holes.

But I’m not supposed to be entertained. I’m supposed to be wowed by the intense statement that’s being made. Binary Star is an ambitious work, but I don’t think that Ms. Gerard quite has the skills to back her ideas up, at least not yet. This is her debut novel. I’m willing to give any second work of hers a chance. I didn’t enjoy Binary Star, and its organization (though intended to be artistically scattered) fell far too short. But this book has heart, and more importantly, it gives an authentic glimpse into the mind of a young anorexic woman in America.

Anyone who has had anorexia or bulimia will find Binary Star especially relatable. Young and idealistic readers should also pick this book up; it’s illuminating in its amateur observation of contemporary consumerism’s harsh impact.

This review has been partially posted and originally appeared on Lovable Reader.

[Liralen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mmm. Not my cuppa. Not so much the fault of this particular book—I just don't respond terribly well to aggressively poetic prose. (Aggressively literary poetic prose?) I might have appreciated it better had I been inclined to read more slowly, process more gradually; I didn't take great pains to separate out past and present in the narrative.

It doesn't really help that the characters are so deeply unlikable—self-absorbed and self-righteous, manipulative and not terribly stable, destructive and self-destructive. It's intentional, mind (let's call it two and a half stars, that extra half being for the intentional unlikability), but...doesn't make it much easier to sympathise with them.

[Christina · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't think I was the right audience for this book. The content is important (she's anorexic, he's an alcoholic), but I'm just not into a lyrical prose style of writing or the astronomy anaolgy. I also didn't really care for the characters. I felt like the author did a good job portraying a person suffering from an eating disorder, but I would have rather read it as a regular short story.

[ten thousand bees · Rating 1 out of 5]

all this for a mf named JOHN with a receeding hairlane christ this is a young anorexic girls wetdream novel wooohhh im so demure and fragile oh nooo my mentally ill oh noooo toxicity everywhere around me

[Swan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit disturbing, but raw, beautiful and captivating.