Aside from an ending that feels a little like a cheat, I enjoyed reading this novel. I was sometimes incredulous about the way it progressed, which I suppose makes sense given the ending, but there were still bits that struck me as true (in the sense of emotional truth, not factual accuracy). One of these moments comes in chapter ten or Part I (p 138 in the hardcover I read): 
 "This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under normal circumstances, feel seen. When I walk down the street, my experience is of looking. Manifest to myself in the ethereal privacy of my head, I grow alarmed when presented with evidence of my public body." 
 I don't know how commonplace this is, but I certainly relate to it. I think this was the main thing I disliked about being pregnant, this sense that I was more noticeable than I am usually. Of course, I'm always visible, I always enact with the world via my physical body, but during pregnancy I seemed to become a kind of community property about which strangers were invited to comment. Whether it was the hip couple in the Whole Foods who pushed their cart into my backside when my belly caused me to extend too far into the aisle while I was browsing the spice selection or the well-meaning woman (women, actually) who said gravely, "Are you sure it's not twins?" people's reactions made it impossible to trick myself into thinking I was invisible. 
 I'm a fairly small person---not necessarily slender, but little. For example, when the dentist takes impressions of my teeth, she needs to use a child-sized tray, and I have trouble finding contact lenses that feel comfortable because my irises are small. I'm accustomed to being overlooked, unseen, or at least I feel like I am overlooked and unseen. When I'm "presented with evidence of my public body," I, too, grow alarmed. It's as though someone in a movie I'm watching suddenly began interacting with me. Well, maybe not quite that alarming, but still unsettling. 
 Another idea that feels true to me is woven throughout the novel, but appears overtly at the end of chapter one in Part II: 
 "It wasn't that eating was so great---it wasn't---but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything else that was decidedly less than okay." (190) 
 Food is necessary for survival, so we can't give it up entirely like we might smoking or gambling, which, even with as difficult as complete abstention is, would still be easier than eating enough but not too much, needing both to be wary of and to embrace food. It's difficult to put our attention on the relationship between food and the shape of our bodies and not obsess. It's difficult to separate food as physical nourishment from food as spiritual, social, and emotional nourishment. It's difficult, but I think it makes sense. When an infant is nursing from his mother or being held in arms and taking a bottle, he's receiving not just food but also comfort and an emotional nourishment without which he would not thrive. I remember looking into my nursling's eyes intent upon mine and thinking how miraculous it was that this loving closeness also gave her food. I think that conflating of food and attachment, food and love, food and unconditional acceptance must be hard-wired into us. Perhaps when one gets out of balance, we feel a need to compensate with the other.