Cinthia Ritchie’s memoir Malnourished is a strange and beautiful trek into the heart of a family. Ritchie has three sisters, and all four girls/women have been tragically affected by their upbringing in a home with a predatory stepfather, a mother who will not see the truth, and a deceased father.

While Ritchie’s sister’s death from anorexia is the catalyst for the book, the subject is Ritchie’s survival story. She shares how she and her sister Deena grew up together, how their relationship expanded and contracted over time, how she and Deena diverged in their responses to life, and where they were similar. While Ritchie claims never to have been an anorexic, she has a complicated relationship with food. Ritchie has exhibited starvation and other dangerous symptoms of emotional distress and control over her body. In this memoir, Ritchie manages to open up a space where we can think, discuss, soul-search human relationships with food as emotionally-charged metaphor and how that power plays out on our bodies.

Reading this story gave me insight into how personalities and desires are shaped by experience. For example, Ritchie is a serious runner who craves being outdoors. By reading Malnourished, I was able to feel what it would be like to need to run, to sleep outside under the stars. A small bedroom offers no place for a child to run from a menace that lurks inside the house, one which makes the walls complicit with the stepfather.

What I’ve written here might sound like Ritchie explains all this in the book. While she does reflect on her experiences, her gorgeous, lyrical writing does not “tell” the reader, so much as allow the reader into her world to figure things out for herself. Most importantly, Ritchie’s generosity in baring herself for scrutiny and understanding is such a gift to every reader.

Malnourished is not a comfortable read. It’s a work of art that nudges readers from our comfortable seats, from the comforting ways our minds purposefully arrange our interior landscapes. The beauty of the way Ritchie arranges her words will keep you going even through the darkest passages.


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Wow, what a heart-breaking but beautiful and moving memoir this was. It was emotionally quite difficult to read at times - and I do not have any personal or familial experience with anorexia - so there should definitely be a trigger warning for this book. Though the main subject is Ritchie's sister's eating disorder, the book ultimately tells a story of survival and adaptation. It was an emotionally challenging, beautiful, and candidly written memoir of a story certainly worth telling. ( )

Malnourished by Cinthia Ritchie tells the sad story of an impoverished, broken family, and the complex relationship between two sisters. While one sister confines herself to minute portions of white foods, like saltines and protein powder, the other loses herself in irresponsible sexual behavior. One dies, and the other lives to hint at dark happenings in the family’s farmhouse. The narrative gets a little redundant (how many times must the reader be told that the author loves wild nature?), and, as other readers have pointed out, it jumps around a fair amount in time and place, but it is lyrical and moving in places.

This is a remarkable memoir, but, as a reader, you have to be in the right mood for it. ( )

This memoir is raw and emotional, but just too all over the place to appreciate. This style works for some, but didn’t work here. Trigger warnings abound. ( )

This book was just to raw for me to swallow. Eating disorders affect all those surrounding them, and these two sisters are no different. The different struggles between them (cutting, sexual issues) were just a glimpse into the real problems they had. Overall the book just didn't flow well and jumped from here to there quite a bit. ( )