Cardboard
Subtitle: A woman left for dead
Edition: 2nd
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 18/01/2010
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 372
ISBN-13: 9781450502023
Subjects: Literary Fiction
Genres: Psychological Drama
First sentence: `When did you last eat?' asked Dr E in a flat voice.  Solemnly. I guess it helped him to be detached, made it clear it was merely a professional concern.

`A week ago,' I replied. Faintly. I tried to be as outside of it all as he was.

Perched on the edge of his huge pink armchair I ripped up his man-sized Kleenex. Deliberately, to show him I could tear him apart. I wanted to split open his deskbound, therapeutic dream. 
Kleenex only tear in one direction and even that requires a delicate touch. My anger just fell to the floor in harmless white strips which I hurriedly picked up and nursed in my lap. I knew Dr E wouldn't appreciate my leaving any tissued trace of my chaotic existence in view for the next patient. It would be unfair.  
My leaving just one tiny speck of tissue would destroy such a well planned notion.
Every patient likes to believe they are the only one.
And I knew that. Even then. 
`This is serious, I want you to go into hospital tomorrow,' he advised.
I was relieved and apprehensive. I knew I needed help and I did remember someone describing hospital as time out. It sounded so relaxing and carefree. I imagined getting my life back under control with the help of lots of kind doctors and nurses. We would chat and become the best of friends.

white white blare
whittling away
her black heavy coat

I always seemed to misunderstand the boxes of meaning.
Description: Cardboard: A woman left for dead is a ficto-critical account of one woman's life-threatening eating disorder and her eventual hard-won recovery. Author Fiona Place has created Lucy, a narrator who is capable of taking the reader inside the dark and often puzzling experience of anorexia nervosa. 
A university student, Lucy falls ill while on a coach trip in Europe. Ashen, thin and with a thready heartbeat, she cannot understand what is wrong with her. The tour leader decides she is homesick. And lying on her bed, she is left to fend for herself. In her tiny hotel room Lucy wonders what she should do? Is she really sick or just homesick? Reluctantly, she decides to fly to an English speaking country. And to her embarrassment is taken off the plane in a wheelchair. Lucy is now a patient. And unknowingly enters into a dynamic and powerful struggle over the ownership of her life's narrative.
Hospitalized she undergoes a range of treatments - some harsh, some ineffective, others insightful and intelligent. Cleverly observed, Lucy invites the reader to make sense of what it means to be ill. To understand why it is so difficult for her to eat. And as she fleshes out her journey towards recovery, demands her distress be understood. Demands it be put into her own words.
When it was first published by Local Consumption Publications Cardboard was recognized as a compelling portrait and one of the first books to understand the importance of the role of narrative in the recovery process. Similarly today when much of the focus on eating disorders concerns decoding the genetics and biology of the condition, this prize-winning novel continues to provide an understanding of the individual's affective experience and the socio-cultural context in which it occurs. 
A must read for any one interested in the big questions: Who am I? What do I want?
Notes: Publisher’s Note to First Edition.
Local Consumption Publications is attracted to the novel Cardboard because it is something of a landmark in experimental writing. From a theoretical point of view, it uses semiotic theory to advance a case, in the guise of fiction, for a language-based therapy of anorexia. 
Anorexia, it seems, is not just a ‘slimmer's disease,’ nor a problem confined to young girls seduced by media propaganda about desirable looks. It is rather a kind of ‘communication disorder’ which therapists can respond to, if they take this book seriously, by equipping patients with the ability to decode the ‘subtexts’ of conversational exchanges. 
People with anorexia suffer from being bound to literal interpretations of language and, by extension, society. As a work of experimental fiction, it is not so esoteric as to be beyond the grasp of most readers, but the main interest for the critics and readers whose ideas extend beyond the notion of a general humanising function of literature will be the use of poetry as it intersects with the prose narrative, providing a counter-point to the positioning of the narrator, and thus describing the very process of an emerging subjectivity as it dramatically engages with the discourses of psychiatry, medicine and institutional bureaucracy. In this book different languages and points of view engage in a stimulating battle. 
The narrative is organised around the `self-liberation' of a repressed and distressed young woman, and the culmination is a kind of joyful release. Friendship, trust and intelligence are celebrated—independently of institutional affiliations. The control is good—no lurching into sentimentality. It is a fictional work which deals in a sound manner with a social problem of our times. 
Stephen Muecke