Food

Drunkorexia, anyone? Okay, so maybe Wren's not exactly suffering from an eating disorder, but she's definitely flirting with one. As her roommate Courtney says when they adopt the Skinny B**** diet: "We're skinny bitches on weekdays, and drunk bitches on the weekend" (8.42). In other words, they're saving their calories for booze. Did we mention she's eating a meal of cottage cheese with peaches at the time? Because she is.

As we talk about in some detail over in Wren's analysis in the "Characters" section, Wren is starving for acceptance after her mom bounces, and one of the main ways this manifests while she's at college is by going to parties and getting wasted all the time, all in the name of fitting in and making friends. So as she opts to save her calories for liquid consumption, a move she makes in cahoots with her roomie, Courtney, we see Wren literally starving to fill the void left by her mother.

Contrast this dining-hall revelation with Cath's relationship to food: Just being in the dining hall at all is a big deal for her. She is perfectly content to live on protein bars and peanut butter in her room, thankyouverymuch, eating the dorm snacks of the socially inept. Just like her meals all come in tiny containers (think: wrappers, jars), Cath would prefer to stay in the tiny container of her dorm room, interacting with people primarily through the tiny container that is her computer.

Wren and Reagan practically have to drag her kicking and screaming to a venue in which she can eat off a plate, with silverware—you know, so she doesn't forget how to completely. And also because protein bars and peanut butter are snacks, not meals. One way to track Cath's slow increase in comfort around other people is to pay attention to how often she goes to the dining hall. As her comfort rises, so do her proper meals, in the company of friends. We see her physical sustenance improve as she is nourished socially by friendship. Aw.

As for Cath and Wren's dad, he views food as either a thing to be advertised or something to just cram down your throat in order to stay alive. Although he eats some pretty disgusting stuff—QuikTrip roll-ups, anyone?—it's not as disgusting as Gravioli, especially the new cheese kind.
His eating habits are never great, but they're noticeably worse when he's in the throws of mania, and Cath knows he's truly doing a bit better when she visits and there is actual food in the fridge.

Now that we've unpacked the symbolic work food does in this book on a sort of macro level, we're going to leave you with a few micro examples to think about. Food is all up in this book, and there are ample small moments you might want to home in on to see what symbolic significance you can draw out. We're talking Levi and his Starbucks drinks, Reagan and her Olive Garden gig, the truly vile food item called Frankenbeans, Thanksgiving dinner from the taco truck, a plate of all-night-diner corned-beef-hash, and green bean casserole ditched by Wren.

See? We weren't kidding. There's tons of food for thought when it comes to food in Fangirl. And yes, we made that pun on purpose.