“At the center of Varley O’Connor’s novel The Welsh Fasting Girl is a single, horrifying question: what happens when an idea becomes more important than a person—and what happens when that person is a girl? . . . A searing critique. . . . It is one of the only places I have been reassured, in literature or otherwise, that when our morbid wonder towards eating problems ends, our understanding of the individual’s pain might begin.”