“Every book is about cancer or dieting,” the narrator of Life is About Losing Everything observes while perusing a bookshop (180). Crosbie’s text fits into the latter camp, featuring a protagonist whose aging body has fattened and fails her—despite her many forays into dieting à la Jenny Craig. Part memoir, part fiction, part poetry, part prose, Life is About Losing Everything is written as a series of vignettes that document a painful seven-year period in the life of a middle-aged woman with a fraught relationship with food, alcohol and drugs, and sex—with nourishment of all kinds. What is told is a non-continuous, fluid spectrum of feeling, of physical touch, and a body hungry for it.

Crosbie, Lynn. Life Is about Losing Everything. Toronto: Anansi, 2012. Print.

Written by: Valerie Silva

Valerie Silva is currently in her final year of the Master’s program at McGill University, where she studies contemporary Canadian literature. Her current research focuses on affect, objects, and the body in contemporary Canadian life writing.