In The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting, Evanna Lynch opens up about her struggle with an eating disorder and her path toward self-love. This is a reflective memoir that challenges the idea of perfection as something worth chasing. Lynch doesn’t shy away from sensitive topics like self-harm, fatphobia, and the emotional toll of disordered eating.

What really drew me since the beginning was Lynch’s refusal to sugarcoat the healing process. She writes about how society often rushes to craft a happy ending or a redemption arc, even before true healing begins. There’s no performative optimism here, just a deeply human story about learning to sit with the dark parts of ourselves.

One of the most touching parts of the memoir is when Lynch begins therapy with Dr. Natasha Tighe. Their sessions quickly become a highlight of her week, and it was moving to read how that therapeutic relationship helped her find her voice again.

As someone who hasn’t had much direct experience with eating disorders, this book helped me better understand what it might feel like from the inside. It offered me a new perspective, and more importantly, it helped me realize how to be more mindful and empathetic in conversations with those who are struggling.

Lynch also gently implies how we might better support people dealing with eating disorders. For instance:

• Don’t comment on their body.
• Don’t ask about their weight.
• Focus on building trust, first and always.

This memoir is about learning to live with imperfection, and how the slow, unglamorous work of healing is more courageous than any fairytale ending.

My Favorite Bits

Dreaming is an underrated so often diminished as a fanciful, childish, passive activity for immature people not rooted in reality. But sometimes, reality is truly unbearable, not worth enduring, and dreaming offers the only way out of it: a light in impenetrable darkness, even if it’s an illusory one you conjured by your imagination. And that’s the great thing about dreaming; you don’t have to have a shred of self-worth to do it, you only have to have imagination. Dreaming makes us better people, because in seeing this wonderful, irresistible, beautiful images of a potential future, we ignite that desire to be around to witness them, to live and become part of the dream.

Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting

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Author: Evanna Lynch
Publication date: 14 September 2021
Number of pages: 463 pages

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