Courtney Martin on her book Perfect Girls...

WRITE STUFF: Courtney E Martin is a freelance writer and teacher, based in the US.

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Keywords: Starving Daughters, Perfect Girls

Courtney E Martin is a freelance writer and teacher, based in the US. Her book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters - The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body was published by Free Press (Simon&Schuster) in April 2007.

Courtney E Martin, in an e-mail interview, tells CNN-IBN's Amrita Tripathi about her work.

CNN-IBN: You put a lot of yourself into this book and draw on personal experience as well - do you think that "borderline" issues (if I can call it that) helped make you more observant to what's going on and helped give you an insight into what some of these girls go through?

Courtney E Martin: I felt like the voice of the "average girl" – i.e. not textbooked disorders, but playing around with disordered eating or exercising – was missing from the dialogue on women and body image. There are some really excellent, very popular memoirs by women who have survived eating disorders, but very few writers who have explored the vast "borderline" – as you put it – that so many girls travel. It was my hope that this perspective would add insight and give girls and women who don't seem themselves as disordered to the point of disease to identify with.

CNN-IBN: Also what comes through the stories you tell, and from meeting people, there is still very much a stigma about eating disorder. No one wants to be that girl who has eating issues – but it's a given, that girls especially will be effortlessly perfect, as you write it's interesting this connection between the "perfect girls" who are also driven to these unhealthy limits. Can you go into that a little bit for prospective readers?

Courtney E Martin: The public still associates eating disorders, to some extent, with the dumb blonde stereotype. Despite all the great research and writing out there, it doesn't seem that we've been able to debunk this idea. In fact, most of those who are eating disordered are very smart women. Anorectics, in particular, tend to be brilliant.

There is a huge abyss between our intellects and our internalisation, and this is why so many smart girls can construct beautiful arguments for why eating disorders are stupid over dinner, but then go upstairs to the dorm bathroom and vomit their meals. We haven't learned how to jump across the abyss between what we know is right in our heads and what feel in our hearts.

CNN-IBN: What really motivated you to write this book - you say in the introduction, the fact that there's nothing out there. Are you hoping to reach out to borderline cases/ people with eating issues/ their families and friends?

Courtney E Martin: My personal experiences with close friends was the seed of my motivation. Add on to that my outrage at how accepted the state of things seemed to be, and you've got 300 plus pages!

CNN-IBN: How serious is the problem we're facing today, would you say - you also have correspondence with people from across the world, so if you could draw on that? Besides a serious health issue, it's also in some ways, you write, a massive waste of time – that so many young (and not so young) people using up their creative energies in worrying about calories/ food??