A NEW NAME
By Emma Scrivener
IVP. 152 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 1 844 745 869
Emma Scrivener was just a normal girl from east Belfast growing up during the ‘troubles’. A prodigious reader, Emma excelled at school and, in particular, demonstrated a flair for creative writing. She was an able and dedicated student who earned a place at Oxford University before finally graduating with a degree in English Literature. But this is only half the story.
She describes her homeland as ‘battered but unbowed, terrible and beautiful’, perhaps echoing W.B. Yeats’s famous poem, Easter 1916. There is no denying the beauty of the Ulster landscape or the terrible events of our recent past, and anyone living through this period will identify with Emma’s experience of life in a divided society. This experience, along with the death of her grandfather, unhappiness at not fitting in at school, uncertainty about her body and confusion about boys all contributed to her unhappiness and her inexorable drift into the condition known as anorexia.
Emma tells the story of her struggle with anorexia with refreshing honesty and humour, but she never seems flippant about her illness and its effect on her or her family and friends. You will laugh with her, and you will weep for the tragedy of her condition and the apparent waste of her talent, but you will marvel at Emma’s Saviour who has performed such a work of grace in transforming Emma’s body and soul.
One question I would like to ask the author is whether the experience she had as she read Revelation 5 was conversion or assurance of salvation, but, either way, it is clear that Emma has been liberated from her condition and from the bondage of sin. In writing this book Emma has done a great service to anyone with an interest in anorexia, either through personal experience or those seeking to offer counselling to sufferers. It brings a message of hope to the sufferer, that God brings people through this illness to fullness of life in Christ, and a message of hope to the rest of us, that we may be able to understand something of their struggle and in turn be better equipped to help.
Mike Reeves has said that ‘this book is going to turn lives around’. With God’s grace, I suspect he may be right.
Colin Campbell,
Manager, Evangelical Bookshop, Belfast
