My Perfectly Imperfect Body was her new book last year; her earlier books - at least the ones I've seen; I might have missed something - were (most famously) Quiet Girl in a Noisy World, Book Love, Happily Ever After & Everything in Between, and Everything Is OK.
And I'm leaning into taxonomy and background here, as I often do, when I hit an interesting, good book that is just fundamentally not for me. Tung is a British woman, still (I think) relatively young, and she writes for other young women about topics core to that experience - from the outside, I tend to think of it as the cluster of issues around particularly introverted women living in a world and a society that pushes women to be pretty, decorative, accommodating, and outgoing. Tung's books are very particular, about what happened to her and how she dealt with it, but they're open and welcoming, pitched in a tone that says "if you're like me, you can do the same; you can have a great life, get a little better at this stuff, and still be the person you are."
This is the one about disordered eating, telling the story of Tung's teen years. And I come to it as a person who never had any kind of eating disorder and definitely wasn't ever a teen girl. I have struggled with weight, like so many other people, and lost about a hundred pounds over a six-year period not long ago after twenty years of yo-yo-ing. So my eating issues have been close to the opposite of Tung's.
More centrally, my discomfort here is that I'm a middle-aged man writing about a book entirely about a teen girl's concerns about her body. I want to say that I have no opinion about any teen girl's body, past or present, unless she specifically asks me a very particular question. (Like, maybe, "is this a wasp sting between my shoulder blades?" - I'd be OK answering that.) I want to avoid having any opinions about teen girl's bodies, in general or particular, or to pay attention to those bodies more than nominally, because that would be creepy.
So I came to this book with a mix of wanting to see what Tung would do next - I enjoy her positivity and her conversational comics, with soft tones and realistic gestures - and not wanting to question or focus on the body stuff. And the book is all body stuff.
Tung had the sadly common kind of mother who focused on her body and eating habits, and I think Tung also has habits of thinking that makes her susceptible to spiraling - see Everything Is OK how that turned into depression for her, a few years later - which meant that puberty meant anxiety about her body. Tung here tells the story of those years: she had some kind of eating disorder, though she doesn't here say whether she was ever diagnosed with anything specific or even saw a medical professional to help her get better. She ate less than she should have, and exercised relentlessly, with some notable negative health impacts while not getting to the body she thought she wanted. (Because - and she implies this - that "thought she wanted" was a moving target: it's always that bit slimmer than right now, always a vision and never a reality.)
Like her other books, Perfectly Imperfect is mostly a story of how she got better; how she realized this was a problem and took steps to get out of it. That's a lot of what makes her work so positive: there's an underlying central idea of "I had this problem, and realized it; I may not be perfect but I'm getting better - and you can too!" in most of her books.
If you're more like Tung than I am, you may get more out of it, but even I found it inspiring and (there's that word again!) positive, a welcome flash of can-do in the sometimes dour world of misery memoirs.
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