ANGELA MARIA “BLYTHE” TABIOS Engages
“War and Peace” by Gabriela Lee
from The Lives of a Filipino High School Student: Anthology of Personal Essays on High School in the Philippines. Eds. Rolando B. Tolentino, Joselito D. De Los Reyes, Ferdinand Piagan Jarin
(University of Santo Tomas Press, 2022)
Intimate Battlefields: Gabriela Lee’s War and Peace
Exploring Bodily Shame, Survival, and the Ethics of Creative Nonfiction
The body is often the first battlefield a young woman is taught to inhabit. Long before war is named in nations or histories, it is rehearsed quietly in mirrors, locker rooms, clinics, and kitchens—spaces where flesh is measured, disciplined, praised, or denied. Hunger becomes strategy, shame becomes weapon, and endurance is mistaken for virtue. In these intimate wars, there are no medals, only survival, and the violence is so normalized that it often goes unnamed.
In War and Peace, Gabriela Lee writes from within this terrain, using creative nonfiction to expose how social aesthetics and gendered expectations turn the private body into a site of conflict. Through second-person narration and densely textured sensory detail, Lee transforms everyday experiences—changing clothes, skipping meals, vomiting in secret—into scenes of sustained combat. The second-person voice refuses distance or detachment; instead, it positions the reader inside the body under siege, implicating them in both the witnessing and the harm. What emerges is not a singular story of illness, but a shared condition shaped by cultural surveillance of female bodies.
Telling one’s story becomes, then, an act of resistance. In narrating bodily suffering with such precision and vulnerability, Lee reclaims authority over an experience often minimized, aestheticized, or medicalized. Creative nonfiction allows the essay to hold contradiction: the body as both enemy and home, breakdown as both failure and reckoning. Through second-person address and raw sensory detail, War and Peace transforms private self-loathing into a communal mirror, compelling readers to recognize how personal pain is produced by collective systems. The essay opens with the unflinching confession—“you’ve hated your body”—a line that does not ask permission to be heard. Instead, it insists that the story of the body, once spoken, can no longer be dismissed as merely personal.
The title deliberately evokes Tolstoy’s epic, signaling a meditation on conflict, endurance, and the human condition, but Lee repurposes these grand concepts on an intimate, corporeal scale. Where Tolstoy examines nations, battles, and political upheaval, Lee maps war onto the body itself, exploring the internalized violence of social surveillance, gendered expectation, and self-discipline. Peace, likewise, is provisional and fragile in both texts, achieved not through conquest or victory but through recognition, endurance, and reflection. By invoking Tolstoy, Lee situates her essay within a tradition of human struggle while emphasizing that the most profound conflicts are often private, unseen, and embodied. The title thus creates a dialogue between the epic and the everyday, underscoring the universality of struggle while reframing it in terms of the female body and socialized shame.
The narrative unfolds as a compressed slice of lived experience, tracing the slow escalation of bodily self-hatred into physical collapse. The narrator—addressed relentlessly as “you”—has despised her body for as long as memory allows. This hatred manifests early and quietly, most visibly in the school setting, where changing clothes becomes a ritual of comparison and shame. The classroom is transformed into a site of surveillance: branded underwear, smooth skin, and socially sanctioned thinness stand in silent contrast to the narrator’s own body, which she learns to regard as excessive, unruly, and wrong. These moments establish the social roots of her private war, showing how communal spaces teach women to internalize judgment long before harm becomes visible.
In response, the narrator engages in behaviors framed not as dramatic rebellion but as discipline—skipping meals, rationing food, vomiting in secrecy, and dismissing bodily pain as normal female inconvenience. Lee presents these actions without sensationalism, allowing their ordinariness to indict the culture that normalizes self-erasure. The body begins to retaliate: cramps intensify, food is rejected, fever sets in, and dehydration strips the narrator of strength. What begins as an attempt at control devolves into loss of agency, culminating in hospitalization. The crisis is not sudden but cumulative, the logical outcome of prolonged neglect rather than a singular reckless act.
The hospital episode marks a tonal and physical shift. Diagnosed with gastritis, the narrator receives IV fluids, medical explanation, and the quiet labor of care from siblings and relatives. The body—once treated as an adversary to be starved into submission—is suddenly exposed as fragile, finite, and necessary for survival. Upon waking, the narrator does not experience epiphany so much as détente: the hatred does not disappear, but it loosens its grip. Peace arrives reluctantly, born not of self-love but of exhaustion and recognition.
Lee’s choice of second-person narration is central to this effect. The “you” collapses the distance between narrator and reader, transforming the story into an embodied experience rather than an observed one. The voice shifts fluidly between intimate confession and clinical description, mirroring the tension between emotional suffering and medical diagnosis. Scenes are rendered in present tense—school hallways, the family home, the hospital room—compressing time into a visceral now that reflects the immediacy of bodily pain. The narrative arc is inward rather than event-driven: a progression from self-loathing to breakdown to tentative reconciliation, mapped entirely onto the body.
Key relationships further illuminate this internal struggle. Classmates function as a social mirror, reflecting ideals the narrator is taught to desire and punish herself for failing to embody. The father’s teasing and concern, the mother’s distant care via phone, and the siblings’ quiet attentiveness complicate the narrative of isolation, suggesting that love exists even as the body is misunderstood. Medical relatives bridge the gap between suffering and legitimacy, translating pain into diagnosis. Through these interactions, Lee underscores how the body is never purely personal—it is shaped, judged, and sustained within networks of social and familial meaning.
This honesty is deeply uncomfortable. Lee does not soften the indignities of vomiting, weakness, or shame, nor does she offer moral reassurance. Yet it is precisely this discomfort that marks the piece as emotionally and psychologically true. War and Peace refuses redemption through transformation; instead, it documents survival. In doing so, it asserts that telling one’s bodily story—fully, painfully, without apology—is itself an act of truth-telling, one that creative nonfiction is uniquely equipped to hold.
One of the most striking formal decisions is Lee’s sustained use of the second-person “you.” This choice generates an intense empathetic immediacy, collapsing the distance between narrator and reader while simultaneously creating distance between the narrator and herself. As Jarin argues in Ang Kasinungalingan ng Malikhaing Sanaysay, creative nonfiction does not merely recount experience; it stages it, shaping voice and perspective to arrive at an emotional truth rather than a strictly factual one. The “you” functions as precisely this kind of shaping device. It universalizes the experience of bodily shame, making it feel communal rather than idiosyncratic, while also suggesting a psychic fracture: the narrator cannot fully inhabit the “I” of ownership. Addressing herself as “you” becomes a survival mechanism, a way to narrate pain without being consumed by it. In implicating the reader so directly, the essay denies passive consumption; we are made intimate witnesses and, by extension, complicit participants in the systems that produce such suffering.
Lee’s prose privileges close sensory detail, grounding abstraction in the physicality of the body. Tactile images—“grasp every flab”—render self-loathing as an act of violence enacted by one’s own hands. Gustatory sensations dominate the middle sections of the essay: vomit, lugaw, Sprite, bile. These are not decorative details but insistently unpleasant ones, forcing the reader to confront the costs of bodily discipline. Thermal imagery—the narrator wrapped in blankets during an August heatwave—further emphasizes disconnection, a body unable to regulate itself after prolonged neglect. Creative nonfiction often relies on sensorial excess to produce credibility, not because the events are verifiable, but because the body remembers in sensation. The truth of the narrative is carried not by dates or statistics, but by taste, heat, texture, and pain.
Repetition and listing function as both rhythmic and psychological devices. Lee catalogs brand names, medicines, television shows, and bodily actions—throwing up, drinking water, heaving again—creating a relentless cadence that mirrors the narrator’s obsessive cycles. These lists escalate tension while also mimicking the mind under duress, fixated on surfaces and routines as deeper harm accumulates. Jarin describes such techniques as “lies” in the structural sense: deliberate arrangements that heighten affect and coherence. The repetition is not accidental realism but crafted insistence, shaping chaos into meaning without claiming objectivity.
Notably, the essay resists overt moralizing. The narrator rarely names her actions as self-destructive; instead, the piece relies on accumulation and consequence. Judgment enters the text obliquely, through medical diagnosis or family concern rather than authorial commentary. This restraint aligns with Jarin’s insistence that creative nonfiction earns its authority by withholding sermon, allowing readers to arrive at ethical recognition through immersion rather than instruction. The doctor’s explanation of gastritis, for instance, translates emotional and behavioral distress into clinical language, offering both relief and reduction. The body’s suffering is legitimized, yet also depersonalized—its story absorbed into biomedical terminology.
Lee further employs contrast and irony to expose the contradictions of care and harm. Small pleasures—watching HBO all afternoon, the sweetness of Sprite—are set against the ongoing violence done to the body, revealing how comfort can coexist with destruction. The father’s affectionate nickname, “Lemon,” and his casual squeezing of the narrator’s arm encapsulate this tension: tenderness entangled with objectification, love expressed through bodily appraisal. These moments resist simple condemnation, instead illuminating how harm is often woven into intimacy itself.
The essay closes through medical language rather than emotional resolution. The diagnosis of “gastritis” reframes what has been an inward, psychological war as a physiological condition with a name and treatment. In Jarin’s terms, this is another productive “lie”: a narrowing of meaning that nonetheless allows survival. Peace is not achieved through self-love or ideological awakening, but through recognition of the body’s limits. The creative nonfiction form allows Lee to hold this ambiguity—to acknowledge that reconciliation with the body may be temporary, conditional, and incomplete. What remains true is the telling itself: a narrative that transforms private suffering into shared reckoning, insisting that the body’s story, once shaped into language, can no longer be dismissed as merely personal.
The body does not exist in isolation; it is read, ranked, and interpreted as a social text long before the narrator learns to name her own pain. Lee situates bodily self-loathing within a field of visible cues—designer underwear, smooth limbs, disciplined hair—through which worth is quietly measured. These details are not incidental. They reveal how consumer culture supplies the grammar through which bodies are judged, teaching young women to read themselves as objects that must be branded, curated, and displayed correctly. The narrator’s body becomes legible only in comparison, and always as lacking. What she hates is not merely flesh, but what that flesh fails to signify.
Shame, in this essay, is a communal practice rather than a private emotion. The ritual of changing clothes in the classroom stages this most clearly: girls duck behind their hair, avert their eyes, dress without fully undressing. These gestures form a choreography of concealment, a learned invisibility that allows survival within a surveilled space. No one speaks, yet everyone understands. Lee captures how shame operates not through explicit cruelty but through shared silence—how bodies are disciplined not by command, but by collective awareness. Feminine belonging is contingent on not being seen too clearly.
Illness arrives as rupture. The narrator’s physical collapse—dehydration, fever, gastritis—momentarily interrupts the war between self and body. The body, long treated as enemy terrain to be conquered or starved, asserts its limits. This crisis forces a recognition that cannot be aestheticized away: the body is not a symbol, not a problem to be solved, but a living system that requires care. The temporary peace that follows is not triumphal. It is fragile, reluctant, and grounded in exhaustion rather than revelation. Yet it matters. In feminist terms, the breakdown exposes the cost of internalizing violence as discipline and self-denial as virtue.
Lee’s descriptions are saturated with gendered expectation. Hair that refuses to behave, underwear that fails to signify desirability, skin that bears evidence of effort rather than ease—these are markers of a femininity that must be constantly performed yet never fully achieved. The narrator’s language suggests that these standards are enforced not only by peers, but by family, affectionately and carelessly. The father’s teasing, the casual squeeze of flesh, exists in a space between love and appraisal. The body is always being touched, measured, commented upon. Femininity here is not simply personal identity but public labor, performed under watch.
Class further complicates this performance. The contrast between imported lingerie and the “SM department store bargain bin” situates body shame within economic reality. Some bodies are allowed to be ornamental because they can afford the trappings that signal desirability. Others must negotiate visibility with fewer resources, their difference marked not only on the body but through what the body wears—or cannot. Lee’s attention to these details exposes how class shapes not only access to goods, but access to dignity.
Against this backdrop, care appears as a small but radical mercy. Siblings who bring water, a pediatrician-aunt who names doctors, IV fluids dripping into an emptied body—these gestures are quiet, imperfect, and profoundly necessary. Nourishment becomes both literal and symbolic, a reminder that the body can still be tended to rather than punished. Recovery is framed not as self-mastery but as exchange: the body receives what it has been denied, and in return, it continues.
By blending narrative craft with personal exposure, Lee demonstrates how creative nonfiction can articulate truths too layered and painful for straightforward exposition. The essay does not offer resolution so much as recognition—of how bodies absorb social pressure, how shame is learned collectively, and how survival often arrives not through empowerment, but through care. In telling this story, Lee insists on the political weight of the personal, reminding us that the most intimate wars are rarely fought alone.
Lee invites readers to understand eating-disordered behavior not as personal failure or individual pathology, but as a response shaped by the quiet pressures of a gendered and classed world. The war waged against the body unfolds on the terrain of visibility—what can be seen, admired, afforded, and consumed. Lee shows how beauty standards, filtered through consumer culture, ask young women to continually negotiate their worth through their bodies. The narrator’s self-denial emerges not from vanity, but from a longing to belong, to disappear into what is deemed acceptable.
The essay’s turn toward illness functions not as punishment, but as interruption. Physical collapse forces the body to be acknowledged, to be cared for, to be taken seriously. In the hospital room, pain is translated into diagnosis, and suffering becomes legible enough to warrant attention. This moment of care—however clinical or temporary—loosens the cycle of shame. Reconciliation does not arrive as self-love or moral awakening, but as a gentler truth: the body cannot be endlessly ignored and still survive. There is humanity in this realization, and a quiet dignity in choosing to listen.
Lee’s use of second-person address deepens this ethic of care. By speaking in “you,” the essay reaches outward, transforming private suffering into shared recognition. Readers are not asked to observe from a safe distance; they are invited to inhabit the body’s vulnerability, to feel its hunger, its exhaustion, its need. In this way, the narrative becomes both testimonial and mirror. It asks not “why does this happen to her?” but “how do we live inside systems that make this feel ordinary?”
Lee’s aesthetic strategy lies in her attention to the everyday. Self-hatred is rendered not as spectacle, but as routine—skipped meals, casual comparisons, small acts of refusal repeated until they harden into harm. The essay suggests that crises are rarely sudden; they are made slowly, through daily, almost invisible violences. By telling this story with tenderness and restraint, Lee affirms a humanistic truth at the heart of creative nonfiction: that naming pain, and allowing it to be seen, is already a form of care. The piece stands as a testament to creative nonfiction’s capacity to transform private pain into shared understanding—not through confession alone, but through carefully shaped truth-telling. Jarin reminds us that the malikhaing sanaysay does not promise transparency; it promises intelligibility. Lee’s essay fulfills this promise by crafting an ethical encounter between narrator and reader, one mediated most powerfully through second-person address.
The sustained use of “you” radically alters the ethical relation of the narrative. Rather than soliciting pity, the voice produces identification that is uneasy and invasive. The reader is not allowed the comfort of distance; to read is to inhabit the body being scrutinized, disciplined, and undone. This technique does not merely invite empathy—it implicates. In Jarin’s terms, this is a productive “lie”: the reader is not literally the subject of the essay, yet the grammar insists otherwise. The effect is not shame imposed from above, but recognition from within. We are made to feel how ordinary this suffering is, how easily it could be—or already is—our own.
At key moments, Lee’s language shifts from intensely private self-loathing toward systemic observation. The classroom changing room, initially rendered as an intimate site of embarrassment, becomes a social stage populated by brands, labels, and classed distinctions. Mentions of Victoria’s Secret, La Senza, and Debenhams contrast sharply with the “SM department store bargain bin,” signaling how consumer culture scripts bodily value. These passages mark a crucial expansion of the essay’s scope: the narrator’s pain is no longer only psychological, but cultural. Here, Lee’s writing succeeds most fully, revealing how personal suffering is scaffolded by material conditions. The body is not merely seen—it is priced.
Lee’s reliance on small, domestic objects further exemplifies creative nonfiction’s ability to compress emotional meaning. Sprite, HBO, lugaw, Efficascent Oil—these are humble, recognizable items that carry disproportionate weight. They function as emotional shorthand, signaling comfort, care, and temporary relief in the midst of crisis. In Jarin’s framework, such details are not proof of factual accuracy but of experiential truth. They anchor the essay in the everyday, resisting melodrama while allowing tenderness to surface quietly. Yet this strategy also risks aestheticizing suffering; the pleasures of watching HBO while feverish, for instance, flirt with narrative softness even as the body deteriorates.
Structurally, the hospital scene operates as both climax and reset. It is the moment when accumulated harm becomes undeniable, when the body’s rebellion demands intervention. From a craft perspective, the scene is effective in slowing the narrative, introducing medical language that contrasts sharply with earlier sensory excess. However, this turn also raises questions. Does hospitalization resolve the conflict too neatly? Or does it merely suspend it? Jarin warns that creative nonfiction often seeks closure through naming—diagnosis, explanation, categorization. The word “gastritis” offers relief, granting legitimacy to pain, but it also flattens complexity. Psychological distress, social pressure, and gendered shame are translated into acid and lining, symptoms and treatment. The lie here is not malicious, but necessary: medicine provides care even as it narrows meaning.
The essay’s final line—“You do not hate your body when you wake up”—is perhaps its most delicate gesture. As closure, it is intentionally modest. There is no declaration of self-love, no triumph over disorder. The hatred is merely absent, temporarily quiet. This restraint makes the ending believable, yet also provisional. It reads less as resolution than as wish, a pause rather than an arrival. From a critical standpoint, one might argue that the essay underexamines what follows—how fragile this peace might be, how easily the war could resume. Yet this very incompleteness aligns with the ethics of creative nonfiction as Jarin describes it: truth not as finality, but as momentary alignment between experience and language.
Relatedly, Lee’s writing succeeds not because it explains suffering, but because it renders it livable on the page. The plot is inward, repetitive, almost anti-dramatic, mirroring the way harm accumulates quietly over time. The style privileges sensation over argument, vulnerability over certainty. If the essay risks simplifying psychological complexity through medical framing, it also resists spectacle, refusing to turn pain into a moral lesson. In this balance—between exposure and restraint, between lie and truth—War and Peace demonstrates how creative nonfiction can bear witness to embodied struggle while honoring the limits of what storytelling can heal.
One of War and Peace’s greatest strengths lies in its restraint. Gabriela Lee resists sensationalizing bodily harm or aestheticizing recovery; instead, she commits to the slow, repetitive texture of lived experience. The essay’s inward, bodily plot—marked by hunger, vomiting, fatigue, and small domestic rituals—mirrors the way self-destructive behaviors often unfold quietly rather than dramatically. This structural choice aligns powerfully with feminist ethics, refusing narratives of spectacle or redemption that demand women suffer “beautifully” or recover convincingly. Lee allows pain to remain unresolved, and in doing so, honors its reality.
The second-person narration is another significant strength. Ethically, it expands responsibility beyond the narrator, asking readers to recognize their place within the cultural conditions that shape bodily shame. Rather than positioning the reader as a sympathetic outsider, the “you” creates a shared field of vulnerability and complicity. The essay does not claim objectivity; instead, it insists on recognition.
Lee’s attention to material detail—brands, household remedies, television shows—also strengthens the piece’s social critique. These details quietly expose how class and consumer culture mediate bodily value. The body is not judged in abstraction; it is assessed through what it wears, consumes, and can afford. In this sense, the piece succeeds as both personal narrative and cultural diagnosis.
However, the essay’s reliance on medical resolution introduces a notable limitation. The diagnosis of gastritis provides relief and narrative closure, but it risks narrowing the complexity of the narrator’s experience. Psychological distress, gendered shame, and social pressure are translated into biomedical terms that can be treated and managed. While this framing allows care to enter the narrative, it also potentially depoliticizes the suffering by locating its cause within the body rather than the systems that discipline it. This raises questions about whether medicine restores agency—or merely stabilizes the body so it can return to the same conditions that produced harm.
Additionally, the essay’s ending, while emotionally honest, remains provisional. “You do not hate your body when you wake up” gestures toward peace without interrogating its durability. This ambiguity can be read as ethical restraint, but it also leaves unexplored the long-term implications of reconciliation. The war pauses, but its structures remain intact. Despite these limitations, War and Peace holds significant literary and ethical value. Its strength lies not in offering solutions, but in rendering harm visible without reducing it to pathology or moral failure. The essay demonstrates how creative nonfiction can hold pain gently—without fixing it, resolving it, or making it exemplary. It ultimately affirms the power of creative nonfiction to transform private suffering into shared ethical awareness. Through second-person narration, intimate sensory detail, and a deliberately modest narrative arc, Gabriela Lee exposes how the female body becomes a site where social expectations, consumer culture, and gendered discipline converge. What appears at first as personal self-loathing is revealed, through careful craft, as a socially mediated response to systems that demand visibility, control, and compliance.
Ferdinand Pisigan Jarin’s notion of the lies of creative nonfiction clarifies this achievement. Lee’s essay does not offer an objective account of illness or recovery; instead, it shapes experience into a form that can be felt, recognized, and ethically engaged with. The “lie” of second-person address, the compression of time, and the medical framing of crisis are not betrayals of truth, but strategies that allow deeper truths to surface—truths about shame, care, and survival.
The essay insists that the body’s story matters precisely because it is ordinary. Hunger, comparison, self-discipline, and collapse are not aberrations but learned responses within a culture that teaches women to monitor and correct themselves constantly. Lee’s refusal to dramatize recovery or claim lasting peace respects the complexity of embodiment under such conditions. Peace, when it arrives, is fragile and temporary—but it is real. In telling this story, War and Peace performs the humanistic work at the heart of creative nonfiction: it makes pain speakable without demanding that it be overcome. The essay reminds us that care—whether familial, medical, or narrative—is not a cure, but a necessary interruption. And sometimes, that interruption is enough to allow the body, and the self, to keep living.
*****
Angela Maria Tabios, also known as Blythe, is a writer from the University of Santo Tomas in España, Manila, Philippines. An essayist, playwright, and multidisciplinary writer, she works across short stories, poetry, essays, plays, and film scripts, with a strong focus on feminist writing. Her work has been recognized with 3rd Place for One-Act Play (Choke) at the 40th Gawad Ustetika (2025). She has publications in Dapitan 2023: Panopticon by the UST Flame for “The Song of the Tides” and the Fairy Tale Magazine with “The Mangrove Bride and a Bargain of Salt.” She recently won First Place in Fiction and the Rector’s Literary Award at the 41st Gawad Ustetika for her short story “A Thousand Sweet Deaths.”
She is also the author of the critical essays “In the Wake of Dark, Here You Are: Reflections on KalapatingLeon by Eileen R. Tabios, Translated by Danton Remoto,” and its Filipino counterpart, “Sa Pagsapit ng Dilim, Ako’y Naghihintay Pa Rin: Isang Masusing Pagbabasa ng KalapatingLeon ni Eileen R. Tabios, Na Isinalin sa Filipino ni Danton Remoto,” both of which examine gender, memory, trauma, and sexuality through the lens of translation and linguistic nuance.
Blythe’s essay “Intimate Battlefields: Gabriela Lee’s War and Peace. Exploring Bodily Shame, Survival, and the Ethics of Creative Nonfiction,” interrogates the body as a site of conflict and survival through creative nonfiction, drawing on Jarin’s theory to explore the ethics of self-exposure, truth, and narrative responsibility. Dedicated to her lecturer, Sir Louie Zaraspe, the essay emerges from—and responds to—the rigorous critical prompt he provided, which challenged the writer to engage creative nonfiction as both an ethical inquiry and a deeply personal mode of literary practice.
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