Wasted : A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher

Amazon.com
If you think you've read all you can possibly read about dieting, eating disorders, and troubled adolescent girls, think again: Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia is a passionate and eloquent account of a young woman's near-death self-starvation. In less skilled hands, this would be a familiar story with a familiar ending--and the details of her disorder are harrowing but not in fact especially new. Still, Hornbacher distinguishes herself by a refusal to rely on pat explanations or self-pity; she's also willing to look beyond her own suffering for some larger thread of meaning. In recounting the particulars of her story, Hornbacher reveals a complex web of causes--some cultural, some familial, some personal. She calls her near-fatal combination of anorexia and bulimia a "bundle of deadly contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength... It is a grotesque mockery of cultural standards of beauty that winds up mocking no one more than you."
Marya Hornbacher is only 23 years old, and on occasion she sounds it. Wasted has its fair share of naive generalizations: "In the 1920s, women smoked with long cigarette holders and flashed their toothpick legs. In the 1950s, women blushed and said tee-hee. In the 1960s, women swayed, eyes closed, with a silly smile on their faces. My generation and the last one feign disinterest in food." But in general, Hornbacher writes with a wisdom born of years of almost unbearable pain--a bartender, asked to guess her age, says "Thirty-six?" This is a sad book; Hornbacher refuses to wrap her reminiscences in false triumph. She's convinced she will die young; stepping on a scale, she's still overjoyed to find she's lost weight. If there's hope to be found in Wasted, it's in the skill with which she evokes the nightmare world "behind the mirror."

OxfordBooks.com / Oxford, MS

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