Wasted

This was recommended in the goodreads review section of a fiction book that mocked people with eating disorders and was praised by Roxane Gay. Many people recovering from eating disorders understandably were deeply offended, and one of them recommended this memoir instead. Memoirs aren't my thing, and me giving three stars is common. Five stars for this actual content. Three stars for the way it was edited. The book could have been a hundred pages shorter, or even more, and lost nothing. The style took some getting used to. It switched back and forth between past and present without warning. It switched between first and -second- person -within the same paragraph- so often that I came to expect it. At first, I had a hard time show more interpreting whether she used "you" royally to confer a sense of immediacy or intimacy, or if it was herself in second person trying to distance herself from her body and choices around it in a way that's consistent with her state. Often, it was both. This is both a memoir and a social commentary, and the two are weaved together so tightly that it can be...a lot at times.

Hornbacher is bipolar. Someone asked if I'd read her memoir about it, and I said no. I have the same thing. I don't need to read about it. I've been stable on medication for awhile, but am fully aware of what I'm like off of it. This is a book about eating disorders and has a few pages dedicated to treatment. It's also inseparable from her experiences with bipolar disorder, such to the point that sometimes I felt like I -was- reading a memoir about bipolar disorder before she was medicated. But eating disorders; I don't have one that I know of. So I read this. I learned a lot. I'm glad Hornbacher was so willing to share so much of her life, especially with all the gritty details. I've never seen a fiction book handle this topic with such respect nor gravity, and I wish those authors would read this memoir first. Highly, highly recommended. show less

This was an incredibly difficult book to read.

On the surface, that seems obvious. Reading the experience of a woman living with bulima, anorexia, and a plethora of other mental health issues, is going to be a difficult read. But that's not what I mean.

Hornbacher wrote this memior at age 23. She ends the book (I did not read the modern reprint with her "updated" ending) rather solemnly, admitting that she is not cured, there is no answer, and essentially she cannot give an ending. She wrote this only 4 years after her nearth-death experience, and only 3 years after her suicide attempt. This memoir was written by someone still deeply in the grip of the things that had led her to that point in her life.

So the uncomfortableness comes from show more the outsiders perspective. She insists, over and again, that she had a "normal", "good" childhood and that her eating disorder just appeared out of the blue from no where.

She then goes on to detail a childhood filled with emotional trauma, surrounded by family members with mental health and food issues of their own, and as the reader we find ourselves frustratingly yelling, "it's there! it's all there! I can see it happening to you as you're writing it but you cannot see it!" Near the end of the book she still refers to her family has relatively normal, just "messy". It feels like a kick in the gut.

I have not read Hornbacher's other books. I feel almost honor-bound to do so now, to not always have my memory of this author entrenched in her view of herself at 23-years-old. None of us deserve that. show less

I don't usually read non-fiction. Normally, I can't much even stand it. But I read this. I had despised this book greatly without ever having given it a chance to speak. Someone had been trying to get me to read it. At the time, I had wanted nothing to do with the book. She kept handing it to me, and I kept sneaking it back with her other books, unread. This went on for years. I had known nothing about eating disorders, and thought the book sounded uninteresting and stupid. Why would someone eat if they were just going to throw the food up, I thought, they're wasting food. I grew up amazingly poor at times, so I knew all about not wasting food. Now I think back on those thoughts and want to smack my younger self. I was ignorant. I can show more see a great importance in a bulimic eating now of course. A bulimic does not always keep their food, but that doesn't mean they never hope, want to or don't try. And an anorexic, I thought had to be stick thin, but knew before I read this book that that's not the case at all - a person's weight doesn't matter in the concern over whether he or she has a serious case or not. It simply means some people may be more healthy, and perhaps, I think, have a better chance at survival. You'll never understand as an outsider why a bulimic or an anorexic feels the need to be thin when they are perfection, the image of pure beauty in their heart already.

I knew before getting into this book that I would not read a story in which the girl lived happily ever after. She has life-lasting conditions that will always be a part of her. "There is no 'cure.' A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself," (Hornbacher 284). This bit of news can be truly sad for a person watching someone they love and care about as they go through the routines of having anorexia or bulimia, knowing all the while there is nothing they can do but be there for their friend or loved one and hope one day it will end. But it doesn't end. So you can only hope their life will be different. Better. Happier.

This book was difficult to read at times. It taught me some things I didn't know, while confirming things I thought but had not known for sure. It can scare you. All of a sudden you are provided with someone's secrets and feel the desperate need to check on people you know and listen as they assure you they are 'okay,' they are 'fine.' It pulls your mind and plays games even on you, where you close the book and remind yourself who you are.

This book is filled with quotes at the start of chapters, especially from Lewis Carrol's well-known Alice. This is one of them (though not from Alice, I apologize). "Oh there is no use in loving the dying. / I have tried. / I have tried but you can't, / you just can't guard the dead. / You are the watchman and you / can't keep the gate shut." -Anne Sexton, "Letter to Dr. Y," 1964 (pg 181). I cannot do a single thing. I am helpless as ever I have possibly been and then some. But I disagree here. There is use, and I won't stop even if it takes them first. show less

I really liked this. She has a great smartass style and just writes frankly about what anorexia and bulimia are like for her and what her life has been like. She started being bulimic at age 9. She acknowledges all the societal pressures on women and how abnormally most "normal" women eat, but also thinks there is something about her that responded to this. Her family is so much like mine, in their "stop acting like a child / why are you trying to act so grown up?" schizophrenia and their micro managing in some areas and deliberate blindness in others. I'm surprised in some ways that I didn't develop her kind of eating disorder but can see places where my life went in a different way.
A long time ago someone I know said of her eating show more disorders that she tells people who say they wish they could get anorexia and lose weight, "If you want to kill yourself, just use a gun, it's quicker." But I never understood what she meant or what it was like. This book made what it's like clear. For the first time I wasn't thinking "What's so bad about that? It would be great to have that kind of willpower" and could see it was something that had hold of her rather than something she was doing.
All that and she's funny, too. show less

This book should be read by every grade school girl and every woman in Western civilization, if not the world. Along with being very well written, it is a haunting critique on the ramifications of our culture's idea of beauty. It's the memoir of a woman (the author) who dealt with bulimia and anorexia for 15 years of her life. And yet this book reflects the majority of women, regardless of whether they have eating disorders or not. Hornbacher constantly refers to the fact that most women in our culture are obsessed with their weight, that the paragon of cultural beauty is found in a body that is prepubescent at best, and that society expects women to be something that is unrealistic if not distinctly unhealthy. It will scare you, how show more much of yourself you see in this novel. An absolutely amazing, striking, and tragic memoir. show less

This book continues to fascinate me long after I first read it. It is a curious mixture of bits and pieces. But what stands out to me is what a hugely anorexic book it is. It's focus is wholly on weight loss and accounts, pound by pound, the descent. The prose runs over the physical decline, the bones pushing out, the hair falling in the shower, the coldness, the numbness, the trembling bird like hands, the tiny limbs you can fit your thumb and finger round and on and on. But in between these periods of weight loss she must have, occaisionally, had periods of weight gain. These are mentioned really only in passing, the focus is on weight _loss_ and how _that_ feels. This misses key points of the experience of eating disorders, which is show more if you survive it, chances are you have to gain weight, you have to sit there and accept it. Hornbacher acknowledges that she gains weight but the epilogue is anorexia's last word - she is still skipping meals, exercising through the pain, passing out.

The book's narrative returns again and again to just how much she gets done. I felt at times I was reading a book written by anorexia itself - here I am winning scholarships, leaving home, swanning in and out of the doctor's office, nothing they can do, winning awards, going to a prestigious university, getting a great job, all on virtually no calories, no sleep and no slowing down. It is not of course that these things didn't happen, but that a memoir is a highly selective version of events, and this memoir shows a teenage girl winning it all - winning at school, winning awards, winning at anorexia. And anorexia being a disease that creates the desire for pain and depicting that pain, she's winning at that too, describing more than once the heart troubles, the bone deterioation. And of course, writing a book about it. She is now fixed in everyone's mind at 52 pounds.

It is a punchy and graphic memoir and there is good writing in there. Hornbacher knows how to write a cool sentence, to create some vivid imagery. But there is a holding back built into it, a restraint, an intellectual distance. When it seems to throw open the door and show you all the gory details, it still holds back, not just on weight gain, but on the boring side of eating disorders, the things you miss cause youre bingeing or you have binged and cant face it, or you feel too ill, youre too tired and hungry and feel too awful. The easy fun you miss, because your whole world is seen through a lens of "what have i eaten, how thin do i look?" The guilt. This memoir swings between mouthy descriptions of her life, of dashing about with her bones poking through, getting so much done, smart-arsed sex, drugs and literature; and bursts of analysis on the meaning of the anorexic body, why someone might play with death. But I was left still cold, not really knowing who Marya was, what she was like to hang out with, what she wanted (other than "thin" and "success", which are superficial desires), her best qualities and her worst. This memoir made the same mistake that bad therapists make - they make it all about food and weight. show less

Marya Hornbacher was severely anorexic and bulimic from the age of nine into her college years. In this memoir she attempts to explain the experience of having an eating disorder. The picture is grim. Hornbacher cannot locate a single cause for her eating disorder. Certainly there are plenty of the regularly-accepted influences: a family that's weird about food, a society in which women are rewarded for being quiet and skinny, and so on. While living at boarding school Hornbacher was surrounded by girls with eating disorders, hers, too, was already formed. By the time she was in college Hornbacher was nearly dead.

The portrait of eating disorders that emerges from this memoir is complex and frightening. There are no simple causes and no show more simple answers. It is scary how easy it is for Hornbacher, as a desperately ill girl, to fall under the radar of anyone's ability to help, even parents and doctors. Hornbacher's analysis of her disease is thoughtful. She makes interesting points, and argues that anorexia in not, necessarily, an effort to remain a child. Light reading this is not, but essential for those who would like to understand more about eating disorders. show less