Wasted: Amazon.co.uk: Marya Hornbacher: Books

Review

A gruesome, eloquent and brutally frank memoir of long-term bulimia and anorexia, and a clear-headed look at its many possible causes. Locked into an increasingly severe eating-disordered lifestyle from the age of nine, the author's life has been dominated by her relentless obsession with feeding, the size of her backside and counting her bones. There are no happy endings. Viewing things from her early twenties, married and a writer, treated but not cured, she is still haunted by her suicidal sickness and its legacy of collapsed veins, arrhythmic heartbeat and drastically reduced life expectancy - but, after countless hospitalizations and finally having starved herself to within a week of death, she is very lucky to be alive. Until recently no-one talked or wrote about eating disorders; now they are out in the open and part of the cultural mainstream. But whether or not they are taken seriously or even widely understood is questionable. This savage and uncompromising book is a reminder that however pointless and narcissistic they might appear from the outside, eating disorders are extremely complex and destructive, and, alarmingly, by no means unusual. (Kirkus UK)

Bulimic since she was 9 years old, anorexic since she was about 15, the author reveals how and why women with these eating disorders can be helped and, most of all, how long it takes for that help to take hold. Hombacher, a freelance editor and writer, is now 23 years old and, if not well ("it's never over, not really"), at least ingesting and keeping down enough food to sustain life and begin the repairs of the heart and other organs that were ravaged by over a decade of vomiting and starvation. Not yet convinced that she will survive, she struggles each morning over her bowl of "goddamn Cheerios" to let go of the urge to be thinner and of "the bitch in your head" who says, "You're fat." With the help of journals and thousands of pages of her own medical records, Hombacher explores why she began trying to make herself disappear. Although in many ways she fit the profile of a person with an eating disorder - her family life was emotionally chaotic, she was a perfectionist - Hombacher feels there is more to it, including society's dictate that "you can't be too rich or too thin." In and out of eating-disorder clinics and mental institutions for many years, she also encountered general practitioners who accepted her extremely low weight - she bottomed out at 52 pounds - as normal. Descriptions of both the desperate need to binge and purge and the grip of the addiction to not-eating are vivid. Along the way, Hombacher was involved with drugs and promiscuous sex but managed to keep her habits and her lifestyle a secret. Hombacher's message is a warning about the complexity of eating disorders - that they are not simply about food or parental missteps or even "thin is in," but about a tapestry of dysfunction that gives rejection of nourishment a terrible potency of its own. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

A ‘retired career anorexic’ examines herself and her, and our, culture in a masterpiece of confessional literature.

At the age of four Marya Hornbacher looked in a mirror and decided she was fat. At nine, she was bulimic. At twelve, she was anorexic. By the time she was eighteen, she’d been hospitalized five times, once in the loony bin. Her doctors and her parents had given up on her; they were watching her die. But Marya decided to live. Four years on, now 22, here is her harrowing tale, powerfully told in a virtuoso mix of memoir, cultural criticism and psychological examination.

Here is the amazingly articulate fury of a clever woman made stupid by her culture, who threw away her teenage years in a continuous cycle of bingeing and vomiting or just plain starvation.

The first book to explore, from the inside, the intimate relationship between eating disorders and 1990s culture’s historically unprecedented obsession with body, diet and gender; not a testimony to a miracle cure, but the story of one woman’s travels to the darker side of reality, and her decision to find her way back, on her own terms.

‘Hornbacher is articulate, clever, and has all the persuasive zeal of a convert, furious at the pressures that made her what she was. Paradoxically, her painful journey is also gripping and…dare one say it….entertaining in a way that no fiction could ever be. A compulsive read.’ Publishing News; ‘A gritty unflinching look at eating disorders written from the raw disintegrated centre of young pain with stark candour and power.’ New York Times
• The slimming industry is worth £1billion in GB alone
• The UK has 3.5 million anorexics and bulimics

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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

So true... 12 Mar 2006

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Ive just finished this book and it shocked me how well the Hornbacher decribes eating disorders. I have suffered with a combination of bulimia and to a lesser extent, anorexia for years. There is no other way to say what it does to you except to say that eating disorders are soul destroying. There are days when I want to curl up and die because I know that there is no easy way out but this book shows that however ill you can become, you can also get through. Wasted is a shockingly honest book. Some may say that Hornbacher is almost encouraging readers to toy with the idea of extreme dieting, but I disagree. She is telling the way it really is. Yes, she was an extreme case but it happens and it is terrifying. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the thought process behind bulimia and anorexia. If you have an eating disorder and want a trigger book or some sort of motivation, dont bother. You wont find it here.

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

Dark, incisive and ultimately terrifying 22 Feb 2000

By heather@heather555.freeserve.co.uk

You can read many accounts of Eating Disorders, but this one has to be one of the most disturbing, well written and incisive. Marya writes clearly and without self-pity, about the start of her disease, when she is young and bulimic, until the climax of anorexia when she enters into a disturbing account of severe mental illness. She never explains why she got the disease, probably because she can't explain it to herself, but her description of her state of mind and the people around her's reaction to her disease is brilliant. She says she wants to write this book to stop other people going down the same route. I have no doubt she will succeed, because this book is horrific and terrifying. She adds information from supposed experts into the book, and quite often mocks therapists who have no idea about her illness, so together with her honest self-analysis it makes for an educational read. Don't expect any answers or miracle cures however. The quality of her writing is high, and I'm sure any book by her is well worth the read.

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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

Disturbing, gripping, and absolutely honest 3 Mar 2006

There are so many books out there about eating disorders being 'all about control', or about some teenager who made a miraculous recovery; this squashes those books flat with its honesty and realism. This shows you how it really is, and the language Hornbacher has used to convey the confused, disorientated feeling you get when you're starving and purging yourself to death is spot on. As a sufferer of both anorexia and bulimia, there were some points where I had to put the book down because I felt so faint, because what she was describing felt so true, but this is a book that grips you and demands your attention because once you've started it, you can't think of anything else until you've finished it.

Hornbacher makes no apologies for what she's been through and she doesn't sugar-coat anything. Hers may be a particularly dramatic journey through eating disorders but sufferers will identify with the all-consuming nature of the illness, and those with an interest in the subject can see for themselves just how truly horrifying eating disorders really can be. All is not 'happily ever after' at the end of this book, which keeps in fitting with Hornbacher's honest style. Marya closes the book with the reminder that if you've suffered for a long time, the illness will never really leave you. This may sound depressing but it makes you realise (if you're ill) you never want to be as ill as Marya was, and if you've never suffered, it makes you realise you never want to start down the path of starving, bingeing and purging yourself to death. It's inspiring in its realism, and is the most honest book I've ever read.