Hornbacher, Marya - Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

[oyceter]

Marya Hornbacher has had an eating disorder for most of her life. I think she wrote this memoir when she was 21 or something like that, and her earliest memories of bulimia reach back to her pre-teens, which is frightening.

She writes about her experiences with both anorexia and bulimia with lovely prose and switches often between first-person and second-person; there's an immediacy about this book that is both gripping and horrifying.

I am guessing that pretty much everyone who has read this LJ knows that my roommate fannishly has bulimia and that I adore food, though I think anyone would be shocked by this book. I went through it quickly, often with my hand over my mouth because it was so difficult reading about someone hurting herself so very badly.

There's one point in the book where Hornbacher is accepted into a prestigious art school, and there, she starts running 25 miles a day and weighs around .. I can't remember, but some horrifically small number, and I was sitting there, thinking, "Oh my God, how could someone do this to herself?" Except, it's not even halfway through the book, and things get much worse.

Hornbacher writes without pity and with brutal honesty about herself, her family dynamics and her subsequent attitudes toward food and her body, and culture as well. She frequently slipped into somewhat manic states, especially later on, when she was only eating about 100 calories a day.

It's a terrifying book about one woman's battle with her body and very, very highly recommended.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

This is really a great book, brilliantly written. I like that she both delves as deeply as she can into the reasons for things, but also acknowledges that a lot of human behavior is basically inexplicable, as in the line that goes, more or less, "Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Some get eating disorders."

That reminds me of the conversation we had about Schopenhauer and fandom, the one where I suggested that some impulses are innate, but how we express them is up to us (and our environment.)

[fannishly.livejournal.com]

I think Hornbacher argues that one of those innate impulses is the impulse towards self-destruction. I am not sure I agree with her, but as Oyce says, reading the book, you can't help being horrified at just how badly she hurts herself, and I think most readers would be thinking, how? Why? Most people don't have that impulse. Hornbacher says that familial and cultural influences interacted with her character to produce her eating disorder, and under her character she classifies the instinct to destroy herself, the self-hatred, and, indeed, the curiosity about "the limits of the self" that led her to push herself almost all the way to death's door.

In the book she mentions that at some point she was diagnosed as bipolar II, which is a genetic disorder. So I think that it could be argued that yes, her self-hatred and self-destructive impulse was innate - to the extent to which the bipolar-II-generated depression was innate, because the self-hatred and self-destruction are functions of the depression.

But, yes. Like Oyce, the main impression the book left me with was the horror that anyone could hurt herself that badly, and the reason I at least partly agree with Hornbacher that self-destruction is an innate impulse is that there really doesn't seem to be any other satisfying explanation for just how and why anyone would hurt herself so, so badly. You can blame body image and culture and family, but I think those influences play out in people who don't develop eating disorders too.

Finally, I think I get the impulse towards self-destruction, because I think that it is exactly that impulse that was driving me back when I was struggling with the bipolar II and med compliance. I also had a perverse curiosity about just how far I could push myself, and just how sick I could get. And like Hornbacher, one of the reasons that I chose to get well is simply and undramatically that, okay, I'd seen what it was like to get as sick as I did. Now let me see what it's like to get well.

[oyceter]

Yeah -- the weirdest thing that I found about depression was that I still liked the same things. I was just really good at beating myself up about liking them. So the general tendency toward fannishness and books was the same, but now it's aimed toward having fun and enjoying myself, whereas before it was aimed at feeling I was stupid.

It's very weird.

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

She wrote it when she was twenty-six, heh -- she grew up in the same CA suburb I did and we both went to IAA and had the same writing teacher, only he loved her stuff and hated mine. Hee. -- Anyway, yes, it's a brilliantly written memoir, and v upfront about her fascination with death, deprivation, starvation -- and I think it's also really insightful for non-ED people to read, to see how the thinking works. It's a little melodramatic at points (I got tired of the constant "I was dying, this was death" mentions that seemed to go on for a while) but extremely vivid and arresting.