Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (P.S.)
by Marya Hornbacher
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Book Summary Information
Author: Marya HornbacherEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-01-31
ISBN: 0060858796
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Book Reviews of Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (P.S.)
Book Review: The Justification of a Slow Suicide
Summary: 4 Stars
"I distinctly did not want to be seen as a bulimic. I wanted to be an anoretic" (Hornbacher, 107). In Marya Hornbacher's book, Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she describes her constant struggle with her eating disorders from the time she was nine to the time she wrote at age twenty three. She tells the reader every detail about her life, her emotions, and her binge-purge-starve cycle. She invites the reader to share her journey as she first began to her eventual decision to become an anoretic and attempt to survive on only 160 calories a day. In her book Marya Hornbacher uses tone, point of view, and imagery to ineffectively encourage those with an eating disorder to seek help.
Hornbacher's selfish tone was evident throughout the book. On page 288 as she describes her present day life she still tries to get the attention of her husband and prove to him her worth. "Just have now with me. See? I'm here. See? See? See? Look at me. Look at me." As a married adult she is still like a young child vying for attention. She began starving herself as a means to disappear. But disappearing is never invisible. It is always a means of attention. She describes Houdini and his disappearing acts. The audience sits on the edge of their seats waiting to see where he vanished and where he will appear. The same is true with starvation. She starved herself to become invisible but through the process made herself more visible than she said she wanted. An eating disorder is selfish. It is only done for the person but it affects all around them. It is a means of attention. Because she is still self centered at the end of the book, she shows that she truly has not changed and she proves that she is being granted the attention she wants. If she wants to prevent people from making the same choices she made, she needs to step back and think of them and their needs. This selfish tone throughout the book illustrates her need for attention. It is almost stronger that her emotional need for food. Because she is so focused on herself and her emotional needs, she does not help her reader. This book could be more helpful for someone without an eating disorder or who is emotionally stable and does not always need to be the center of attention.
One example of Hornbacher's use of point of view is on page 268 as she speaks in first person but alternately includes or excludes herself from generalizations. "You can subsist a long time, eating just a little. You can stay alive. That's how we all stay alive as long as we do...You can't stay alive very long when you're not eating at all...This is an eating disorder; and this is how crazy it makes you; and this is how you kill yourself by accident. Accident? Yes, by accident, because we are running through the streets in the middle of the night, trying to find an open store where we can buy more food." Through this quote, Hornbacher is attempting to allow people to understand the thought process of the anoretic and bulimic as well as the physical needs of the body. She is showing the reader who may or may not have struggled with the same thoughts that an eating disorder is a slow form of suicide. This quote is an example of her use of point of view because she speaks in first person as she does throughout her memoir. But in this, as in other points throughout the book, she chooses whether or not to be included in the thought process. This is not a justification she tells herself for her eating disorder, but rather a statement of the needs of the body. Because of this, it is important to remember the needs of people with an eating disorder. They will have been through the justification process themselves. They will have tested the body to see the least amount of food needed for survival. They do not need to be told that a person can live on a little bit of food for a long time because they know. Rather, they need to develop a reason to want to live. If an eating disorder is a slow form of suicide, it is not going to affect a reader with anorexia or bulimia to hear that they may eventually die because of their actions. They are going to relate to her feelings and need to know how to overcome them as she did. They are going to need to have a clear example to follow and not one of a woman still justifying those actions. In this quote she begins by addressing the audience as "you." She excludes herself from the need for food as other people need. Only when talking about running to the store in the middle of the night for food does she include herself. This could be because she recognizes that not all her readers have an eating disorder and thus they cannot identify as easily as one who does. However, she could also be continuing to help those with a severe disorder to justify their actions because the threat of death will most likely not be enough to stop them.
Imagery is used on pages 220 through 223. She describes a time when her parents left for the weekend and she was home alone after several stays in a hospital for her disorder. She thought she was overcoming her bulimia but because of her anorexia, was hungrier than she had ever been. So she once again turned to bulimia. "It started as if it had never stopped...I walked into the kitchen, set my bags down, went to the cupboard...opened it, took out the cereal, poured a bowl, and started eating. And eating. I ate until there was no room left, went to the bathroom, puked my guts out, washed my face and hands, returned to the kitchen." She continued in this pattern for a whole weekend. Binging and purging in a continuous cycle. When she ran out of food she went to the store and bought more. Later her father told her that "the sewer had backed up." She was mortified because there was family visiting them "and here [I] was, clogging the sewer, flooding the bathroom and basement with my vomit." In other parts of the book she vividly describes her hands and face after continuous vomiting. Her knuckles had scabs and scars and her eyes were red from popped blood vessels. This imagery of the results of bulimia could be discouraging to one considering bulimia. Her eating habits and her descriptions of all the different foods she ate in one sitting were detailed. One who eats little or no food soon becomes obsessed with the sight, taste, and smell of it. For someone overcoming bulimia or anorexia, descriptions of food could trigger some of the same actions. When reading about food it is tempting to eat food. A bulimic might read about food, eat it, and then feel guilty and need to throw it up. Therefore, when using imagery to describe food and details of vomiting, it can encourage or trigger some of the same behaviors in the reader and recovering bulimic or anorexic. It would be difficult to decide how much detail and imagery to give. If she gave too much, it could trigger behaviors, but if not enough detail was given then someone without those temptations might not understand her thought process or that of any other anorexic or bulimic. In parts of the book, however, too much imagery was given. It is a graphic novel that portrays all aspects of bulimia and anorexia. It is not always a pleasant read. The imagery of her self destructive thoughts extends even further than the physical images. But she does not encourage the reader to seek help or not take the first step down the destructive cycle of binging, purging, and starving.
Hornbacher says on page 7, "I would do anything to keep people from going where I went. Writing this book is the only thing I could think of." While she states that she wants to help people and prevent them from following the same destructive cycle she lived through, she also does not include much to help those already in that cycle. This is an excellent book and truly allows an audience to understand the despair of a person suffering from an eating disorder. I would recommend this book to anyone with a family member, friend, or colleague with an eating disorder because it can be hard to understand how a person could possibly starve themselves to death or throw up everything they eat. However, I am not sure that it would be an effective book for someone struggling to overcome an eating disorder. She has so many relapses that it could easily trigger a person to continue on the destructive path because her actions are described in such detail. For a person considering developing an eating disorder for various reasons this memoir could give him or her ideas on how to secretively act with an eating disorder. Because she still has not fully overcome her eating disorder she still struggles with the thoughts that she could eat just a little bit less. As dieting is so prevalent in today's society, her triumph over her body and physical desires do nothing to influence young impressionable girls that dieting or eating disorders are wrong especially at such a young age. While it is admirable that she has come this far in overcoming her eating disorder, she could have done more to discourage others from the same habits. This was a very interesting book to read and it was hard to put it down, but I don't think she accomplished her goal of keeping people from going where she went as she glorified herself and her actions.
Summary of Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (P.S.)
Why would a talented young woman enter into a torrid affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Through five lengthy hospital stays, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and all sense of what it means to be "normal," Marya Hornbacher lovingly embraced her anorexia and bulimia -- until a particularly horrifying bout with the disease in college put the romance of wasting away to rest forever. A vivid, honest, and emotionally wrenching memoir, Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to reality's darker side -- and her decision to find her way back on her own terms.
"I fell for the great American dream, female version, hook, line, and sinker," Marya Hornbacher writes. "I, as many young women do, honest-to-God believed that once I Just Lost a Few Pounds, suddenly I would be a New You, I would have Ken-doll men chasing my thin legs down with bouquets of flowers on the street, I would become rich and famous and glamorous and lose my freckles and become blond and five foot ten." Hornbacher describes in shocking detail her lifelong quest to starve herself to death, to force her short, athletic body to fade away. She remembers telling a friend, at age 4, that she was on a diet. Her bizarre tale includes not only the usual puking and starving, but also being confined to mental hospitals and growing fur (a phenomenon called lanugo, which nature imposes to keep a body from freezing to death during periods of famine).
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