Wasted : A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

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"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).


From School Library Journal
YA-Eating disorders are frequently written about but rarely with such immediacy and candor. Hornbacher was only 23 years old when she wrote this book so there is no sense of her having distanced herself from the disease or its lingering effects on her. This, combined with her talent for writing, gives readers a real sense of the horror of anorexia and bulimia and their power to dominate an individual's life. The author was bulimic as a fourth grader and anorexic at age 15. She was hospitalized several times and institutionalized once. By 1993 she was attending college and working as a journalist. Her weight had dropped to 52 pounds and doctors in the emergency room gave her only a week to live. She left the hospital, decided she wanted to live, then walked back and signed herself in for treatment. This is not a quick or an easy read. Hornbacher talks about possible causes for the illnesses and describes feeling isolated, being in complete denial, and not wanting to change or fearing change, until she nearly died. Young people will connect with this compelling and authentic story.Patricia Noonan, Prince William Public Library, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This gritty, bluntly honest personal account read by the author tracks Hornbacher's downward spiral from bulimia at age nine to life-threatening anorexia requiring five lengthy hospitalizations. Interwoven with the remarkably vivid chronicle of this struggle is an adept examination of the complex causes of eating disorders. While accepting that a troubled, chaotic family life and the relentless bombardment of cultural messages exhorting thinness played a role, the author acknowledges that her underlying neurotic intensity and perfectionism contributed to the problem; she concludes that she is "a victim, primarily, of myself, which makes victim status very uneasy and ultimately ridiculous." This abridged version sharpens the focus of the original text, and the outstanding narration by Hornbacher enhances the unblinking tone of the work. Highly recommended for all public libraries.?Linda Bredengerd, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Bradford, PACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.



"A gritty, unflinching look at eating disorders....written from the raw, disintegrated center of young pain....Hornbacher describes [such phenomena] with a stark candor that captures both their pain and underlying purposes....She is wise beyond her years."


Entertainment Weekly
"This is a terrifically well-written book_completely devoid of self-pity."


The New York Times Book Review, Caroline Knapp
Wasted is a gritty, unflinching look at eating disorders, and Hornbacher's refusal to tie the story up in a neat package labeled "Triumph" or "Recovery" speaks to her respect for their insidious power and persistence.... at 23, still living in a "state of mutual antagonism" with her illness, can Hornbacher turn her experience into something larger than the sum of its harrowing parts? Wasted is written from the raw, disintegrated center of young pain: there is power in this approach; there are also limitations.


From AudioFile
Hornbacher's poignant memoir of succumbing to the eating disorders anorexia and bulimia for a near-lifetime moves beyond the traditional angry-at-the-world manifesto listeners might expect. True, there is anger in her voice. Her tone throughout the audiobook is one of jaw-clenched distaste--at her fighting parents, her feeling of general displacement in the world, but ultimately of her own life choices. Hornbacher's background in theater comes through in the earnest and graphic articulation of her experiences. Wasted is an honest and heartfelt account that asks us, by example, to reflect on our own life battles. R.A.P. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Why, Hornbacher asks in this profoundly distressing chronicle of her struggle with eating disorders, do so many young women suffer from self-hatred, a mania for being thin, and the twisted sense of power self-starvation engenders? Hornbacher entered with the realm of the body-obsessed at the precocious age of nine, came a frail heartbeat away from dying in her teens, and now, at age 23, has the gumption to tell her wrenching story in an effort to expose the societal roots of this complex disease. In spite of coming of age during the 1980s, an allegedly sophisticated and open-minded time, she was denied the same basic information about puberty, sexuality, and self-respect that women have always been denied, a crime made even more deplorable by virtue of the media's glorification of thinness. Hornbacher's severe illness was willfully ignored by every adult in her life, from her parents to her therapists, a failure to recognize the severity of her self-destructiveness appalling in its implications. Hornbacher's courage and candor may help solve the riddle of why young women punish themselves for being female. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
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. Hornbacher, 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, Hornbacher 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--Hornbacher 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, Hornbacher was involved with drugs and promiscuous sex but managed to keep her habits and her lifestyle a secret. Hornbacher'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. (First serial to New Woman; radio satellite tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


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A memoir that resonates with unflinching candor and ironic wit, Wasted is a book that can save lives. The courage that prompted it awes me. Yes, this one is not to be missed. — Dorothy Allison


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