That is what makes this memoir so addictive. Hornbacher is well-versed in psychiatric illness and is a professional writer. Why, then, can I not stop turning its pages? Why can I not put the book down? It is like a post-modern painting in an art museum that you cannot take your eyes off of for studying every detail. I want to describe this book as beautiful it is anything but. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death. This is a wish to murder yourself the connotation of kill is too mild. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. It will try very hard to avoid that realization it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you.

When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it.

She shares, “Eating disorders linger so long undetected, eroding the body in silence, and then they strike. Her first of six hospitalizations occurred while she was enrolled there. At Interlochen Center for the Arts, a boarding school in Michigan, her health quickly declined. It was when she found some independence that her disorder took over. She started starving herself at the age of fifteen, simply because she wanted a change. The minute you stick your fingers down your throat, you know damn well something’s wrong. Anorexia is so disembodied, so imperceptible for such a long time, so socially sanctioned, that you can go a long time clinging to the belief that there’s nothing wrong with you. She explains the former as an untamable monster, whereas the latter is a stricter, slowly creeping beast:īulimia scared the hell out of me. Somehow, it opened the door to an eleven-year long oscillation between bulimia and anorexia. Simply out of curiosity, she gave purging a try one day while watching the Brady Bunch and eating Fritos. I was mesmerized by how her eating disorder started. She became bulimic at the age of nine, influenced by various sources, including her mother’s eating habits and comments rooted in low self-esteem. You want handfuls and handfuls of salt.” Hornbacher was dehydrated and malnourished because she had a severe eating disorder. You will scream at the nutritionist… because you only get one of those little teeny packets of salt with your meal. In her bestseller Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she explains, “Dehydration, induced by both incessant vomiting and a lack of nutrients, makes you crave salt in the worst way. Can you imagine such a combination? Can you imagine eating this and only this for a period of your high school education? Marya Hornbacher did.

Wasted book anorexia