The
Culture
Wasted
`
A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
By Marya Hornbacher
Marya Hornbacher's Wasted
is a gripping autobiographical novel of one woman's treacherous life-long
battle with eating disorders. Hornbacher successfully accounts her personal
entrapment of self abusive eating habits while stripping away the glamor
that our culture horrifically associates with such disorders. She also
painfully examines the culture, how it can bind women into a state
of mind that dictates and rationalizes starvation, among over half of the
population, in order to strive for the ideal. Only in many ways women with
eating disorders aren't channeling vanity through the disorders, they are
trying to achieve the status quo; they are trying to make their flawed,
unacceptable selves, acceptable to themselves, their families and society.
Hornbacher chronicles her life from the early age of five, examining her
feelings, situations, and events. She supplies information about her parents
and their own personal faults. She draws parallels between her mother's
driven, determined personality and her own. She recognizes her father's
depressed and needy personality, and sees the traces of his traits in herself.
Though her childhood was far from ideal, she points out herself, that it
was hardly exceptionally traumatic.
She explores how the combination of her environment, culture, and her own
personality collide into a battle with eating disorders lasting 15 years.
She explains her experience of writing the book as:
"I have not enjoyed writing this book. Making public what I have kept private
from those closest to me, and often enough from myself, all my life, is
not exactly my idea of a good time. This project was not, as many people
have suggested, "therapeutic" fro me...On the contrary it was very difficult.
I wrote in stops and starts. Trying to explain rather than excuse, to balance
rather than blame. The words came bitten-off in quick gusts and then long
ellipses. After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak"(275).
She
supplements her feelings and vivid imagery with lines of poetry from Adrienne
Rich's "Diving in the Wreck" and Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland.
This work is by far one of the most detailed and well written accounts
of someone's life I have ever encountered. It is so well written, at times
it is easy to forget the writer is only 23 years old. The details can be
so shocking, it is sometimes hard to remember that the story is factual.
-Hornbacher,
Marya.Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia.New York:HarperCollins,1998