Wasted (1998) (edit title/settings)

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• Marya Hornbacher: Marya Hornbacher, born April 4th, 1974 is an American author and journalist. She has written Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, The Center of Winter, and Madness: A Bipolar Life after she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She was born in California and raised in Minnesota. She developed bulimia very young, at the age of nine and by the age of thirteen, had drug and alcohol problems. At fifteen, she developed anorexia but states that she went back and forth on both bulimia and anorexia. She has been hospitalized more than once for her eating disorder. She married in 1996, but ended up divorcing after her success of Wasted. She has now been sober for over five years and lives with her husband Jeff Miller. She has received quite a few awards for her work. Shocking enough, she was admitted to the ER at one point and given one week to live. She has, thank god, survived her ordeal.

Quotes edit see section history

• “You will be obliged to correct it, on principle, to save your soul, and for your pains you will find yourself with a new address, Eating Disorders Unit, Eighth Floor, having confirmed their suspicions, because who, with a pulse of forty-three and a systolic pressure careening in vertical swoops, gives a flying fuck if the scale is three pounds off? An anorectic, that’s who. Does she care that she’s dying? Hell, no.”

• “There is also the other side of passion.. The side of me that feared fire and longed for ice, that cringed at noise and hungered for silence, that shied from touch and desired to numb itself into nothing. To implode. That side was the second to go wrong in me, perhaps in reaction to the first side. Fearing the velocity and force of life and self, I turned toward death Fearing the constant thunder in the mind that bulimia brings, I turned to the silence of anorexia. Afraid of the explicit passion of bulimia, I sought out what I mistook for the passionless state of starvation.”

• “Dear Father, I have no intention of making a peace pact between my body and my soul, and neither do I intend to hold back. Therefore, all me to tame my body by not altering my diet; I will not stop for the rest of my life, until there is no more life left. You should not think that my body is so mortified and weak as it seems; it acts this way so that I should not demand the debt it contracted in the world, when it liked pleasure…Oh my body, why do you not help me serve my creator and redeemer? Why are you not as quick to obey as you were to disobey His commands? Do not lament, do not cry; do not pretend to be half dead. You will bear the weight that I place on your shoulders, all of it…I not only wish to abstain from bodily food but I wish to die a thousand times a day, were it possible, in this mortal life of mine.-Saint Margaret of Cortona, in a letter to her confessor ordering her to eat. D. February 22, 1297, of starvation.”

• “I didn’t want it to be me underneath. I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. 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, you brain can’t quite deal with it…This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that deserve slow torture, violent death.”

• “Whereas most people set out to lose a few pounds-say five, ten, fifteen-and stop when they get there, the anorectic sets out to lose ten pounds and then says, well, maybe fifteen. She loses fifteen and says twenty, loses the twenty, says thirty, loses thirty, says forty, loses the forty and dies. Oops. She hadn’t really meant to die. She just wanted to see what would happen. Wanted to see how far she should go. And then couldn’t quite bring herself to break the fall.”

• “But who the hell were they? Just what I was trying to prove, and to whom? This is one of the terrible, banal truths of eating disorders: when a woman is thin in this culture, she proves her worth, in a way that no great accomplishment, no stellar career, nothing at all can match. We believe she has done what centuries of a collective unconscious insist that no woman can do - control herself.”

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• Bear in mind, people with eating disorders tend to be both competitive and intelligent. We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school, athletics, artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school, drop out, quit jobs, leave lovers, move, lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive. Rather, we tire of having to seem impressive. As a rule, most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place.

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• “Hungry” was the same as lonely, and not-hungry was the same as scared.

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• The convenience in having an eating disorder is that you believe, by definition, that your eating disorder cannot get out of control, because it is control. It is, you believe, your only means of control, so how could it possibly control you?

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• And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.

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• If you are bulimic, it is assumed that you come from a chaotic family. If you are an anoretic, it is assumed you come from a rigid and controlling family. As it happens, mine was both.

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• A strange equation, and an altogether too-common belief: One's worth is exponentially increased with one's incremental disappearance.

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• What probably happened is that, faced with a number of things in my life that I didn't like, I turned to my eating disorder because I had never, ever figured out how to fucking deal.

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• The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.

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• Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others get eating disorders.

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• Your intention was to become superhuman, skin thick as steel, unflinching in the face of adversity, out of the grasping reach of others. “Anorexia develops when a bid for independence on the part of the child has failed.”16 It is not a scramble to get back into the nest. It's a flying leap out.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Washington
• Minneapolis
• Lowe House
• Minnesota
• California
• Interlochen
• D.c.
• Michigan

First Sentence edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Marya Hornbacher (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Pulitzer Prize (1998, Shortlisted)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: RC552.A5 H67 1998
• Dewey: 616.85260092

Notes for Parents edit see section history

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Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Specific Groups › Special Needs
• Books › Health, Mind & Body › Mental Health › Eating Disorders
• Books › Health, Mind & Body › Disorders & Diseases › Diabetes
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Specific Groups › Women
• Books › Health, Mind & Body › Recovery › Drug Dependency
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Professionals & Academics › Medical
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Memoirs

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