Hornbacher discusses the rigidity of the classification of eating disorders simply because her father was not ‘absent and emotionally inaccessible’ and her mother ‘overbearing, invasive, needy’, she was not deemed to come from the right family type to develop bulimia and, later, anorexia. She writes: ‘Body and mind fall apart from each other, and it is in this fissure that an eating disorder may flourish, in the silence that surrounds this confusion that an eating disorder may fester and think.’ This, however, is not a memoir written as a coping mechanism from a position retrospect Hornbacher makes this as clear, as she also does with the way in which she hopes the publication of the book will help others in a similar position to the one she was in.

Hornbacher is incredibly frank, and much of her writing about eating disorders is highly psychological. It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, contained – and in the end, of course, you find it’s doing quite the opposite.’ She makes clear throughout that Wasted tells of a singular experience, but does hint at its terrifying commonality: ‘So I get to be the stereotype: female, white, young, middle-class. It is a protest against cultural stereotypes of women that in the end makes you seem the weakest, the most needy and neurotic of all women. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength… It is a grotesque mockery of cultural standards of beauty that winds up mocking no one more than you. Hornbacher writes: ‘It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of deadly contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power.

Her introduction is insightful she states that she chose to write the book because, fundamentally, she disagreed with the majority of what had been written about eating disorders prior to 1998. Hornbacher begins with some startling admissions: ‘I became bulimic at the age of nine, anorexic at the age of fifteen’. I was quite interested to see firsthand what coping with an eating disorder is like, particularly over such a prolonged period, having never read a book which deals with the issue. Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted, a memoir of the author’s struggles with bulimia and anorexia, was March’s choice for the Mad Woman’s Book Club which I run on Goodreads.

Wasted book marya