Wasted - Hardcover

A ‘retired career anorexic’ examines herself and her, and our, culture in a masterpiece of confessional literature.

At the age of four Marya Hornbacher looked in a mirror and decided she was fat. At nine, she was bulimic. At twelve, she was anorexic. By the time she was eighteen, she’d been hospitalized five times, once in the loony bin. Her doctors and her parents had given up on her; they were watching her die. But Marya decided to live. Four years on, now 22, here is her harrowing tale, powerfully told in a virtuoso mix of memoir, cultural criticism and psychological examination.

Here is the amazingly articulate fury of a clever woman made stupid by her culture, who threw away her teenage years in a continuous cycle of bingeing and vomiting or just plain starvation.

The first book to explore, from the inside, the intimate relationship between eating disorders and 1990s culture’s historically unprecedented obsession with body, diet and gender

This is no tabloid tale of mystery disease nor a testimony to a miracle cure, but the story of one woman’s travels to the darker side of reality, and her decision to find her way back, on her own terms.
· The slimming industry is worth £1billion in GB alone
· The UK has 3.5 million anorexics and bulimics
· In Australia, a third of all women count calories
· Princess Di was only the highest-profile case of celebrity bulimia; Kate Winslet, hot Brit actress, said she was ‘happiest ever when 8 stone’
· Models get thinner and thinner; they are now 23% less heavy than the average Western woman; in 1977, they were just 8% lighter
· 41% of 9-year-olds in GB want to be thinner (Leeds Uni/Birmingham Uni research, 1996)
· The doll Sindy is now 20% thinner than it was when launched in the mid-1960s; if it were a real woman now, it would be too thin to menstruate

Marya Hornbacher looked in the mirror at four and decided she was fat; she was bulimic at nine, anorexic at fifteen, hospitalized five times before she was eighteen and, at twenty-three, is now recovering from starving herself to death. No-one who reads her devastating testimony will follow her into that hell, for 'Wasted' is a breathtaking, piano-clear, and utterly persuasive description of living Life-in-Death.

“This book is neither a tabloid tale of mysterious disease nor a testimony to a miracle cure. It's simply a story of one woman's travels to a darker side of reality, and her decision to make her way back. On her own terms.

"My terms amount to cultural heresy. I had to say: I will eat what I want and look as I please and laugh as loud as I like and use the wrong fork and lick my knife. I had to learn strange and delicious lessons, lessons too few women learn: to love the thump of my steps, the implication of weight and presence and taking of space, to love my body's rebellious hungers, responses to touch, to understand myself as more than a brain attached to a bundle of bones. I have to ignore the cultural cacophony that sing-songs all day long. Too much, too much, too much.”

"I wrote this book because I believe some people will recognize themselves in it – eating disordered or not. I wrote it because I disagree with much of what is generally believed about eating disorders. I wrote it because people often dismiss an eating disorder as a manifestation of vanity, immaturity, madness. It is, in some ways, all of these things. But it is also an addiction. It is a response, albeit a rather twisted one, to a culture, a family, a self.”

"I would do anything to keep people from going where I went. This book was the only thing I could think of."