[Most of the photo is darkness. The left half of the photo has two star ornaments set up on poles, lit up with twinkly lights. Someones feet are silhouetted against the light as they recline on a couch.]
Serious trigger warning! This book is a memoir about living with eating disorders. Do not read if reading about disordered eating or body dysmorphia gives you anxiety or triggers bad eating and thinking habits in you. If you or someone you know needs help, contact the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) online or at (800) 931-2237.
- Why did I pick this book up?
As mentioned in my Catcher in the Rye review, I picked a few books up at my partner’s parents’ home. I picked Wasted up because I had heard of it before, as a groundbreaking text when it came to representations of eating disorders. I also knew that it was more than a little controversial, as it includes a lot of gruesome details about eating disorders, and has raised concerns about talking about eating disorders without giving “tips and tricks” to those suffering. So this is why I picked Wasted up. I am also a bit of a masochist; although I have never exactly had an eating disorder, disordered eating, and in particular intense body dysmorphia, did play a large role in my young adult life, causing me intense anxiety and pain. I thought to myself, “Well, I have never actually been anorexic or bulimic, and am intellectually interested in reading about it. I am tough enough, I love myself enough, to be unaffected by this”. Boy was I wrong.
- Would I recommend why/why not?
Honestly, I would not recommend this book. It is very interesting, and I do not want to take away from Marya Hornbacher’s narrative and experiences. In fact, I applaud her for being so frank and sharing her painful journey with people at a time when eating disorders were intensely taboo.
However, I think that the potential it has to cause distress and influence a person’s (particularly women’s) eating habits and view of themselves. I found myself falling back into patterns of dysmorphic thinking. Thinking about society’s need for women to disappear also led me to feel at times like I was taking too much space, being too present, too overt in my self. Not a great thing for a book to do tbh.
Also, although her narrative is interesting, Hornbacher spends a huge portion of the text theorizing about the cause of her eating disorder, and it gets quite repetitious. In addition, this book was written before Hornbacher was diagnosed as bipolar, and it is evident reading this now – more than twenty years after the text was published – that this is the large missing piece to Hornbacher’s attempts to explain her disorders.
So I would not recommend this book because of the intensity of the subject matter, as well as the way in which it is written: too much exposition and psychological investigation.
I guess I would recommend this book if you specialize in disordered eating in a professional setting, and were looking for some insight.
I gave this book the star rating that I did because of its bravery in addressing eating disorders, as well as its cultural role in launching a conversation about eating disorders and Western culture’s obsession with thinness.
- Quick Synopsis **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:
As a memoir, this book takes us from Hornbacher’s earliest memories as a child to her third hospitalization at the age of 19 for a variety of eating disorders and behavioural issues. I won’t get into too much detail to avoid falling into my own criticisms of the text.
Hornbacher has a somewhat unhappy childhood: trapped in the battlefield of her parents’ disastrous marriage, her anxiety and need to control her fear lead to her becoming bulimic at the insanely tender and young age of 9. Hornbacher then sinks further and further into a spiral of bulimia, anorexia, drugs, anonymous sex with older men, and just generally risky and self-destructive behaviour. It is jarring, and disturbing to read how easily Hornbacher was able to hide what she was going through. It was distressing to read how many times she was hospitalized, and all the ridiculous mistakes that were made when giving her care; the most troubling anecdote being the amount of times that doctors told her “Well you don’t even look anorexic”.
Hornbacher provides a lot of different explanations for her disordered eating, none of which I can go into too much detail, but involves Western culture’s obsession with women taking up as little space as possible, and the ways in which anxious and underdeveloped people (aka vulnerable children) can sublimate and displace their fear and anxiety. Eventually, at the age of 19, Hornbacher is hospitalized for a third time, near death and in denial.
The book was written when Hornbacher was 23, and goes on to say that although her disordered eating has become more manageable and healthy, her anxiety and body dysmorphia, as well as severe psychological pain and trauma, still remain. Hornbacher has since written another memoir about the years following publication of Wasted that deals with being diagnosed bipolar and her persistent addiction issues.
[A hand holds a book in front of a plant that has a few leaves and two flags in it: a gay pride flag, and a bisexual pride flag. The cover of the book is white, and there is a black and white photo of a young woman in jeans and a long sweater. WASTED sprawls at an angle on the bottom half of the book.]
- Overall brain gushings :
I’m not even going to do more brain gushings. I’ve honestly said almost everything I wanted to say about this text.
- What does it mean?
This book means that eating disorders and society sucks. It means the mind is a crazy thing that can facilitate all sorts of self-torture and that nothing and no one is worth making yourself smaller for. Taking up space is political. Accepting the body, and a simultaneous hatred of the body, is political.
- Favourite passages :
Favourite passages in a book about eating disorders is a toughie. However, I’ve chosen some passages that I think are particularly insightful or thought-provoking.
[This book is] the 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 singsongs all day long, Too much, too much, too much.
Marya Hornbacher, pg 5
At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be ‘about’ any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically. And it becomes a crusade… You are also doing it for yourself. It is a shortcut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny.
Hornbacher, pg 64
[About avoiding physical contact]: the night after Duane and I played cards, he caught me. He ran me down in the hall, blocked my door with his wee body, and said, staring at the floor, ‘I know you don’t usually give hugs but I was wondering maybe if I could give you a hug, you don’t have to hug back or anything, but I thought maybe since you’ve been here a while and you haven’t had any hugs at all in like weeks maybe you need a hug.’
I leaned down and stiffly hugged him. He held on to my neck so tightly, the contact was so startling, and his small self so warm, that I took a sharp breath inward and started to cry, and he said, patting my back, ‘Hugs are very good for you. I’ll give you another one tomorrow if you want.’
And I just held on for dear life… One might, in fact, over a few years, begin to avoid [physical contact] like the plague, begin to claim such absolute ownership over one’s own body that contact itself… begins to seem a threat.
Hornbacher, pg 201-202
I have not enjoyed writing this book… This project was not, as so many people have suggested, ‘therapeutic’ for me – I pay my therapist a lot of money for that… Trying to explain rather than excuse, to balance rather than blame…
You expect an ending. This is a book; it ought to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I cannot give you an end. I would very much like to. I would like to wrap up all loose ends in a bow and say, See? All better now. But the loose ends stare back at me in the mirror. The loose ends are my body, which neither forgives nor forgets: the random half-hearted kicking of my heart, wrinkled and shrunken as an apple… They are the constant trips to the mirror, the anxious fingers reading the body like Braille, as if an arrangement of bones might give words and sense to my life…
It does not hit you until later. The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive. Frostbite does not hurt until it starts to thaw.
Hornbacher, pg 275-276
- Things that made me go “ugh” :
What made me go “ugh” was every time society or someone reinforced Hornbacher’s idea that thinness equates greatness and value, and every time someone found it necessary to praise a woman’s weight loss.
- If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :
I haven’t read it yet (because I am too cheap to buy any more books and also this book is very recent so get ready for a hot off the presses recommendation!) but I think that Lara William’s Supper Club would be a good antidote or response to Wasted. Supper Club is described as; ‘about a secret society of hungry young women who meet after dark and feast to reclaim their appetites – and their physical spaces – that posits the question: if you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into?’
Holy hell how could you not want to read that?! I may in fact have to break my no-more-book-buying-until-you-read-what-you-own pledge to get this book as there is nothing I want to read as much (other than Heart Berries which I want to read like crazy but didn’t want to read two memoirs back to back for review purposes) as this book right now.
I would also recommend (again things I haven’t read ha) Hornbacher’s Madness: A Bipolar Life which is the sequel to Wasted. Her critically acclaimed novel The Centre of Winter, about a family dealing with a suicide, would also be a good read!
Stay tuned for my next review Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst; a novel on raising non-normative children in the woods and the ties that bind us.
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