Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher (English) Paperback

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A 'retired career anorexic' examines herself and her, and our, culture.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

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; not 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.'Hornbacher is articulate, clever, and has all the persuasive zeal of a convert, furious at the pressures that made her what she was. Paradoxically, her painful journey is also gripping and…dare one say it….entertaining in a way that no fiction could ever be. A compulsive read.' Publishing News; 'A gritty unflinching look at eating disorders written from the raw disintegrated centre of young pain with stark candour and power.' New York Times• The slimming industry is worth £1billion in GB alone• The UK has 3.5 million anorexics and bulimics

Notes

An autobiographical exploration of the relationship between eating disorders and the historically unprecedented nineties obsession with the body, diet and gender.

Back Cover

'WASTED' Marya HornbacherComing back from an addiction to starvation"I would do anything to keep people from going whereI went. This book was the only thing I could think of." "A stunning original and beautifully written book gouging deep into a gruesome subject which, by comparison, other writers have merely flirted with."KATIE CAMPBELL, 'Evening Standard' "This factual account of a 23-year-old's experience of anorexia and bulimia is not just another confessional. It has not been written as an act of therapy or for financial gain. It is a prose poem. This does not detract from its painful force nor from the author's searing intelligence (one has to keep reminding oneself that she is only 23) but rather adds to the force of her communication ...Like Plath she writes with a metaphoric intensity which at times seems tragically indistinguishable from the power of her drive to self-destruct. Her brutal honesty and her lack of special pleading, only adds to the essential pain of the book. If you want to understand anorexia, read this book."ALICE THOMPSON, 'The Scotsman' "The mind of Hornbacher is sharper than were her collar-bones when she weighed 4 stone, was given a week to live, and suddenly decided not to die. It is her 23-year-old body that was wasted by 14 years of anorexia and bulimia. Her true story is painfully honest, analytical, complex and sad: compulsive reading."'Harpers & Queen' "A brilliant moving memoir"TOBIAS JONES, 'Frank' "What marks 'WASTED' out is the quality of the voice. Hornbacher is, simply, a good writer. Her gift for description makes even the familiar aspects of the phenomenon newly real. She is coolly vivid on the sheer violence of anorexia. There's an edge to her prose ...successfully catching a young woman's desperate desire to counter the cultural voice that tells her she's "too much, too much, too much." 'WASTED' will be of value not only to fellow sufferers: any woman who has ever been made to feel gleeful by the diminishing of her physical self will gain from reading this painful and sharp-boned account."SYLVIA BROWNRIGG, 'Guardian'

Flap

'WASTED' Marya Hornbacher Coming back from an addiction to starvation "I would do anything to keep people from going where I went. This book was the only thing I could think of." "A stunning original and beautifully written book gouging deep into a gruesome subject which, by comparison, other writers have merely flirted with." KATIE CAMPBELL, 'Evening Standard' "This factual account of a 23-year-old's experience of anorexia and bulimia is not just another confessional. It has not been written as an act of therapy or for financial gain. It is a prose poem. This does not detract from its painful force nor from the author's searing intelligence (one has to keep reminding oneself that she is only 23) but rather adds to the force of her communication ...Like Plath she writes with a metaphoric intensity which at times seems tragically indistinguishable from the power of her drive to self-destruct. Her brutal honesty and her lack of special pleading, only adds to the essential pain of the book. If you want to understand anorexia, read this book." ALICE THOMPSON, 'The Scotsman' "The mind of Hornbacher is sharper than were her collar-bones when she weighed 4 stone, was given a week to live, and suddenly decided not to die. It is her 23-year-old body that was wasted by 14 years of anorexia and bulimia. Her true story is painfully honest, analytical, complex and sad: compulsive reading." 'Harpers & Queen' "A brilliant moving memoir" TOBIAS JONES, 'Frank' "What marks 'WASTED' out is the quality of the voice. Hornbacher is, simply, a good writer. Her gift for description makes even the familiar aspects of the phenomenon newly real. She is coolly vivid on the sheer violence of anorexia. There's an edge to her prose ...successfully catching a young woman's desperate desire to counter the cultural voice that tells her she's "too much, too much, too much." 'WASTED' will be of value not only to fellow sufferers: any woman who has ever been made to feel gleeful by the diminishing of her physical self will gain from reading this painful and sharp-boned account." SYLVIA BROWNRIGG, 'Guardian'

Author Biography

In additon to her international best-seller Madness: A Bipolar Life, Marya Hornbacher is the author of Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia and a novel, The Center of Winter.

Kirkus UK Review

A gruesome, eloquent and brutally frank memoir of long-term bulimia and anorexia, and a clear-headed look at its many possible causes. Locked into an increasingly severe eating-disordered lifestyle from the age of nine, the author's life has been dominated by her relentless obsession with feeding, the size of her backside and counting her bones. There are no happy endings. Viewing things from her early twenties, married and a writer, treated but not cured, she is still haunted by her suicidal sickness and its legacy of collapsed veins, arrhythmic heartbeat and drastically reduced life expectancy - but, after countless hospitalizations and finally having starved herself to within a week of death, she is very lucky to be alive. Until recently no-one talked or wrote about eating disorders; now they are out in the open and part of the cultural mainstream. But whether or not they are taken seriously or even widely understood is questionable. This savage and uncompromising book is a reminder that however pointless and narcissistic they might appear from the outside, eating disorders are extremely complex and destructive, and, alarmingly, by no means unusual. (Kirkus UK)

Kirkus US Review

Bulimic since she was 9 years old, anorexic since she was about 15, the author reveals how and why women with these eating disorders can be helped and, most of all, how long it takes for that help to take hold. Hombacher, a freelance editor and writer, is now 23 years old and, if not well ("it's never over, not really"), at least ingesting and keeping down enough food to sustain life and begin the repairs of the heart and other organs that were ravaged by over a decade of vomiting and starvation. Not yet convinced that she will survive, she struggles each morning over her bowl of "goddamn Cheerios" to let go of the urge to be thinner and of "the bitch in your head" who says, "You're fat." With the help of journals and thousands of pages of her own medical records, Hombacher explores why she began trying to make herself disappear. Although in many ways she fit the profile of a person with an eating disorder - her family life was emotionally chaotic, she was a perfectionist - Hombacher feels there is more to it, including society's dictate that "you can't be too rich or too thin." In and out of eating-disorder clinics and mental institutions for many years, she also encountered general practitioners who accepted her extremely low weight - she bottomed out at 52 pounds - as normal. Descriptions of both the desperate need to binge and purge and the grip of the addiction to not-eating are vivid. Along the way, Hombacher was involved with drugs and promiscuous sex but managed to keep her habits and her lifestyle a secret. Hombacher's message is a warning about the complexity of eating disorders - that they are not simply about food or parental missteps or even "thin is in," but about a tapestry of dysfunction that gives rejection of nourishment a terrible potency of its own. (Kirkus Reviews)

Long Description

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; not 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. 'Hornbacher is articulate, clever, and has all the persuasive zeal of a convert, furious at the pressures that made her what she was. Paradoxically, her painful journey is also gripping and...dare one say it....entertaining in a way that no fiction could ever be. A compulsive read.' Publishing News; 'A gritty unflinching look at eating disorders written from the raw disintegrated centre of young pain with stark candour and power.' New York Times* The slimming industry is worth

Feature

* This is The Bell Jar of bulimia and anorexia * A dazzling beginning to a significant writer's career; a novel will be next. * This is the book for those who bought Prozac Nation but wished Wurtzel was smarter and for those wish Naomi Wolf's books were more moving * Full-colour, front-cover serialization in the Weekend Guardian supplement; 2nd serial in the Mail on Sunday; a feature in the Face - for hardback. * Lead Title status: poster, dumpbins, national advertising, etc. Competition: Prozac Nation/ Wurtzel; The Bell Jar/ Plath; The Beauty Myth/ Wolf

Description for Sales People

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; not 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. 'Hornbacher is articulate, clever, and has all the persuasive zeal of a convert, furious at the pressures that made her what she was. Paradoxically, her painful journey is also gripping and...dare one say it....entertaining in a way that no fiction could ever be. A compulsive read.' Publishing News; 'A gritty unflinching look at eating disorders written from the raw disintegrated centre of young pain with stark candour and power.' New York Times* The slimming industry is worth

Details ISBN0006550894 Author Marya Hornbacher Pages 304 Publisher HarperCollins Publishers ISBN-10 0006550894 ISBN-13 9780006550891 Format Paperback Imprint Flamingo Place of Publication London Country of Publication United Kingdom DEWEY 362.25092 Media Book Language English Subtitle A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia Short Title Wasted UK Release Date 1999-01-04 Year 1999 Publication Date 1999-01-04 Alternative 9780061755552 Audience General AU Release Date 1999-03-02 NZ Release Date 1998-09-23 We've got this

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