Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

We have all had "fat" days. Days where we wake up chewing on the cat's tail, after dreaming that we were eating a cheeseburger. Where we stumble out of bed and wander to the bathroom only to find ourselves staring longingly at the toothpaste, wanting to swallow the whole tube, or wondering what the lipstick on the counter might taste like. When we find ourselves, hours later, on the couch under a blanket of foils, wrappers, and plastic bags, littered with crumbs. On these days, we have a love-hate relationship with food. We need it, we desire it, that pizza shop on the corner looming like a shirtless Brad Pitt - but at the same time, we hate it. It's disgusting. Greasy, congealed. Stay away from me, empty calories.

My journey through Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia echoes that same love-hate relationship. It began as a fat day. I devoured page after page, taking a break only to burp after each chapter. I scoured over her witty, sometimes shocking phrases with a bright yellow highlighter, sometimes leaving less than half the page its original white. I couldn't get enough. But then, the sugar hangover set in. I started to feel full. Those last three bites were making me nauseous.

There is no doubt that Marya (I feel like I knew her well enough to speak of her on a first name basis - after all, I was there for the binging, the purging, the counting of ribs and bones in the spine) is a lot of wonderful things. She is brave, talented, unflinchingly honest, and has an incredible capacity for self knowledge that long term therapy clients would kill for. She has been to hell and back, and has an unbelievable amount of knowledge and experience to share with the world. But should an admittedly obsessive compulsive, manic, control-obsessed woman be allowed to compose a 289 page memoir? I'm not sure.

There are true gems hidden within Wasted. Even though I gave up highlighting about 100 pages in - her prose is already thick and complex enough, stopping to color-code made my pace almost unbearably slow - there are countless dog-eared pages and pencil scribbles marking the statements that left me open-mouthed, reconsidering everything I thought I knew about my body image. In fact, the mere fact that she is able to write after living through what she did (a euphemistic synopsis includes the onset of bulimia at age nine, anorexia setting in not much longer, three hospital stays and a long stint in a mental hospital/"Treatment Center", the inability to graduate both high school and college, reaching 55 pounds in her darkest days, at one point being given a week to live, and damaging her body and psyche so badly that she will never fully recover) is remarkable. But there was still something about Wasted that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Eating disorders are a dramatic subject. They have to be. Most addicts are tempted by something concrete - a needle, a cigarette, the seductive figure of a glass bottle. But the eating disordered are tempted simply by imbalances and distorted images in their own minds. In order to really starve yourself, you have to be a little bit nuts. So how could a book detailing an eating disorder be mundane? Black and white? I didn't expect facts and figures. But I also didn't expect wave after wave of tired metaphors, expletives, and end-of-the-world statements ("And then the other shoe dropped," "And then I lost my mind," "I knew I was dying"....). The same thoughts repeat over and over, the same situation is examined from a few too many angles. After awhile, I started to get fed up. When Marya leaves Interlochen in 1990 at the age of 16 and is checked into her first hospital stint, the reader is convinced that we have collectively reached rock bottom. But then the carpet is ripped out from underneath us, and we tumble again. After the second and third hospital stays, we are again convinced that Marya is so unhealthy that things can't get any worse. But then - ah hah! A trap door to fall through! It is appropriate that quotations from Lewis Carrol's Through the Looking Glass and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are sprinkled throughout the book, because we just keep tumbling down the anoretic rabbit hole. And things keep getting curioser and curioser.

I must clarify. I enjoyed the book. Well, maybe enjoy is the wrong word. Hornbacher's honesty and ability to reveal the darkest, most unattractive aspects of her character (similar to what I admired in Frey's A Million Little Pieces) made a gut-wrenching story. Like every other woman in the universe, I have struggled with eating and my weight, and I learned things about myself and my own personal struggle through Wasted's chapters. The mixture of research, opinion, and firsthand experience shines a light on the reasoning behind eating disorders, the fuel that keeps these poor girls calculating and controlling, and the inexplicable turning points that (sometimes) bring them back to Earth that I never really understood. Plus, the girl can write. She's funny, she's clever, and she can spin a phrase with the best of them (which is pretty amazing, because around 60 pounds, she apparently lost her ability to read and speak correctly, as her starved body began to break down her major muscles and organs for food, including her brain). She's got undeniable chutzpah. And the book got its point across - it made me really think about the messages that I take from the way I was raised, the people I surround myself with, the media, and even my own inner monologue about my body image and self esteem.

Additionally, Marya, the author of three published novels, a successful journalist and a literary fanatic (while in the mental institution, the staff takes her collection of books away, stating that they are allowing her to distance herself from her issues, and she cries for three weeks straight), includes an eerily appropriate collection of poems within Wasted's chapters. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson are a few of the all-star cast to accompany her words.

Marya's journey began, officially, at the age of nine. "One minute I was your average nine-year-old, shorts and a T-shirt and long brown braids [...]. The next I was walking, in a surreal haze [...] down the stairs, into the bathroom, shutting the door, putting the toilet seat up, pulling my braids back with one hand, sticking my first two fingers down my throat, and throwing up until I spat blood." Her life is a twisted juxtaposition of excess and limitation, that isn't completely limited to food; she cycles in and out of fears of and addiction to sex, work, intimacy (physical and emotional), exercise and physical activity in general, and literature (a heroine addicted to writing and reading! A little part of me cheered - then I remembered that this was part of her disease and sat on my hands). We follow as Marya learns to express her pain through vomiting, starving, binging, fornicating, withdrawing, screaming, crying, cutting. We journey with her across the river Styx and watch her flesh melts away, leaving a skeleton, both inside and out.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of Wasted was the Afterword. While the main thing I hated about Nic Scheff's memoir, Tweak, was its ambiguous closing, this is oddly enough what I loved about Marya's. Perhaps it's because I'm more familiar with body issues, more versed in eating disorders, that a clean ending would have disappointed me. Because I wasn't looking for a neat little package or a goody-goody happy ending. I was looking for the truth, no matter how unnerving or disappointing. Mayra knows that this is what her reader wants, and deserves, and so she delivers it. She states over and over again that there is no single treatment plan to "fix" an anoretic. What worked for her will not work for everyone. She does not claim to be cured, to be a role model. She admits that she still struggles everyday.

"I make it sound so simple; I say it got boring, so I stopped. I say I ahd other things to do, so I stopped. I say I had no other choice but to stop. I know all too well that it is not that simple. But in some ways, the most significat choices one makes in life are done for reasons that are not all that dramatic, not eartshaking at all - often enough, the choices we make are, for better or worse, made by default. Its quite true that there was no revelatory moment. Mostly what happened was that my life took over - that is to say, that the impulse for life became stronger in me than the impulse for death. In me, the two impulses coexist in an uneasy balance, but they are balanced enough now that I am alive."

In admitting this, at least for me, she makes Wasted a beautiful book, a tiny step in the battle against eating disorders, an inspiring (although imperfect) piece of writing. I laughed, I cried, I learned (well, I didn't actually cry. But the girl inside of me still aching to swallow the whole tube of toothpaste may have). Did I love it? Perhaps not. But it was a worthwhile literary experience. A twisted vacation into a sick Wonderland that many of us visit, but few of us live; and a critical reminder of why we buy our return tickets.