Marya Hornbacher's Wasted - A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia - Book Report/Review Example

Wasted Wasn’t Wasted Marya Hornbacher’s book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia brings out several aspects of the various familial, social and personal aspects of eating disorders that are not always considered. When studying about these illnesses, it is easy to overlook the personal aspects of the disorder, the addicting nature of it or the gradual way in which it becomes a part, a very necessary part, of the individual’s life. In many ways, the illness becomes her way of defining herself, and treatment options must therefore provide an alternative means of identification if it is to have any chance of success. Rather than presenting her story in the detached, rather clinical way in which many of these stories are presented, Hornbacher takes an in depth look into her own soul, writing out the events of her life in sequential order, yet imbuing the text with her own impressions, ideas and beliefs as she grew up. Interspersed here and there is the odd statistic or scientific quote that helps to illuminate various aspects of what the illness entails, such as her preoccupation with food or the evidence that suggests girls who mature early are more likely to suffer with eating disorders. This continuous interjection of hindsight, scientific backup, personal impressions and painful insight brings the issue of eating disorders into the realm of the human, providing the reader with a solid idea of what the illness looks like from inside the patient, building a new understanding with every turn of the page. The book is a memoir of one woman’s journey through the disease and is presented exactly as such. Hornbacher herself sums up the book best with the statement she has included on the book’s jacket – “I wrote this book 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.” Through this novel, she traces her disease from before it began, through her beginning stages of bulimia at age 9 through what she describes as suicide on a slow scale to her eventual slow but painful and not wholly satisfying recovery. At several points in her discussion, Hornbacher allows the reader to enter into her own mind, following the experience of what it’s like to have an eating disorder in every aspect – the power, the pain, the disgust, the self-deception and the damage being done at every step along the way on a physical and psychological level. In discussing how she fit into the typical anoretic definition, Hornbacher writes in sharp detail about her early physical maturity and the experiences it brought on. Because it occurred in elementary school, she had not yet had the education within the school system she needed to understand what was happening and her questions to her mother, neatly written out on her finest stationary, continued to go unanswered. The embarrassing moments of staining white pants at school and the ways in which the boys teased her regarding her developing bust-line illustrate how Hornbacher grew to feel about her body. This entire discussion, while undoubtedly painful to the writer, makes it possible to understand the mindset of a person suffering from eating disorders from the perspective of one who has not. Throughout her development, she discusses her life stages in concert with her disease stages, working through them with her psychological state at the time as well as her perspective on these events now. Discussing a time when she collapsed at college, Hornbacher said, “Eating disorders have the centripetal force of black holes. I remember, that day, pulling into myself and not caring about who I was sucking in after me – the friends at the bedside, the nurses … I remember being utterly, utterly pleased with myself … because I was disappearing” (129). Her writing style itself tends to reflect the dizzying, disorienting effects of her eating disorder upon her. Her description of a school dance illustrates this well: “Back on the floor, strobe lights were flashing, faces suddenly garish, absent-eyed smiles flickering on and off, limbs moving too quickly, too close. I began to flinch, holding my hands up to my face, trying to focus, and stumbled off the floor to return to the bathroom” (132). The choppy, short phrases strung together in this quote help paint a visual picture that the words describe, while her warped thinking of the time is illustrated as the course of events unfold. “I bent over at the waist and began to cough, blood spattering on the white porcelain tile, rasping out the words: I’m fine, I’m fine while my friends screamed. … I had a very hard time not laughing. It all seemed like a great joke” (132). At other times, her more rational older self discusses her previous motives with a calm detachment that yet understands. “The year I moved home, some switch flipped in me, cutting off the lights in the rational part of my mind … leaving me with a blind, desperate desire, more virulent than ever, to get rid of the self that I hated and make me new” (231). Thanks to her frank writing style and the degree to which she is able to bear her soul to her reader in the relating of her life’s journey to hell and back again, Marya Hornbacher is able to touch the chord that resonates in everyone regarding her own insecurities, fears, reactions and strengths. It is surprising to learn of the various ways in which the illness affected her life. Despite the fact that she had ample evidence that she was killing herself, time and again she continued to participate in the behavior that was killing her. The way she traces this development and the way she illustrates how she thought at the time makes it easier to understand this process. The description of how she felt liberated and empowered by her controls over her eating seem so rational and well-thought-out from within the perspective she presents in a way that has never been adequately depicted before. Rather than starving or purging out of spite, Hornbacher makes it clear that she starved and purged out of necessity, as the only way to retain her own individuality and her own control over her life. Rather than noticing the things she was experiencing were indications of death, she saw them as indications of her impending freedom from the shackles and heavy aspects of the body she’d been lugging around with her all her life. “I did not yet understand that the gasp and wheeze of my heart was death. The wild skittish flitting of my eyes and my hands working themselves together, trying to get warm, was death. The absence of any understanding that my body was falling away from me like a pair of old pants was death. I did not understand” (181). Although she has all the same basic ingredients as everyone else – issues with parents, friends, boyfriends, sex, power and play – Hornbacher shows throughout the novel how her way of approaching these issues was slightly different from the way most people approach them. Perhaps the most chilling part of the novel for me was toward the end, after she’d returned home again from college, literally at death’s door. “The night I got home, my mother sat at the kitchen table with me while I several bowls of cereal in a row and then cried because I’d eaten too much, and she just said, Honey, oh, honey, don’t say that. Lifting my head from the place mat, I looked at her, searching her eyes for an answer, and I asked: Mom, do you think I’m crazy? … She said, looking out the window, ‘I think you’re very sick.’ It took me a minute to realize that she’d just said Yes.” (272). Although everyone around her had been telling her for years that she was killing herself and that her thinking wasn’t quite straight, it wasn’t until this point that Marya was ready to hear what they were saying. There was no magic formula that brought her around, no magic words that broke the spell she’d been in, just the final realization that she had reached a point of no return. As a pharmacist facing a patient like Marya, it would be difficult to know just how to treat her, as it is apparent that every individual suffering with an eating disorder approaches it in a different way. After having read the book, there are several telling signs that were provided that indicate when a person is suffering from either anorexia or bulimia, such as the persistent calluses on her knuckles where her fingers touched the back of her throat when she was purging and some of her behavior patterns. Seeing these signs in an individual purchasing diet supplements or other weight-reducing products would certainly make me concerned. Working with this patient, I would try to help them find a decent counselor, one that truly understood the illness and how to approach a person with it. It would be important for the patient to understand their approach to food, the reasons they feel it necessary to use food and what they are using it for – control, power, escape, pleasure – before they can begin to find alternative and healthier means of working these issues out. I would encourage the patient to also seek medical assistance by getting regular checkups and helping them understand the relationship between proper nutrition and the body’s urge to binge following a long period of starvation. For Marya, it was the realization that she could no longer play a game at death if she wished to continue living, she either had to live or die and she had to make the decision very soon. Although patients are often aware of the final conclusion if they don’t eat, Hornbacher indicated they don’t always view death in the same way, somehow disassociating themselves from the idea that by separating themselves from the body, they are separating themselves from life. Instead, I think it would be important to understand how the patient views their illness, whether they recognize it or not and what they see as the final outcome, when are they successful at reaching the goals they hope to achieve through their eating disorder and what would that success look like. I think once they’re forced to view their illness in this light, they might be more interested in finding a way of breaking their addiction. References Hornbacher, Marya. (1998). Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. New York: Harper Collins. Read More