Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Growing up in a cozy middle-class American environment, Marya Hornbacher was gifted with early intelligence, creativity, energy, and ambition. She believed she was big, so one day when she was five years old, she came home from ballet class, put on a huge sweater, curled up on her bed, and started crying. She was covertly bulimic by the age of nine, vomiting up at home after school while eating Fritos and watching reruns of The Brady Bunch on television. A few years later, she added anorexia to her repertory and took great delight in her ability to go without food.

Why would a gifted young lady pass through the looking glass and enter a realm known as the netherworld, where avarice drives food, honor triumphs over flesh, and up is down? Why commit to a relationship including drugs, sex, starvation, and death? Marya Hornbacher battled bulimia and anorexia for five long years, enduring constant treatment, losing her family, friends, and career, and eventually losing all concept of what it meant to be "normal."

She recreates the experience and sheds light on the complex web of familial, societal, and personal factors that contribute to eating disorders in this evocative and heartbreaking memoir. The more years go by, the more intense Hornbacher's narrative becomes. By the time she reaches college and starts working for a news agency in Washington, DC, she has fallen victim to anorexia, a horrible condition that will end any romantic notion of aging away. Hornbacher's body turns into a death instinct with the urge to live, mind and body engaged in deadly conflict, down to 52 pounds and counting.

The narrative of Wasted tells the tale of a lady who ventured into the shadowy side of reality and made the choice to return on her own terms. Wasted, a ground-breaking book written by a 23-year-old writing prodigy, brings us inside the experience of bulimia and anorexia in a manner that no other book has ever done.