"I fell for the great American dream, female version, hook, line, and sinker," Marya Hornbacher writes. "I, as many young women do, honest-to-God believed that once I Just Lost a Few Pounds, suddenly I would be a New You, I would have Ken-doll men chasing my thin legs down with bouquets of flowers on the street, I would become rich and famous and glamorous and lose my freckles and become blond and five foot ten." Hornbacher describes in shocking detail her lifelong quest to starve herself to death, to force her short, athletic body to fade away. She remembers telling a friend, at age 4, that she was on a diet. Her bizarre tale includes not only the usual puking and starving, but also being confined to mental hospitals and growing fur (a phenomenon called lanugo, which nature imposes to keep a body from freezing to death during periods of famine).


From School Library Journal
YA-Eating disorders are frequently written about but rarely with such immediacy and candor. Hornbacher was only 23 years old when she wrote this book so there is no sense of her having distanced herself from the disease or its lingering effects on her. This, combined with her talent for writing, gives readers a real sense of the horror of anorexia and bulimia and their power to dominate an individual's life. The author was bulimic as a fourth grader and anorexic at age 15. She was hospitalized several times and institutionalized once. By 1993 she was attending college and working as a journalist. Her weight had dropped to 52 pounds and doctors in the emergency room gave her only a week to live. She left the hospital, decided she wanted to live, then walked back and signed herself in for treatment. This is not a quick or an easy read. Hornbacher talks about possible causes for the illnesses and describes feeling isolated, being in complete denial, and not wanting to change or fearing change, until she nearly died. Young people will connect with this compelling and authentic story.Patricia Noonan, Prince William Public Library, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This gritty, bluntly honest personal account read by the author tracks Hornbacher's downward spiral from bulimia at age nine to life-threatening anorexia requiring five lengthy hospitalizations. Interwoven with the remarkably vivid chronicle of this struggle is an adept examination of the complex causes of eating disorders. While accepting that a troubled, chaotic family life and the relentless bombardment of cultural messages exhorting thinness played a role, the author acknowledges that her underlying neurotic intensity and perfectionism contributed to the problem; she concludes that she is "a victim, primarily, of myself, which makes victim status very uneasy and ultimately ridiculous." This abridged version sharpens the focus of the original text, and the outstanding narration by Hornbacher enhances the unblinking tone of the work. Highly recommended for all public libraries.?Linda Bredengerd, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Bradford, PACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.



"A gritty, unflinching look at eating disorders....written from the raw, disintegrated center of young pain....Hornbacher describes [such phenomena] with a stark candor that captures both their pain and underlying purposes....She is wise beyond her years."


Entertainment Weekly
"This is a terrifically well-written book_completely devoid of self-pity."


The New York Times Book Review, Caroline Knapp
Wasted is a gritty, unflinching look at eating disorders, and Hornbacher's refusal to tie the story up in a neat package labeled "Triumph" or "Recovery" speaks to her respect for their insidious power and persistence.... at 23, still living in a "state of mutual antagonism" with her illness, can Hornbacher turn her experience into something larger than the sum of its harrowing parts? Wasted is written from the raw, disintegrated center of young pain: there is power in this approach; there are also limitations.


From AudioFile
Hornbacher's poignant memoir of succumbing to the eating disorders anorexia and bulimia for a near-lifetime moves beyond the traditional angry-at-the-world manifesto listeners might expect. True, there is anger in her voice. Her tone throughout the audiobook is one of jaw-clenched distaste--at her fighting parents, her feeling of general displacement in the world, but ultimately of her own life choices. Hornbacher's background in theater comes through in the earnest and graphic articulation of her experiences. Wasted is an honest and heartfelt account that asks us, by example, to reflect on our own life battles. R.A.P. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Why, Hornbacher asks in this profoundly distressing chronicle of her struggle with eating disorders, do so many young women suffer from self-hatred, a mania for being thin, and the twisted sense of power self-starvation engenders? Hornbacher entered with the realm of the body-obsessed at the precocious age of nine, came a frail heartbeat away from dying in her teens, and now, at age 23, has the gumption to tell her wrenching story in an effort to expose the societal roots of this complex disease. In spite of coming of age during the 1980s, an allegedly sophisticated and open-minded time, she was denied the same basic information about puberty, sexuality, and self-respect that women have always been denied, a crime made even more deplorable by virtue of the media's glorification of thinness. Hornbacher's severe illness was willfully ignored by every adult in her life, from her parents to her therapists, a failure to recognize the severity of her self-destructiveness appalling in its implications. Hornbacher's courage and candor may help solve the riddle of why young women punish themselves for being female. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
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. Hornbacher, 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, Hornbacher 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--Hornbacher 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, Hornbacher was involved with drugs and promiscuous sex but managed to keep her habits and her lifestyle a secret. Hornbacher'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. (First serial to New Woman; radio satellite tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
"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. It did not occur to me that I'd gone crazy. It did not occur to me that I would either be dead or locked up for good in the near future. I know that while I was in the hospital, I got a pair of scissors and cut my waist-length hair to my chin. [Someone] said I looked like a model. I was of course thrilled."

Wasted is exactly what a book about eating disorders should be: frightening. With Hornbachers gripping prose, Wasted has the potential to do for eating disorders what Go Ask Alice did for drug abuse: scare young readers away from killing themselves.

Based on research and her own battle with anorexia and bulimia, which left her with permanent physical ailments and nearly killed her, Hornbacher's book explores the mysterious and ruthless realm of self-starvation, which has its grip firmly around the minds and bodies of adolescents all across this country. Hornbacher became bulimic at the age of 9, anorexic at 15, and went back and forth between the two until she was 20. In 1993, when she weighed 52 pounds, doctors predicted she had a week to live.

Hornbacher's story is of a journey to self-destruction and back again, raw enough to make even the most jaded readers flinch and honest enough to make the most cynical pause forthought. But while recounting her own pain, flaws, and failures, Hornbacher successfully avoids the traps of self-pity and reachiness. "I do not have all the answers. In fact, I have precious few. I will pose more questions in this book than I can respond to myself. I can offer little more than my perspective, my experience of having an eating disorder. It is not an unusual experience. I was sicker than some, not as sick as others. My eating disorder has neither exotic origins nor a religious-conversion conclusion. I am not a curiosity, nor is my life particularly curious. That's what bothers me—that my life is so common."

Hornbacher was born in California, the only child of a former theater director and an actress turned school administrator, struggling with their unrealized dreams and troubled marriage. While she was in elementary school, Hornbacher's family moved to Minnesota. With witty insight, she offers cutting social commentary about growing up on the less desirable side of a town that "operated on money" during the value-skewed '80s. She recalls the social caste system at her school, in which "lanky children were clad in Ralph Lauren and Laura Ashley" and posed a disturbing contrast to her own perceived physical awkwardness. Children notice differences, and Hornbacher was perhaps acutely aware of the implications of these differences. She could not control where she lived, the early onset of her puberty, or the disharmony between her parents. She could, however, control her eating, which was inseparably enmeshed with every other aspect of her world. By the time she entered junior high school, Hornbacher had been vomiting daily for three years.

But Hornbacher's story transcends the physical. It is a book as much about the intellect and the spirit as it is about the body. She describes vividly the acute life of her mind, her almost overwhelming drive to succeed even as a young teenager, and her passionate interest in the world around her. She escapes stifling suburbia by being accepted at the prestigious arts school Interlochen, only to become hospitalized before she could graduate. By her late teens, Hornbacher's promising intelligence and intense personality were turned exclusively inward, fueling her careening trip toward death via self-starvation, bingeing, sexual promiscuity, and drug use. Hers was a downward spiral so dark and extreme, it's difficult to believe that the person depicted in the pages lived, let alone lived to create for the world a brilliant account of her descent and survival.

As Hornbacher readily admits, her book does not offer any answers. However, the revelations about adolescent self-destruction and all of the questions therein are vital: As she observes, "There are reasons why this is happening, and they do not lie in the mind alone."

Wasted is more than a cautionary tale, and it is more than an account of the power of the human spirit: It is an astonishing work of literature that serves as a mirror that reflects the crueler aspects of our culture, which all too often penetrate and imperil the minds and lives of our vulnerable youth.

—Jamie Weisman

ANNOTATION

"...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...the author takes the reader inside the world of anorexia and bulimia in a unique manner."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Precociously intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and ambitious, Marya Hornbacher grew up in a comfortable middle-class American home. Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and step into a netherworld where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Marya Hornbacher sustained both anorexia and bulimia through five lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, the loss of family, friends, jobs, and, ultimately, any sense of what it meant to be "normal." In this vivid, emotionally wrenching memoir, she recreates the experience and illuminates the tangle of personal, family, and cultural causes underlying eating disorders. Marya's story gathers intensity with each passing year. By the time she is in college and working for a wire news service in Washington, D.C., she is in the grip of a bout with anorexia so horrifying that it will forever put to rest the romance of wasting away. Down to fifty-two pounds and counting, Marya becomes a battlefield: the death instinct at war with the drive to live, mind and body locked in mortal combat.

FROM THE CRITICS

Barcelona Review

Intelligent, honest, without the least hint of self-pity or undue accusation, this is not only the definitive personal account on the subject of eating disorders, but one hell of a book full stop.

Entertainment Weekly

Terrifically well written...non-judgmental...

San Francisco Chronicle

A scary but tentatively triumphant memoir....[Told] with grace, sharp humor and candor.

Village Voice

Hornbacher writes like an artist, shaping her themes without self-pity or self-importance, wondering with intelligence why the dissatisfaction everyone feels with life is so often blamed on the female body.

New York Times Book Review

A gritty, unflinching look at eating disorders...written from the raw, disintegrated center of young pain...Hornbacher describes [such phenomena] with stark candor that captures both their pain and underlying purposes...She is wise beyond her years. Read all 11 "From The Critics" >

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