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)
'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'
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