Book Review: Wasted

This book review is part of a series that covers the topic of Eating Disorders. Eating Disorders are potentially life-threatening neurotic conditions characterized by severe disturbances in eating habits that involve insufficient or excessive food intake. Tricia Greaves is the Official Guide to Eating Disorders.

Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, by Marya Hornbacher, is a valuable resource for people interested in Eating Disorders, and it is available through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

Book Description

Why would a talented young woman enter into a torrid affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Through five lengthy hospital stays, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and all sense of what it means to be "normal," Marya Hornbacher lovingly embraced her anorexia and bulimia -- until a particularly horrifying bout with the disease in college put the romance of wasting away to rest forever. A vivid, honest, and emotionally wrenching memoir, Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to reality's darker side -- and her decision to find her way back on her own terms.

Publisher Description

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.