Wasted

Marya Hornbacher's memoir chronicles her 14-year experience with anorexia and bulimia, tracing the disorders from early childhood through repeated hospitalizations, near-death, and an incomplete process of recovery. Written when Hornbacher was 23, the book combines personal narrative with cultural criticism, arguing that eating disorders are not simply about vanity or control but arise from a convergence of family dysfunction, cultural obsession with thinness, and individual personality.

Hornbacher opens with a scene in which she rushes her friend Jane, a fellow eating disorder survivor, to the emergency room because Jane's heart is skipping and stopping. She introduces herself as someone who became bulimic at nine, anorexic at 15, and who has been hospitalized six times. Her medical records describe her as a hopeless case. She states that the book is not a miracle-cure testimony but the story of one woman's journey into darkness and her decision to find a way back.

Hornbacher's childhood in California was marked by instability. Her father, a man with severe depression, swung between adoration and rage; her mother, deeply repressed, alternated between tenderness and withdrawal. Food carried enormous emotional weight: Her father ate voraciously and obsessed about his weight, while her mother picked at meals and pushed plates away. At four, Hornbacher stood in a ballet class horrified by her body and told her parents she was fat. She developed an early habit of dissociating from her reflection and performing rituals with food to feel in control. Her parents' marriage deteriorated through fights and reconciliations. At six, she wrote down a plan and buried it in the backyard: to get thin, to be great, to get out. When she was eight, her father moved the family to Minnesota, and 15 months later, nine-year-old Hornbacher walked to the bathroom and made herself throw up for the first time. The next day at school, she realized she would have to keep doing it.

The move to Edina, Minnesota, intensified her anxiety. She hit puberty at eight, far earlier than her peers, and developed a hatred for her changing body. By 11, she met the full diagnostic criteria for bulimia nervosa, purging almost daily while absorbing cultural messages from teen magazines equating thinness with worth. In junior high, her behavior spiraled into drug use, drinking, and sexual activity with older boys. At 14, she became pregnant and miscarried in the bathroom during dinner, then immediately turned to scrutinize her body in the mirror. A friend reported her purging to a school counselor, and Hornbacher told her parents, who reacted with nervous laughter and their own confessions. She decided anorexia would be her salvation and applied to Interlochen Arts Academy, a boarding school in northern Michigan.

At Interlochen, Hornbacher thrived in the writing program but severely restricted her food intake while running 25 miles daily. Her body grew lanugo, a fine white fur the body produces when lacking sufficient calories. After collapsing at a school dance, she was sent home. At the Teen-Age Medical Services (TAMS) clinic in Minnesota, a counselor named Kathi coordinated her evaluation. A doctor found her blood pressure dangerously unstable and her fingernails blue. She was admitted to Methodist Hospital with diagnoses of bulimia nervosa with anorexic features, substance use, and major depression.

During her first hospitalization, Hornbacher encountered the rituals of inpatient treatment: locked bathrooms, monitored urination, and weigh-ins on scales reading in kilograms so patients could not know their weight. Family therapy became a battleground. When her mother visited alone and Hornbacher suggested she may have absorbed food neuroses from her, her mother replied, "Sweetheart, you didn't pick anything up. You just came this way," and walked out. After her vital signs stabilized, Hornbacher convinced everyone she had recovered and was released, having actually gotten worse.

She moved to Northern California to live with her father's ex-wife and attend high school, where she rigged scales, fabricated food diaries, and starved in earnest. She fell in love with Julian Daniel Beard, a classmate she would later marry, but could not reveal what was happening. She bought an entire bottle of ipecac, a syrup used to induce vomiting, and swallowed it on an empty stomach, nearly dying. Her parents demanded she return to Minnesota, and she was readmitted to Methodist in the low 80s in weight with severe cardiac complications.

Discharged when her insurance ran out, Hornbacher deteriorated rapidly. Her father sat up all night holding a thread over her mouth to check she was still breathing. After being threatened with commitment to Willmar, the state institution, she was placed in Lowe House, a locked residential treatment center for children with severe psychiatric and behavioral conditions. She befriended Duane, an 11-year-old who had been abandoned and who asked her to be his sister. His warmth began to crack her emotional armor. Staff took away her books to force emotional engagement. Over months, she slowly began to eat and form attachments, but she fabricated a story about childhood sexual abuse to avoid deeper therapeutic work, a lie she describes as the thing she most regrets. She was released on November 5, 1991.

Living at home and attending the University of Minnesota, Hornbacher initially thrived but gradually relapsed. When her parents left for a weekend, she binged uncontrollably for three days. Her relationship with her father deteriorated into constant fights. She fell in love with Mark, a photographer at the student newspaper, and tapered off therapy by constructing a false picture of health. She transferred to American University in Washington, DC, leaving Minneapolis at 85 pounds.

In Washington, Hornbacher worked as managing editor of a wire service, attended school full-time with a 4.0 average, and reduced her intake to 320 calories a day. She developed a system dividing food into "units" of 80 calories each, progressively eliminating units until she ate only four per day. Her weight dropped to 52 pounds. She could no longer read and fell down an escalator at the Dupont Circle Metro station. Her roommate called her parents, and she dropped out and flew home. In the emergency room, a doctor told her she would not make it down the block. Hornbacher signed herself in, was given a week to live, and spent three months in the hospital.

In the afterword, written four years later, Hornbacher reports that she is alive, married to Julian, and "all right," a term she prefers to "recovered." She lists her reasons for getting better with blunt humor: Being sick got boring, she was annoyed at being told she would die, and she got curious about whether she could get unsick. The years after the hospital were messy and nonlinear. She moved into a run-down apartment, got a cat, learned to eat, attempted suicide in November 1994, received 42 stitches, and decided that was enough. She insists there was no sudden revelation, only a leap of faith that she was strong enough to face life combined with the principle that being alive carried a responsibility to do something with that life. She describes the ongoing daily struggle, noting that her heart is damaged, her immune system is compromised, and she will likely die young.

In a second afterword for the updated edition, Hornbacher argues for the possibility of full recovery. She recalls buying heavy boots in 1993 whose satisfying clomp marked her decision to take up physical space. She describes learning to cook soup with her friend Ruth as pivotal in relearning how to inhabit her body. She outlines practical strategies: throwing out her scale, eliminating full-length mirrors, seeking rigorous therapy, quitting drinking, and getting treatment for her bipolar disorder. The fear underlying eating disorders, she argues, is not a fear of fat but a fear of need, hunger, desire, and being human. Recovery requires giving oneself permission to live.