Wasted

Why would a precociously intelligent, imaginative, talented young girl go through the looking glass into a netherland where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak? A secret bulimic at age nine, an accomplished anorexic by 15, Marya Hornbacher grew up in a comfortable middle-class home in Minnesota. Fearful of her developing adolescent body and dismayed by her seemingly voracious appetites for food and love, she embraced anorexia and bulimia with a passion that resembled love. Through five lengthy hospitalizations and endless therapy, she sustained a secret life of binging and purging, starving, self-mortification, alcohol, drugs, and sex, deceiving those who loved her and those who tried to help her. When her weight slipped down to 52 pounds, however, mind and body entered into mortal combat, and Marya began to fight desperately for her life.aIlluminating the tangle of personal, family and cultural causes that underlie eating disorders, Wasted takes us inside the experience of anorexia and bulimia in a way no one else has done before. A harrowing story of obsession, passion and madness, physically graphic and emotionally wrenching, this landmark book promises to do for eating disorders what William Styron's Darkness Visible did for depression and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar for madness.