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A review by valancysnaith
Wasted by Marya Hornbacher
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
5.0
I will be brutally and totally honest. Much as I love this book, and much as the book is superbly written... it is a book that, in the depths of my own eating disorder, I have used to fuel the fire. In particular, I would read, over and over again, the account of Marya getting down to 52 lbs. And everyone on the ED online communities I frequented knew the exact BMI she was at that weight; I still remember, actually. And so many of us envied her. We knew the risks... we knew the health perils... yet we wanted, so badly, to achieve exactly what she had. To get down to a BMI of 10.2. It was amazing to us. We wanted it so, so badly.
I am in a better place, at least perspective-wise, these days, and I recognize that Marya was not someone to be envied, but an incredibly, direly ill person who was a hair's width away from death. I do not envy her weight or BMI, now. I've been down a similar road -- I've been emaciated, starving, in and out of hospitals -- and I know it isn't fun and games, and it will never give you what you want.
But this book, for people with active EDs... it's extremely dangerous. Marya says she wrote this memoir with the intention of helping people with eating disorders, but for most of the people I knew who read it around the time I first did, it did not help their eating disorders to get better, but rather helped them to become worse. And it is true that this book is FULL of tips and tricks about purging and losing weight alike. I do not believe that people with active eating disorders should read this book, but of course no one can stop them. And it's very true that at the time of publication, there was no LiveJournal, no social media, none of the things that people now use to create eating disorder communities. So the effects of this book, although I imagine similar even then, were less wide-spread than they are today.
I don't blame Marya, though. Someone offered her a contract to write this specific book, and when you're given your first ever contract to write a novel, it's a very very difficult thing to turn down, especially as her finances were not very good at the time. And I do not think she believed it would do any harm. To any "sane" person, this book is horrific and terrifying. I know this. But to those of us who are stuck in the same disorders that she was stuck in (she has since fully recovered), it makes a lot of sense -- too much sense. And it makes the eating disorder voice even louder and even stronger.
I am in a better place, at least perspective-wise, these days, and I recognize that Marya was not someone to be envied, but an incredibly, direly ill person who was a hair's width away from death. I do not envy her weight or BMI, now. I've been down a similar road -- I've been emaciated, starving, in and out of hospitals -- and I know it isn't fun and games, and it will never give you what you want.
But this book, for people with active EDs... it's extremely dangerous. Marya says she wrote this memoir with the intention of helping people with eating disorders, but for most of the people I knew who read it around the time I first did, it did not help their eating disorders to get better, but rather helped them to become worse. And it is true that this book is FULL of tips and tricks about purging and losing weight alike. I do not believe that people with active eating disorders should read this book, but of course no one can stop them. And it's very true that at the time of publication, there was no LiveJournal, no social media, none of the things that people now use to create eating disorder communities. So the effects of this book, although I imagine similar even then, were less wide-spread than they are today.
I don't blame Marya, though. Someone offered her a contract to write this specific book, and when you're given your first ever contract to write a novel, it's a very very difficult thing to turn down, especially as her finances were not very good at the time. And I do not think she believed it would do any harm. To any "sane" person, this book is horrific and terrifying. I know this. But to those of us who are stuck in the same disorders that she was stuck in (she has since fully recovered), it makes a lot of sense -- too much sense. And it makes the eating disorder voice even louder and even stronger.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Drug abuse, Drug use, Eating disorder, Mental illness, and Forced institutionalization
Moderate: Vomit