The title of the memoir I read, is Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. I think that the title Wasted reflects on the main character, Marya Hornbacher. She became an anorexic and bulimic person as she grew up, so the title shows how she wasted her body and life because of her obsession with food and her paranoia of becoming an over-weight person.
Marya Hornbacher became so conscious about her weight ever since she turned three years old. She would call herself fat in front of a mirror, play with her food, and refuse to eat ever since she could remember. Her father was warm towards her, and was going on and off diets. Her mother however, had continuous mood swings, one time, playing Barbies with her, another, picking at her food and acting very much like who Marya grew up to be. Her parents were constantly fighting, taking their arguments out on her, competing to be the better parent. Marya would try to be like her mother, cool and collected, while her father would tell her to stay a kid forever, and her mother wanting her to hurry up and grow up.
The memoir was written as a novel and how the Marya Hornbacher today, looks back onto her childhood and how she became a bulimic-anorexic. The memorist, Marya came to know how she pushed away everyone in her life, refusing to eat when she was so small she shouldn’t have to worry, and already getting an eating disorder. And then eating as if her stomach was a bottomless pit and then puking it out as a child. hooking up continuously with boys she hardly knew, getting pregnant during high school twice. She worked hard at a newspaper company as a journalist as she became older, and refusing to take a break, and working more than she’s paid to. She became obsessed in to keeping herself occupied so she wouldn’t have to constantly eat.
I think the book was really creative and how she described how she felt as she went through hospitals, homes for the mentally ill, and then her parents. She makes the reader feel as if they could feel their own bone jutting out awkwardly the way her’s felt. Although some may find it endless and tiring to hear about the memorist’s weight, other girls can relate to what Marya was going through, growing up with the fights with her parents, and being targeted by the boys in her grade due to her early puberty.
Some lines I loved are; “I would lift off into the sky, float over the iced white streets, yes, that was death, and I was the princess trapped in a cage, dying of a broken heart. That was death.” And “The self I’d had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was blank.” And “checking my bones, feeling for signs of softness, my brain veering back and forth from pig-pig-pig-fat-pig to stop-it-you’re-okay-it’s-okay-okay-okay”.
I thought the book was very insightful and helped the reader understand how bulimia and anorexia is not just about their vagueness and how they only care about their weight, but Marya Hornbacher shows how there is also fear and how she was unable to open up to anyone and didn’t feel like she can live a normal life. The memoirist went through a suicidal phase so I thought that would help the reader understand and be able to connect to her.
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