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4.0 AVERAGE
4.0 AVERAGE
i liked it, didn’t love it. some of the imagery will haunt me forever, but it certainly reflected the school of thought in psychology of the aetiology/treatment of eating disorders of the last century. it’s enlightening to see how far we’ve come.
emotional
medium-paced
Wasted was a very well-written memoir. What I enjoyed even more were probably the quoted poems by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Emily Dickinson. All are poets I enjoyed so I appreciated them. However, what bothered me was the content and how it came across. Marya Hornbacher's memoir was more or less filled with tips and instructions on how to fool people to think you are recovering from an eating disorder and how to manipulate and sneak around. I feel like that would trigger many people recovering from an eating disorder and be very dangerous.
I read this in high school, and I think it helped keep me from sliding towards anorexia and bulimia. Marya Hornbacher did a great job of presenting eating disorders as what they are-- terrifying, grotesque and deadly-- without glamourization or seductivity.
The more I read memoirs, the more I like them; reading other people's perspectives is essential to understanding the world around you. Marya was so raw and genuine and real, and I just liked her despite everything she did and everything she went through. Her way of writing was beautiful too - I get why she was able to get into Interlochen for it! And her sordid descriptions of her anorexia and bulimia ...
- "My focus on minutiae calmed me. It was a simple refusal to look up at the larger world, which always seemed to dilate my pupils, making me squint and shy from the glare."
- "Watching the two of them eat played out like this: My father, voracious, tried to gobble up my mother. My mother, haughty and stiff-backed, left my father untouched on her plate. They might as well have screamed aloud: I need you/I do not need you."
- "Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be all right."
- "The dark place that my mind was fast becoming blends, in my memory, with the dark womb of church: the chant, the fugue of prayer, the strange erotic energy that carving a very small cross into my thigh with a nail had brought."
- "Maybe I was getting good at this, good enough to scare people. Maybe I would almost die, and balance just there, at the edge of the cliff, wavering while they gasped and clutched one another's arms, and win acclaim for my death-defying stunts."
- "Teenagers do not know that both past and self will rise up like flattened cartoons on the road, unflatten themselves, and follow them everywhere they go. A shadow, or ghost."
- "The taking in of food, like the taking in of a lover, is seen as an admission of weakness and need, an admission of desire for physical pleasure, a succumbing to the “lesser,” the base sides of the self. A loose woman, that's what you are, your passions beyond your control. The etiquette of our culture says that a good woman should take sex and food with a sigh of submission, a stare at the ceiling, a nibble at the crust."
- "The sickness occupies your every thought, breathes like a lover at your ear; the sickness stands at your shoulder in the mirror, absorbed with your body, each inch of skin and flesh, and you let it work you over, touch you with rough hands that thrill."
- "People who've Been to Hell and Back develop a certain sort of self-righteousness. There is a tendency to say: I have an addictive personality, I am terribly sensitive, I'm touched with fire, I have Scars. There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. How dull."
- "I didn't know what lay beneath the skin I wore. I didn't want to know. I suspected it was something horrible, something soft and weak and worthless and stupid and childish and tearful and needy and fat."
- "The year rolled over on its back and died."
dark
emotional
informative
medium-paced
As the sort of end-all, be-all anorexic memoir, I thought it was a little flat. Marya Hornbacher does the "I'm in recovery" shuffle but the book she should have written-- the one that is hidden barely below the subtext of this one-- is the book about the fact that she has not recovered.
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
dark
emotional
sad
tense
While I had to read this for class, it was quite an excellent read/listen. Sometimes things are not only black and white. This is a good book if you want to understand the struggle of eating disorders, mental health, and family.