When it happens, it feels like winning the lottery. An email arrives out of the blue, from one of my publishers or a festival director or a member...
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Christin, August 24, 2012 (view all comments by Christin)
This is an engaging, intelligent, intense, and painfully honest look at one woman's experiences with an eating disorder. Marya Hornbacher's unflinching look at her own life and psyche manages to make the reader both understand the mind of someone with ED (while never condoning it) and also feel a great deal of empathy (without whining). This is a very powerful book.
A word of warning: This book can also be very triggering. If you have any kind of issues with food/weight or any history of disordered eating, you should carefully consider whether or not you're able to handle this book. I wasn't far enough along in my recovery when I first read this and it triggered me 6 ways from Sunday!
emptydreams, November 9, 2008 (view all comments by emptydreams)
I so admire her strength. In some scenes it was like she had a hidden camera following me around or something. Stay strong.
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Krystal, August 20, 2006 (view all comments by Krystal)
Marya Hornbacher allows readers to really get inside of her head as she details her life and death struggle with anorexia and bulimia. Nothing in this book is sugar coated or glossed over. The way it is written allows the reader to share in Marya's triumphs and feel the desparation of her worst moments.
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"Synopsis"
by Harper Collins,
Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and step into a netherworld where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Marya Hornbacher sustains both anorexia and bulimia through five lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and ultimately, any sense of what it means to be "normal." By the time she is in college, Hornbacher is in the grip of a bout with anorexia so horrifying that it will forever put to rest the romance of wasting away. In this vivid, emotionally wrenching memoir, she re-created the experience and illuminated that tangle of personal, family, and cultural causes underlying eating disorders. Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to the darker side of reality, and her decision to find her way back--on her own terms.
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