A really amazing book I’m re-reading:

Wasted by Marya Hornbacher

 

A memoir of her journey through an eating disorder from aged 9, Wasted is peppered with vivid and intricate details of her ordeal, and its relevance to those with the disorder is almost painful because it causes you to think about your own disorder/life. Its descriptive paragraphs are rawfully honest, probably too hard for many to take, I can imagine.

 

As painful as it is to read the book, it serves as a reminder for me to not walk down that road again, and why I’m losing a ‘friend’ I had with me for 3 years of my life.

 

I pull out several excerpts from her book:

 

On denial:

“I knew it the way alcoholics know in the back of their brain that they have a problem. They know, but they don’t believe it’s out of control. The convenience in having an eating disorder is that you believe, by definition, that your eating disorder cannot get out of control, because it is control. It is, you believe, your only means of control, so how could it possibly control you?”

 

On it’s development:

“You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.”

 

And it is so seductive. It is so reassuring, so all-consuming, so entertaining.

 

At first.

 

On the female cultural ideal:

My generation was raised on popular media, televion, teen magazines, billboards that bellowed “if you could choose your body, which would you choose?” with pictures of hard bodies getting yet harder at a very chic gym. Well what the hell do you think I’d choose? … We read the endlessly boring series of Sweet Valley High pulp novels like Bibles, with their  terribly chipper stories of twin sisters who were, of course, the most popular girls in their Southern California high school. They were smart and nice and always getting the guy. As every single book in the series reminded us, they were also blond, blue-eyed, tan, and a ‘perfect size six’. A pair of literary Barbie dolls. We read the books in class, hidden behind our math books. We stood in the school bathroom discussing the plots as we compared our thighs. Look at this, we’d say, slapping our bodies so hard we left white welts. Look how my fat jiggles. But you – we’d say, turning to another girl – you’ve got like the perfect body.

 

*It is crucial to notice the language we use when we talk about bodies. We speak as if there was one collective perfect body, a singular entity that we’re all after. The trouble is, I think we are after that one body. We grew up with the impression that underneath all this normal flesh, buried deep in the excessive recesses of out healthy bodies, there was a Perfect Body just waiting to break out. It would look exactly like everyone else’s perfect body. A clone of shapeless, androgynous models, the hairless, silicone-implanted porn stars. Somehow we, in defiance of nature, would have toothpick thighs and burgeoning bosoms, buns of steel, and dainty firm delts. As Andy Warhol wrote, “The more you look at the same exact thing…the better and emptier you feel.”