Of course, some have complained that Wasted is triggering in a negative way. The book’s frightening detail has triggered recovery in countless individuals as evidenced by the thousands of letters she has received over the years. During our discussion, Marya confirmed that this is, in part, why she wrote Wasted in such a graphic way. I began to move more wholeheartedly out of denial and toward getting better. If Marya has a real, life-threatening eating disorder and I relate to her so much, than I must have the illness, too. My tattered copy is highlighted throughout noting all of the thoughts and behaviors that Marya and I shared.
In a recent conversation with Marya, she told me that she shares her story so that people can experience “less aloneness.” I felt less alone.įor me, Wasted also served as a mirror to see the truth about my own life. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t the only person in the world who struggled with food. When I read her words, I instantly felt connected.
Trigger warning: explicit anorexic behaviours are cited throughout this thesis.One of the first books I ever read about eating disorders was Marya Hornbacher’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. In interpreting the various representations of illness, diagnosis and recovery, I employ concepts from the field of autobiography that can aid me in reading the narratives from a literary perspective, as well as works about the illness narrative as a genre in order to place these three memoirs in a context of other illness life writings. In this way, I can determine to what extent the general explanatory models of anorexia have either been internalised or subverted in these autobiographical narratives, as well as form an understanding of how the practice of diagnosis influences the experience of living with anorexia and the ways in which recovery is conceptualised by these authors. For this comparison I borrow ideas and concepts developed by theorists working on disability, mental illness/health and anorexia, which enables me to explore the portrayal of illness, diagnosis and recovery in the memoirs while also investigating the underlying notions of health, normalcy, disability and difference that precede the general understandings of these terms. I read these works within the framework of the illness narrative/autobiography and compare the ways in which they represent the lived illness experience of anorexia nervosa. In my thesis, I compare three memoirs written by recovering/recovered anorexics: Wasted (1998) by Marya Hornbacher, How to Disappear Completely (2013) by Kelsey Osgood and An Apple a Day (2012) by Emma Woolf.
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