Wasted, Read it!

I read "Wasted" by Marya Hornbacher a while back but I only recently purchased it.

She is at the other end of the spectrum when it comes to food. I tend to cycle between binge eating and excessive dieting while she has struggled with anorexia and bulimia. "Wasted" chronicles her experiences with the two disorders. The book is poignant, interesting, and her style of writing flows freely and easily from her finger tips. She also wrote one on being bipolar that's titled, "Madness: a Memoir." My favorite part is when she is released from a treatment center for a few hours to attend college and she always has to run off quickly before anybody discovers that she's part of an in-patient program.

I empathize with her because I spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals for bouts of mania. I never told my teachers that I wasn't just ditching their class for two weeks...I was sick. Instead, I'd just sort of waltz in and take my old seat without so much as a hello. Of course, my grades suffered each time the paramedics would cart me off on a stretcher with leather wrist cuffs, but I guess that's the price you pay for denial of illness.

The writer does mention an incident where an overweight woman called her chunky, ("just like me," she said to Marya.) and I have to address that. Of course you're not chunky, Marya, and if you were you'd still be a great writer. That woman probably felt really lonely in her castle of flesh and wanted, perhaps irrationally, to be close to you. I doubt she was being cruel. She probably wanted to feel less alone in her pudgy life. Trust me, I should know (I've never called anybody chunky, but still).

The truth is, eating disorders have things in common. This might shock and offend and piss off anorectics everywhere, but it's true: binge eating, anorexia, bulimia, bulimirexia all have a common thread of food obsession, control issues, and emotional issues. All 3 disorders can be precipitated by traumatic life events and are aggravated by stress. Of course, one is more socially acceptable than the others.

Here some people would disagree. They would look around and see this "plus size movement" as proof that there has been a backlash against skinny. Well, tell the fashion editor, the majority of the population, women's clothing manufacturers, and the guy down the street THAT and you'll see how little truth there is to this "pro-fat" movement. Take a classroom of females, one extremely skinny and one extremely fat, and ask them to describe negative comments, looks, and experiences their weight has caused them. Yes, both will have some. But it's likely that the fat woman is more likely to get comments from strangers, doctors, and family more often than not.

Having starved myself to a size 2 and binge eaten to a size 16, I vividly recall many more cruel weight comments when I'm fat. Plus I  have to deal with knocking all kinds of things over with my huge butt. Once, I scrambled out of my classroom desk for a break and almost tipped the thing over with my butt! Desks were obviously not intended for the thick women in the world.

But back to the book, it was totally engrossing and I highly recommend it.

Wasted by Marya Hornbacher---read it!