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Acknowledgments

Thanks to my agent, Sydelle (Saint of Perpetual Patience) Kramer, and to Frances Goldin and Lillian Lent for the incredible work they put into this and the unwavering support they gave. Also for not laughing at and answering weird questions and providing becalming influence throughout. But most of all for taking the chance.

There aren't enough ways to thank you for that.

Thanks to my editor, Terry Karten, for unfailingly hitting the nail on the head, for patiently weaseling out the rest of the story, and for very, very patiently explaining each step of the way. Thanks also for support all along, and again, my undying thanks for going way, way, way out on a limb. Many, many thanks to Kera Bolonik, who gave this book the uber-edit, for which I am extremely grateful.

Thanks to the readers whose insights were invaluable for cutting the dross and smoothing the rough edges and asking the questions and giving the much appreciated help all along; you are all very fine and I thank you more later.

To Paul Trachtman, who said it could be done, whatever it was, and without whom this book would not even exist, since it was his idea. Also for his friendship, editorial insight, and general How to Live exam

ple for these many years, all thanks. To Michele Hodgson, for giving me a start and supporting me all along, I am forever grateful. To Britt Robson for suggesting the title for the original article. To Terry Cazatt and Jack Driscoll who taught me to write in the first place.

To all of the women who generously allowed me to interview them and use their immeasurable insight in this book. Special thanks to Megan for not only stories but also general brilliance and friendship.

To my parents for raising me right, for not throwing a fit about the airing of family laundry in public, for keeping me alive on several occasions, for support throughout all kinds of weirdness, not the least of which was the writing of this book, for staying sane and believing in me despite all evidence, with that obstinacy specific to parents and midwest erners.

To all the people to whom I owe quite literally my life, especially Kathi Jacobsen, Dave Auge, Jan Johnson, Ruth Davini, and the staff at Lowe House, especially Kim, Janet, Paul, Tara, John. Thanks somehow fall short of what I mean to say but nonetheless, thanks.

To all the people who put up with me and then again the ones who didn't: To Ruth Gila Berger, Daniel Casper, Jeremiah Chamber-lain, Lora Kolodny, Jeremy Norton, Josie Raney, Kari Smalkoski, Mark Trackman, Kristen van Loon, Craig Welsh, and Arwen Wilder, for many, many things, including but in no way limited to dogged friendship, constant inspiration and example, highly caffeinated conversation, prolific advice on and support during the writing of this book,
et al.

To Brian Nelson especially for teaching me to live right, for asinine jokes, for calling in the middle of the day and night to see if I'm still ticking, for a lifetime of friendship, for everything.

Finally, most of all, to my husband, Julian, for being you, etc., for making me laugh, for sticking around all these years, for ineffable patience throughout the writing of this book, for being who you astonishingly are, and here as usual words fail me, thank you, love.

About the Author

MARYA HORNBACHER is a journalist as well as a writer of fiction and memoir. Her first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, has become a classic. The Center of Winter is her first novel.

She lives in Minneapolis.

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Praise

“This is a terrifically well-written book—completely devoid of self-pity.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Hornbacher writes with a nothing-sacred crystalline prose.”

—Detroit Free Press

“Hornbacher's courage may help solve the riddle of why young women punish themselves for being female. A powerfully personal, complex book about a baffling disorder.”

—Booklist

“Hornbacher writes poignantly of the devastating effect a pervasive cultural obsession with ‘thinness’ can have on the self-image of a bright creative child.…[
Wasted
] should be read.”

—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Powerful, compelling, intelligent.…In a memoir that has the tension and movement of a well-paced novel, Hornbacher charts the course of an illness that drove her to the brink of madness and laid waste to her body over a period of fourteen years.…[Hornbacher's] utter lack of self-pity catapults this memoir far beyond the whiny scope of so many personal tales.…You simply cannot put
Wasted
down.”

—San Diego Union-Tribune

“Riveting, startlingly assured.…Hornbacher's unblinking testimonial has the nuance and vividness of an accomplished novel.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Hornbacher describes details of the disease with searing honesty.”

—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Hornbacher attacks the subject of her own disorder and its knotted roots in her culture, her family, and her psyche with the same fervor she once applied to the siege on her own body.…At times it hurts to read this book.”

—Village Voice

“[Hornbacher] reveals how and why women with these eating disorders can be helped and, most of all, how long it takes for that help to take hold.…Descriptions of both the desperate need to binge and purge and the grip of the addiction of not-eating are vivid.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Marya Hornbacher's fourteen-year love-hate affair with food is stuffed with enough grit, drama, heartbreak—and eventual triumph—to fill
several
life stories.”

—New York Post

“In this detailed and disturbingly honest work, Marya Hornbacher outlines the progression of an illness that transports her to hell and back.…The entire, devastating catalog of her bulimia and anorexia is laid open in this exquisitely written memoir.”

—Hartford Courant

“[It] was Hornbacher's courage that won me over. She has writ ten a real story. Although she doesn't resolve, or even completely understand, her problems, she keeps trying to, and that makes this book a lot like living real life.”

—Raleigh News & Observer

Credits

Cover design by Rick Pracher

Cover photograph by Mark Trockman

Copyright

GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS MADE TO REPRINT THE FOLLOWING: Excerpt from
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. Copyright © 1939, 1940 by James Agee. Copyright © 1941 by James Agee and Walker Evans. Copyright

© renewed 1969 by Mia Fritsch Agee and Walker Evans. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

From “Admonitions to a Special Person” from
The Complete Poems of Anne
Sexton
. Copyright © 1981 by Linda Gray Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr., Executors of the Will of Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

“Fire and Ice” from
The Poetry of Robert Frost
, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, copyright © 1951 by Robert Frost, copyright © 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt & Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt & Co., Inc.

Excerpts from “Lady Lazarus” from
Ariel
by Sylvia Plath. Copyright ©

1963 by Ted Hughes. Copyright renewed. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Excerpt from “You, Doctor Martin” from
To Bedlam and Part Way Back
by Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1960 by Anne Sexton. Copyright © renewed 1988 by Linda Gray Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

“Bavarian Gentians” by D. H. Lawrence from
The Complete Poems of D. H.

Lawrence
by D. H. Lawrence, edited by V. de Sola Pinto and F. W. Roberts.

Copyright © 1964, 1971 by Angelo Ravagli and C. M. Weekley, Executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.

from “Letter to Dr. Y” from
Words for Dr. Y
by Anne Sexton. Copyright ©

1978 by Linda Gray Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

“In a Dark Time” copyright © 1960 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethlte, from
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
by Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

From
Waiting for Godot
copyright © 1954 by Samuel Beckett. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

The lines from “Diving into the Wreck” from
Diving into the Wreck: Poems
1971-1972
by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1973 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W Norton

& Company, Inc.

WASTED. Copyright © 1998 by Marya Hornbacher-Beard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

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Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader January 2005 ISBN 0-06-077535-1

Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows: Hornbacher, Marya.

Wasted: a memoir of anorexia and bulimia/ Marya Hornbacher.

p. cm.