Read Online Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Marya Hornbacher
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in.…Purging defines the
body by keeping certain contents out.…The quest to feel alive and full by taking in…substances…is fueled by experiencing one's self—and one's body—as inherently empty or dead.2
Shortly after I became bulimic, I went to the library one day to check out a book on anorexia nervosa called The Best Little Girl in the World .3 I wanted to be her: withdrawn, reserved, cold, wholly absorbed in her own obsession, perfectly pure. Shutting everything out. It is in fact a rather romanticized account, written by a doctor intent upon demonstrating not the experience of having an eating disorder but rather his own genius in curing them. The book said you could die of an eating disorder. That didn't bother me. What it did not say was that if it did not kill you right away, it would live with you the rest of your life, and then kill you. I wish I would've known that. I decided that if I did nothing else with my life, I would be an anoretic when I grew up. Bulimia seemed a good place to start.
As it turned out, I was very good at it.
My nighttime baby-sitter Kelly would watch me and laugh as I boasted, I bet you I can eat this entire loaf of bread. No you can't, she'd say. Determined, I'd start popping bread in the toaster, heart pumping. I remember the toast, the butter I spread on it, the crunch of toast against teeth and the caress of butter on tongue. I remember devouring piece after piece, my raging, insatiable hunger, the absolute absence of fullness. I remember cheerfully heading off for my bath. Night, I said. Locking the bathroom door, turning the water on, leaning over the toilet, throwing up in a heave of delight.
But the delight did not last long. The daily bingeing was making me heavier, and though I did not make the connection, it was also making me increasingly volatile. Though the purging was initially rare—maybe
2Zerbe, 155-56.
3The TV movie based on this book, which details the brief stint in anorexia of a girl in her early teens (and which therefore is not overly representative of the eating-disordered population), is often shown on eating-disorder units and never fails to bring a great many patients into a tizzy over how skinny the actress (who starved herself to play the part) is, and how they need now to be as thin as her.
once or twice a week—it was right about this time that I began to get in trouble at school. With frequency. I got into fights. My grades fluctuated, notes were sent home about my disruptive behavior: talking back, being sarcastic, causing a stir. I began to spend more time alone in my room when my parents were home, drawing pictures of skeleton-thin women. My parents and I began to fight. An uncalled-for level of anger on my part began to surface, only to escalate over the next few years until I seemed, to my father, “a ticking bomb.”
At nine, ten, eleven years old, I paged through the teen magazines at Clancy's Drug Store. While my friends were standing in front of the 99-cent Wet 'n Wild lipstick displays, I was poring over Diet Tips for Teens, staring at the paper doll figures of clean, hairless, grinning girls (“Mandi is wearing Shell Pink Lipgloss” and her smooth toothpick legs are doing chorus line kicks. My legs in their regulars are too big, too hairy). I slapped the magazine shut, caught sight of my face in the makeup mirror: round cheeks, round freckled cheeks, cow eyes. At night, I would lie on my bedroom floor practicing their Tight Thighs! leg lifts. I would lick my finger and turn the pages, looking at their faces. There were Mandi and Sandi and Kari and Shelli with their Shell Pink skin and Toned Tushes, glancing sexily at the camera, flouncing boyish bodies about. I practiced the looks in the mirror, casting bedroom eyes at my reflection, thrusting my hips to the side and tossing my hair. My body was wrong—breasts poking through my shirt, butt jutting, all curvaceous and terribly wrong. Everything was wrong.
D
uring my
body by keeping certain contents out.…The quest to feel alive and full by taking in…substances…is fueled by experiencing one's self—and one's body—as inherently empty or dead.2
Shortly after I became bulimic, I went to the library one day to check out a book on anorexia nervosa called The Best Little Girl in the World .3 I wanted to be her: withdrawn, reserved, cold, wholly absorbed in her own obsession, perfectly pure. Shutting everything out. It is in fact a rather romanticized account, written by a doctor intent upon demonstrating not the experience of having an eating disorder but rather his own genius in curing them. The book said you could die of an eating disorder. That didn't bother me. What it did not say was that if it did not kill you right away, it would live with you the rest of your life, and then kill you. I wish I would've known that. I decided that if I did nothing else with my life, I would be an anoretic when I grew up. Bulimia seemed a good place to start.
As it turned out, I was very good at it.
My nighttime baby-sitter Kelly would watch me and laugh as I boasted, I bet you I can eat this entire loaf of bread. No you can't, she'd say. Determined, I'd start popping bread in the toaster, heart pumping. I remember the toast, the butter I spread on it, the crunch of toast against teeth and the caress of butter on tongue. I remember devouring piece after piece, my raging, insatiable hunger, the absolute absence of fullness. I remember cheerfully heading off for my bath. Night, I said. Locking the bathroom door, turning the water on, leaning over the toilet, throwing up in a heave of delight.
But the delight did not last long. The daily bingeing was making me heavier, and though I did not make the connection, it was also making me increasingly volatile. Though the purging was initially rare—maybe
2Zerbe, 155-56.
3The TV movie based on this book, which details the brief stint in anorexia of a girl in her early teens (and which therefore is not overly representative of the eating-disordered population), is often shown on eating-disorder units and never fails to bring a great many patients into a tizzy over how skinny the actress (who starved herself to play the part) is, and how they need now to be as thin as her.
once or twice a week—it was right about this time that I began to get in trouble at school. With frequency. I got into fights. My grades fluctuated, notes were sent home about my disruptive behavior: talking back, being sarcastic, causing a stir. I began to spend more time alone in my room when my parents were home, drawing pictures of skeleton-thin women. My parents and I began to fight. An uncalled-for level of anger on my part began to surface, only to escalate over the next few years until I seemed, to my father, “a ticking bomb.”
At nine, ten, eleven years old, I paged through the teen magazines at Clancy's Drug Store. While my friends were standing in front of the 99-cent Wet 'n Wild lipstick displays, I was poring over Diet Tips for Teens, staring at the paper doll figures of clean, hairless, grinning girls (“Mandi is wearing Shell Pink Lipgloss” and her smooth toothpick legs are doing chorus line kicks. My legs in their regulars are too big, too hairy). I slapped the magazine shut, caught sight of my face in the makeup mirror: round cheeks, round freckled cheeks, cow eyes. At night, I would lie on my bedroom floor practicing their Tight Thighs! leg lifts. I would lick my finger and turn the pages, looking at their faces. There were Mandi and Sandi and Kari and Shelli with their Shell Pink skin and Toned Tushes, glancing sexily at the camera, flouncing boyish bodies about. I practiced the looks in the mirror, casting bedroom eyes at my reflection, thrusting my hips to the side and tossing my hair. My body was wrong—breasts poking through my shirt, butt jutting, all curvaceous and terribly wrong. Everything was wrong.
D
uring my
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