More than anything, I went on tour for six months, got sick, was drinking too much, wasn’t eating enough, and was exhausted. There are a lot of rumors out there about me. Even though I recognized that it was sick, it also seemed so normal.Īfter Wasted was published, did you relapse again?īriefly, yes. I’d spent so many years surrounded by people with eating disorders, girls who’d gone through that same thing. I didn’t have any idea that what I was saying would shock in the way it did. Going on a book tour as a 23-year-old kid with a book that disturbed so many people was really difficult. Did you expect it to cause such an uproar? It was deeply painful for me, but I wrote it because at the time eating disorders were a mysterious, glamorous illness and I wanted people to know what it really looked like. I was so angry, at myself and at my world, and I felt like I needed to come out against a culture that celebrated eating disorders. It was really wrenching to go back and hold up a real mirror to how I had lived and what I had believed. It certainly wasn’t therapeutic, as so many people have suggested about confessional-type books.

She spoke to the Cut in a telephone interview about her mixed feelings about the book, her response to its critics, and what it was like for a body-obsessed young woman to see pictures of herself in bookstores around the country. This year, Hornbacher rereleased Wasted with a new afterword - one she says is intended to set the record straight. The book has also faced intense scrutiny, most recently in Kelsey Osgood’s How to Disappear Completely, which suggested that anorexia memoirs function more as a guidebook than as a deterrent. Since then, Wasted has become something of a cult classic amongst eating-disorder memoirs, selling more than a million copies, which are often dog-eared and passed between teenage girls. Somehow she did, chronicling her descent into disordered eating and recovery from it in the 1998 best-selling memoir Wasted. Marya Hornbacher developed bulimia at 9, anorexia at 14, and cycled in and out of eating-disorder clinics and hospitals until, weighing 52 pounds at age 18, she was told she wouldn’t live longer than a week.

Wasted by marya