Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia- by Marya Hornbacher

     Imagine having your first two fingers shoved down your throat, sharp nails scraping at your flesh, holding your hair back with a ponytail or your free hand, or perhaps letting it fall over your face, letting it get stuck in vomit and mascara-tears. Imagine the roar of the bathwater drowning out your retches and gags so your mother and father can't hear you. Bulimia is terrifying. It leaves scars on your knuckles, a stench on your breath, and a pale and miserable face. Marya Hornbacher describes bulimia like this in her book Wasted, horrifying and something out of a nightmare. She says that having anorexia or bulimia is like having this "evil skinny bitch" inside of you, saying that the pain will stop when you're thin, only when you're thin, except in your eyes you can never get thin. These terrible feelings change Marya so much throughout the course of her memoir, she is like a different person.
     Marya's feelings of self-hatred grow in her like a cancer, starting out small when she was young, telling her friends at five years old that she wouldn't eat and needed to be skinny, to getting into drugs and sex and bulimia and anorexia by the age of thirteen. She talks back, curses, and acts rebellious towards everyone. Her eating disorders cause her to become someone who is quite unlike the Marya we met in the beginning, innocent, happy, eating Fritos on the couch, watching TV, and cuddling with her dog. She now writes depressing poetry, cries herself to sleep, and pukes after everything that she eats.
     I knew a girl at summer camp with bulimia. I'm not saying who, but it has changed them, much as it has changed Marya. She makes frequent bad decisions, some of which make me not want to hang out with her. She had gotten piercings, arguably tried drugs (she denies it), and spends time with people who are bad influences on her. She described her first purge to me, and was open about it. I remember her saying something along the lines of this: "It was really scary, and I didn't really know what I was doing. I turned on the bathwater, pulled my hair back, and shoved my fingers down my throat. I hacked for like ten minutes, but nothing came up. Finally, I stuck my whole hand into my mouth, and my entire dinner came up. It was terrifying, and it hurt, but I'm used to it now. It stings to drink lemonade now because I have a raw patch on the back of my throat." This is very similar to what Marya describes in her book.