Madness and Marya Hornbacher
Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher is one of my favourite books. It’s probably my favourite memoir of all time. My eating disorder has never been that serious, but I can relate to the author eerily well. It was often as if I was reading about what was going on inside my own head, only expressed much more eloquently than I could hope to do so myself. I’m a good writer, not that it’s evident on this blog… but Marya Hornbacher is an amazing writer, and I am in awe of her. The book is an honest an insightful portrayal of illness, although I wish she had written about her actual recovery. Even more than that, I’ve often wished that someone would write a book about manic depression that was just like Wasted.
So I was pretty excited when I was reading the People article about “Britney’s mental illness” (no, I’m not even going to go there right now) and there was a sidebar about Hornbacher’s upcoming memoir, Madness: A Bipolar Life. There are some very annoying annoying things in the book description, but at least I know Hornbacher didn’t write the jacket copy herself:
At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type 1 rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disease there is.
Ugh. Yeah, I’m also rapid-cycling bipolar I, and so what? Do not brag about how your manic depression’s penis is bigger than other people’s, okay? This is not something where you can just whip out a tape measure and settle the matter once and for all, and even if you could, it would be pointless. There are sucktastic things about all flavours of bipolar disorder, and mental illness one-upmanship is really tacky and helps nobody.
Also, Hornbacher’s fiercely self-aware portrait of her own bipolar as early as age four will powerfully change the current debate on whether bipolar in children exists.
This is another one of those don’t-even-go-there things that is probably unfair of me to comment on until I’ve read the actual book.
I can’t say I like the title much, either, but I’m still dying to read the book. Probably there will be parts that will annoy me, and there will be parts that I love, like this passage from Wasted:
People who’ve Been to Hell and Back develop a certain sort of self-righteousness. There is a tendency to say: I have an addictive personality, I am terribly sensitive, I’m touched with fire, I have Scars. There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself.
Or this part, where she falls down and is too weak from starvation to get up:
Halfway home I began to run, a faltering, stumbling run, eyelashes fluttering with snowflakes, face numb, hair falling into my face with the weight of wet snow. I slipped and fell and could not get up. I sat there in a heap in front of the vice president’s mansion. I, up-and-coming young journalist, A student, maniac, starving artist, invisible basket case, me. I cried with an impotent fury at my legs for refusing to stand when I told them to and thought of my cousin Brian as my hands, pure white, indiscernible in the white snow, scrabbled about trying to collect the contents of my bags which had spilled. I thought of my brilliant and wonderful cousin, dear friend and lifelong confidant, who’d been in a wheelchair since he was small. I thought of how he must feel every day, legs refusing to work, through no fault of his own, through some miserable joke of God, and I thought: This is your own fucking fault. Get up. GET UP. I hated myself with a pure and fierce energy and I wished myself dead.
I don’t hate myself anymore. It’s been a long time since I did. But that excerpt says everything you need to know about the way I felt back when I did hate myself.
January 18th, 2008 at 1:36 am
I really liked Wasted too. My eating disorders were never as bad as hers, but they were life-threatening at times (just not as dramatically, I guess!). I found the book compelling in many ways because of the accuracy of portrayal; you can tell she isn’t bullshitting. I did think there was some self-aggrandizement, but she was, what, 20 when she wrote it? I’ll be reading the new book as well. If nothing else it’ll be interesting reading!
January 21st, 2008 at 5:00 pm
I read a lot of books and can never remmber the particulars of what I’ve read but what I do remember about Wasted was that it blew me away. My own eating disorders were not that life threatening but to ome they were just as serious because I was struggling with them. Wasted made me feel like I am not alone. Seriously, because I felt nothing but alone before.