Charlene

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wasted

by Marya Hornbacher

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in March 2011

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Charlene said: " Wasted is Marya Hornbacher’s intense and honest portrayal of her delicate and painful journey with an eating disorder. Hornbacher passionately and vividly depicts a struggle with her embedded idea of perfection which almost instantly manifests into a Wasted is Marya Hornbacher’s intense and honest portrayal of her delicate and painful journey with an eating disorder. Hornbacher passionately and vividly depicts a struggle with her embedded idea of perfection which almost instantly manifests into a desire for control and irrationally cultivates into a ‘self absorbed pride’. Throughout the novel she powerfully explores the ideas surrounding her experience and reflects on the many factors that congregate to build a disturbing covet for death.
Our society today constantly strives for perfection and success, it’s evident in magazines, television ect. persistently dictating the prescribed universal idea of perfection. Throughout the beginning of the novel I constantly tried to see the link with her childhood and an eating disorder, it seemed as though many people could relate to many her experiences, but with the complexity of culture, peer pressure and her family Hornbacher wonderfully illustrates how easy it is for a child to clench on to the proposed ideal to fit the moulds of society inevitably hurting herself in the process. From the beginning of the novel it is clear that Hornbacher is intelligent and inquisitive evidently seen throughout` the quality of her writing , she identifies the various factors that instigated her eating disorder, having lived in a town that ‘operated on money’ very simple associations were made, thinness with success, self-control and discipline and fat with laziness and poverty.
Although Hornbacher started her eating disorder as a means to look a certain way it soon manifests into an ‘ineffective statement, a self defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, social misogyny.’ She effectively illustrates a crusade of control and in the end uses her eating disorder as a way to define herself as well deal with other emotional issues ‘the self absorbed pride in yourself for your incredible feat, and the belief that you are so evil you deserve starvation ... your ability to withstand fame is your claim to fame.’ She effectively uses various allegories to painfully depict the sad and distressing shadows that constantly posses her thoughts.
When Hornbacher is a week from death she decides that her eating disorder is an ‘addiction and an illness, but there is no question at all that they are quite simply a way of avoiding the banal, daily, itchy pain of life’. After 14 years of an eating disorder, she concludes that the only way to deal with the pain in her life (issues that many people experience but some more sensitive than others) and still be alive is to deal with them like everyone else.
This novel brilliantly depicted explores society, perfection, family, love and pain emotions that everyone who reads this book can instantly relate to, Hornbachter’s development from childhood to womanhood is a depressing but thought provoking constantly exposing you to a grey but bright atmosphere otherwise hidden form the majority of people. ...more "

Mar 10, 2011 10:49AM · see review

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The City of Ladies (Penguin Great Ideas)

by Christine de Pizan

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Dec 28, 2010 06:34AM

Charlene is currently reading

Anna Karenina

by Leo Tolstoy

bookshelves: currently-reading

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Dec 15, 2010 10:06AM

Charlene’s Quotes

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

tags: brain, mind

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“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

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