Why would a precociously intelligent, imaginative, and talented young girl go through the looking glass into a netherworld where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak? Fearful of her developing adolescent body and dismayed by her seemingly voracious appetites for food and love, Marya Hornbacher embraced anorexia and bulimia with a passion that resembled love. Through five lengthy hospitalizations and endless therapy, she sustained a secret life of bingeing and purging, starving, self-mortification, alcohol, drugs, and sex, deceiving those who loved her and those who tried to help her. When her weight slipped down to 52 pounds, however, mind and body entered into mortal combat, and Marya began to fight desperately for her life.

Illuminating the tangle of personal, family, and cultural issues that underlie eating disorders, Wasted takes us inside the experience of anorexia and bulimia in a way that has not been done before. A harrowing story of obsession, passion, and madness, this landmark book promises to do for eating disorders what William Styron's Darkness Visible did for depression and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar did for madness.