Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to the darker side of reality, and her decision to find her way back again-on her own terms. Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and step into a netherworld where up is down, food is greed, and death is honor? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Marya sustained both anorexia and bulimia through five lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, the loss of family, friends, jobs, and, ultimately, any sense of what it means to be 'normal.' In this vivid, emotionally wrenching memoir, she recreates the experience and illuminates the tangle of personal, family and cultural causes unlying eating disorders. Down to fifty-two pounds and counting, Marya becomes a battlefield: her powerful death instinct at war with the will to live.

By the time she is in college and working for a wire news service in Washington, D.C., she is in the grip of a bout of anorexia so horrifying that it will forever put to rest the romance of wasting away. Marya's story gathers intensity with each passing year. She added anorexia to her repetoire a few years later and took great pride in her ability to starve. By age nine she was secretly bulimic, throwing up at home after school, while watching Brady Bunch reruns on television and munching Fritos. At the age of five, she returned home from ballet class one day, put on a enormous sweater, curled up on her bed, and cried-because she thought she was fat.

In a review for The New York Times, Caroline Knapp calls the book 'a gritty, unflinching look at eating disorders,' adding, 'Hornbacher is at her best when she zeroes in on the specifics of eating disorders and their origins.Such phenomena aren't new to the literature on eating disorders, but Hornbacher describes them with a stark candor that captures both their pain and underlying purposes.Precociously intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and ambitious, Marya Hornbacher grew up in a comfortable middle-class American home. Wasted has sold in the United States over a million copies and has been translated into fourteen languages. The author's young age (she wrote the book at the age of 21) surprised many readers, and the memoir was praised for its maturity and candor. Published by HarperCollins in 1997, Wasted was a critical and commercial success. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia is an autobiography written by Marya Hornbacher, detailing her fourteen-year battle with eating disorders.

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