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

grade
    school years, I'd wake with a jolt at 6:30
    A.M., when the alarm started blaring awful 1980s pop music. Into the shower, out of the shower, climb up on the toilet with a hand mirror: look, peer, examine, critique. Frontal view first. Legs too short, too round, thighs touch. Seventeen magazine advises that thighs should not touch. Mine touch. I suck. It's all over. How can I hide it? How can I stand so I'm not so swaybacked? How can I curve myself inward, as if preparing to implode? Left side: butt too round, juts out, major gross, ohmigod, the butt, the horrible butt, the butt that is so undeniably a butt. Rear view: hips curve out from the waist.
    Are those saddlebags already? Butt, the butt! Two hand spans wide.
    Oh, fuck it all! Right side: the fucking butt! Who said I wanted a butt? Why can't I have a flat butt, the kind that seems to sink right into the pocket of Guess jeans when the leg goes back? I don't want this thing, not this round, imperious, proud little butt .
    I get up in the morning. I'm maybe nine or ten. I sit down on the couch and pick up the newspaper. There is a story on the front page of the metro section: a girl from my town, Edina, has committed suicide.
    Let's take this a little deeper. Here's what I know: There is a girl, sixteen years old, from the town where I live, who has imploded.
    She has gotten into her mother's car, driven to a peak (there are no peaks in Minnesota, I only picture it this way, a James Dean-esque peak). She has parked the car. She is wearing jeans (did the story say that? Why would it say that? Did I picture her in jeans? With long brown hair). She has poured a circle of gasoline around her.
    (The gasoline was in the trunk? Lighter or matches?) She has lit the gasoline on fire. She has burned herself to death.
    I know that she was an anoretic. I know that she left a note saying she couldn't go on because she couldn't stand to live inside her body anymore. Too heavy a weight to bear.
    My first thought: I can understand that.
    I read the story, then the comics, the horoscope, the weather, the national news, the arts section. I rose when my father called me for breakfast, ate breakfast, bye Daddy, took a left turn out of Nancy Lane, took a right turn down the embankment of the pond at the end of the road, walked into a grove of trees, held my ponytail back, stuck my fingers down my throat, kicked leaves over the mess, spat, put two pieces of gum in my mouth. Walked out of the grove, down St. John's Avenue toward Concord Elementary School, thinking of weight, unbearable weight, and understood. I felt sad for the girl. I felt sad that she would never marry or have babies. I also understood, sadly, and apologized to God for not having thought: Oh no! How awful! How could she do that? How could it happen? Such a waste!
    Such a shame! Instead I thought: I could do that.
    I could do that . That is the shock. It stops me in my tracks. Narcissist. Attention grabber. Always thinking of myself. Pray for the girl!
    But I can't. I'm thinking of unbearable weight. I'm thinking of where to get gasoline.

T
he town I lived in
    operated on money. Money—class,
    really—and eating disorders share a direct relationship with each other. In our culture, thinness is associated with wealth, upward mobility, success. I may not even need to point out that these things are associated with self-control and discipline: the yuppification of the body and soul, perfect people with high-powered jobs and personal trainers, perfect-toothed smiles and happy-happy lives. Conversely, fat is associated with weakness, laziness, and poverty.
    Thinness has become “an ideal symbolizing self-discipline, control, sexual liberation, assertiveness, competitiveness, and affiliation with a higher socio-economic class.”4 To put a finer point on it, the very recent trend of “working out,” the necessity of being “toned,” not merely thin, expresses sexuality—but “a controlled, managed sexuality that is not