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

about to erupt in unwanted and embarrassing display.” 5 Taking part in the fitness craze requires time and money, a privilege available to those only with the means. The “perfect body”
    becomes a public display of those means. The body as costly bauble.
    My generation was raised on popular media, television, teen magazines, billboards that bellowed “If you could choose your body, which would you choose?” with pictures of hard bodies getting yet harder at a very chic gym. Well, what the hell do you think I'd choose? The perfect body, of course. Our magazines were stuffed with ways to achieve it. “Lose That Baby Fat!” “Nose Job for Your Sweet Sixteen!” We read the endlessly boring series of Sweet Valley High pulp novels like Bibles, with their terribly chipper stories of twin sisters who were, of course, the most popular girls in their Southern California high school. They were smart and nice and always getting the guy. As every single book in the series reminded us, they were also blond, blue-eyed, tan, and a “perfect size six.” A pair of literary Barbie dolls. We read the books in class, hidden behind our math books. We stood in the school bathrooms dis-4Horesh, Stein, et al. “Abnormal Psychosocial Situations and Eating Disorders in Adolescents,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, July 1996, v. 35, n. 7: 921. See also Becky Thompson's A Hunger So Deep and So Wide.
    5Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 195.
    cussing the plots as we compared our thighs. Look at this, we'd say, slapping our bodies so hard we left white welts. Look how my fat jiggles. But you—we'd say, turning to another girl—you've got, like, the perfect body.
    It is crucial to notice the language we use when we talk about bodies. We speak as if there was one collective perfect body, a singular entity that we're all after. The trouble is, I think we are after that one body. We grew up with the impression that underneath all this normal flesh, buried deep in the excessive recesses of our healthy bodies, there was a Perfect Body just waiting to break out. It would look exactly like everyone else's perfect body. A clone of the shapeless, androgynous models, the hairless, silicone-implanted porn stars. Somehow we, in defiance of nature, would have toothpick thighs and burgeoning bosoms, buns of steel and dainty firm delts.
    As Andy Warhol wrote, “The more you look at the same exact thing…the better and emptier you feel.”
    I grew up in a world of children who seemed unnaturally clean , dressed in matching outfits bought from the same line at the same store. They were playing grown-up—there were miniature trophy wives and their miniature lawyer husbands prancing around the playground with perfect teeth and hair and tans from Mazatlán vacations or wintertime tanning booth sessions. There were perfectly folded notes and psycho-soap-opera grade school dramas. I was an indeterminate quantity. I was liked but not particularly cool. I was too quirky to be cool, too loudmouthed and quick tempered, smart enough to verge on nerd, too wild.
    There was a social caste system at my school. I was from the wrong side of town, where the houses were plainer, smaller, 1950s-style ramblers. I lived on the side of town by the public pool, where the mothers worked and the kids were latch-keyed. On the other side, by the country club, the houses were old Victorian para-mansions with housekeepers and gardeners, huge stone walks and grand oak trees and BMWs in the three-car garage. Mothers went shopping and decorated obsessively. Their lanky children were clad in Ralph Lauren and Laura Ashley. The fathers seemed to be hidden in the attic, appearing only to pat their daughters on the fanny at dinnertime. Girls got manicures in the fifth grade, did not swear, ate white bread at lunch in the horrible lunchroom, and laughed a very dainty sort of laugh that matched their dainty Keds decorated with ballpoint-pen scrawlings that said “I