Rating: 
Summary: Slaps you in the face with tragic wit and twisted reality!
Review: Marya is an intelligent, fascinating conqueror of anorexia and bulimia. In a dry, tongue-in-cheek sort of a way, she describes her painful journey through the knarly-thorned thicket of her disease. Never knowing what to expect from Marya made this book all the more mysterious. I read it from the middle, out, over the coarse of two weeks... every other day, over coffee and Vivarin. Trying to paste a label on myself, other than anorexic has proven futile after subjecting myself to this piece of literature. Laughing, crying, relating... perhaps I'll read it from front to back next time... Marya is a captivating writer. She has forced me to see myself for who I really am. Whether this disease kills me, (likely), or not, I will always feel priviledged to have stumbled upon her book on that lonesome, hungry afternoon. Four thumbs up... if I had them.
Rating:
Summary: An intense "no holds barred" account of living with an ED
Review: I have read, I believe, every true memoir written by family members, doctors, and sufferers. Marya's book is the most disturbing and yet the most real. Her ability to verbalize her internal emotions and thought processes is unparralleled. As an avid book reader of all types, including psychology, I was strongly impacted by her writing. It appalled me in both it's truthfullness, straightforwardness, and her ability to not spare herself and society and supply a lot of reasons "why" she developed an eating disorder. Also, though terrifying, it is the first time I have read how the thinking of someone with an eating disorder can be unconscious and becomes forever more a part and parcel of the individual. Her goal of the book, to keep others from where whe went, is admirable and I hope anyone who thinks of eating disorders in a glamorized light will read this book and see them for what they really are - hell and slow suicide. Lost years and permanent damage. Marya's book is a combination of an extremely talented writer who confronts her problems unflinchingly. I cannot reccomend more heartily than I have and I hope everyone reads it critically and emotionally.
Rating:
Summary: Wasted by Marya Hornbacher
Review: Marya Hornbacher's descent into the darker side of self did not suddenly present itself. Nor did she simply wake up and say "Oh, everyone else has eating disorders, I want one too." Rather, it was a slow, complex passage which took her sanity for a time and nearly took her life. Many people view people with eating disorders as neurotic at best and vain or self-centered at worst. Many people think it is a preoccupation with looks that drives the person suffering with the eating disorder. As Marya demonstrates in the book, look play a role, but not to the extent one thinks. This is not a choice she made, nor was it a switch she could just turn off. This is a disease, a serious disease with consequences for all of us. Ms. Hornbacher does a superb job of presenting her story in a nonjudgemental way. She has written with an objectivity few could achieve. She shares her experience with a poignancy and candor not seen in many nonfictional works. This is a supremely impressive read. I recommend this book highly. Whether or not you have an eating disorder, you will enjoy this book. It is at times heartbreaking and infuriating, but it challenges you to examine your own self and your attitudes towards food and eating - something so many of us take so blithely for granted, yet which for millions of our sisters, mothers, aunts and friends has become something so painful. Ms. Hornbacher is a fresh new voice and it is one i hope will never be silenced by the whims of our often insensitive, looks-oriented, materialistic culture.
Rating:
Summary: Comforting
Review: Hornbacher has created a touching memoir with this book. Not only is it extremely easy for victims of eating disorders to relate to her text, but she explains the emotions of eating disorder victims in a way that allows the victims to comiserate with her and those individuals who know a person with an eating disorder to get an idea of where this self destruction comes from. However, the best part of this book is the end. This is not like other eating disorder memoirs where the author or narrator asks for the sympathy of the reader, rather, Hornbacher almost forces people with eating disorders to get a grip on their situation and get help, to learn from her terrible experiences before enduring them themselves. An excellent book that I had a hard time putting down and missed when it was over.
Rating: 
Summary: A woman's fear
Review: Marya Hornbacher's "Wasted" is a scary look into the a woman's life struggle with one of the nation's greatest diseases: bulimia and anorexia. Her fear is palpable. Comparing thinness to elegance and the ideal desire is something any woman in the world can relate to. Her ironic love for food and struggle to part with it takes you, as a reader and as a woman, through a struggle that becomes your own. It raises the questions of how normal any of us really are and how far from it we can all get. By the time Marya got to college, she was, in fact, close to being completely wasted, far from the reaches of what is considered normal. Five different hospitalizations hadn't helped her and her fear was getting stronger and hiding deeper. As soon as her conditions got better, she'd go right back down again, worse than she was before. The constant roller coaster that becomes her life is what keeps the reader at the edge of their seat waiting for the glimpse of hope to come to light. Her talent as a writer is what keeps her going and what shows us the dark world she has been through and continues to struggle against. Her story of losing every part of life that was her own and regaining every sense of it, is one that after putting the book down is not forgotten.
Rating:
Summary: Finally an honest look at eating disorders!
Review: As a female who has struggled with eating disorders for the past 6 years, I have read nearly every "eating disorder" novel to date. While most are written by outsiders, those who do not live each day with the struggle, Wasted is written by a woman who has traveled through the realm of eating disorders. Wasted takes an honest look at the causes and the effects of anorexia and bulimia. It does not glamourize the outcome. It does not portray eating disorders as simple things that sufferers "choose" to begin and end. Marya's account is truthful. Her writing is haunting, at times she speaks as if she is outside of herself. The reader can see how complex eating disoders are, however, they can also see what eating disorders are: shallow, decietful, selfish, useless, and a waste. Perhaps the only complaint I have is that the ending was not optimistic. But that's eating disorders. As you travel through their maze, you begin to wonder what recovery is. Marya speaks for women like myself who are victimes of themselves. Thank god someone finally wrote an account of what eating disorders ARE and not what they are SUPPOSED TO BE according to our society. Thank you Marya.
Rating:
Summary: "WASTED"
Review: I really enjoyed this book. I have read several and this was by-far the most raw.I myself and suffering from Anorexia, and it really left me indiffernt. Many people say "it changed them" but if your at your wit's end it won't change you, rather give you somthing to relate too. I reccomend this book to anybody,maybe it would help somebody else more than I though.
Rating: 
Summary: The Battle of a Young Girl
Review: Wasted is a true story that traces the thought process of a girl who has trouble with anorexia and bulimia. Marya, the main character, grows up as an only child. She develops odd eating habits from her parents that will haunt her for the rest of her life. At the age of nine, she has her first run in with bulimia. In high school, Marya is offered a scholarship to a writing institution where she believes she will become thin, smart, and a whole new person. When she gets there, her eating habits become out of control. She falls in and out of clinics and has a battle with life and death throughout the book.
This is not a book to read if a good solid plot is what you are looking for. If being put in the shoes of another is what you're into, this book is excellent. I wouldn't advise anyone who is of a young age to read Wasted because it is quite graphic but also I believe that it would discourage to anyone who is thinking about becoming an anorexic. As a whole, the book was interesting but it never pulled me in. It was more forcing myself to read it than never wanting to put it down. Wasted is written creatively by writing in more of a thought process then in a story line. It's just not my style. I like books with a solid plot and a good storyline and Wasted doesn't contain either.
Rating:
Summary: Eating Disorders: True Insight
Review: Marya Hornbacher writes about her life's revolution around eating disorders in Wasted, a memoir of anorexia and bulimia. Throughout her life, Hornbacher faces family and health struggles as well as internal conflicts ranging from promiscuity to an addiction to crack cocaine. All of this influences her dependency on eating disorders.
At times, Wasted is comparable to a girl's diary, filled with pages of poetic ramblings. The book would draw restless page skimming (which would result in equal understanding) save for Hornbacher's talent for writing with intense verbs and perfectly constructed sing-song sentences; readers roll down each page with a strong sense of imagery.
Wasted is for anyone who has considered eating disorders as an option to relieve self-consciousness, or anyone interested in the psychological side of eating disorders. It's not for the light-hearted.
Rating: 
Summary: Unsatisfactory Conclusions
Review: I'm a boy who has suffered through years of an eating disorder myself. In reading this book, I did become entranced by the many facets of Marya's descriptive prose. In that, I did feel, as many others have written, that she encapsulated a great amount of what it feels like to live through this. The quality of her writing is truly great. However, she, unfortunately, did not stop there.
The nature and tone of her highly unsympathetic conclusions about people who engage in disordered eating dismayed me; claiming that they are basically 'lazy people who want to avoid their lives' is not only crude, it is offensive. Further, her exposition of a combination of popular social theory and an obfuscating psychological model were quite unconvincing. 'Mental illness' in all of it's forms is caused solely and completely by trauma, caused by varying forms of abuse, in early childhood. Social nor cultural values on the subject of aesthetics have the power to cause nor greatly influence the development of an eating disorder. Her 'triangle theory,' is also simply not a sufficient explanation for why she felt the need, from so young an age, to destroy herself.
Marya takes on the classic role of most autobiographies when she, ultimately, sides with her parents; she justifies her mother slapping her, and otherwise does not condemn them when they obviously wronged her. I was truly alarmed by the passage when she describes her 'fake accounts' of sexual abuse; and the fact that her parents didn't believe her at all in when she made these claims. It seemed to me that maybe she did originally tell the truth on that point, and then later cover it up, saying it was all a lie because her parents were so callous. If my suspicions are right, then this may be why she still suffers from 'symptoms,' in which case I hope one day she can explore that more fully with someone who will beleive her.
The quote included at the top of amazon's editorial review from the book is indeed perhaps the worst example possible. The author was already bullimic for several years in the narrative when that passage appeared; so was it really just a 'media influence' which caused her to start starving instead, or was this just another stop on the emotional journey of a damaged person? She did, after all, return to the bullimia at later points, so this can't really be taken as a satisfactory explanation, though I can see that it is a popular turn of phrase.
Part of the reason why my own eating is not currently disordered is that I gained the ability to be sympathetic to myself and sensitive to my own needs as well as others. Rightly condemning my own parents also helped with this greatly; because doing so allows me to fully take my own side as well as the side of every other abused child in the world. This book did not help me to reach that point at all. This book seems to point to confining people in hospitals and force-feeding them ice cream, all the while feeding them abusive 'tough-love' psychology, and engendering them towards cultural, as opposed to personal, explanations for why they are the way they are.
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