The Culture of Eating Disorders in Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted Tyler Kastner College

Marya Hornbacher’s memoir Wasted was published when she was only twenty one years old, and describes her struggle with eating disorders throughout her adolescence. Her experience is greatly influenced by the fact that she is a woman in a repressive society. She demonstrates that her illness was a result of the patriarchal culture that she lived in, and not her biology. She argues this by showing the effects of the media’s portrayal of unattainable body images on young women, the consequences of a father who is not able to understand his daughter growing up, and the imbalance of power between the genders.

As a woman growing up at the end of the 20th century, the female gender was faced with many more ideals of the “perfect body” than males. Beauty magazines are a motif throughout the narrative and symbolize her lust of having a body that is unrealistic. She first reads them at “nine, ten, eleven years old”, and is consumed with reading “[d]iet tips for teens, [and] staring at the paper doll figures of clean, hairless, grinning girls” (Hornbacher 44). These unrealistic body expectations made her feel imperfect, and as a result she tried to change herself by doing exercises and calisthenics at night. She does these activities...