Hornbacher’s “Grade School Years”
Hornbacher sums u[ her ‘grade school years’: “During my 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 curve myself inward, as if preparing to implode? Left side: butt too round, juts out, major gross, oh mi god, the butt, the horrible butt, the butt that is so undeniably a butt. Rear view: hips curve out from the waist. 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?”
The overriding emblems that oversee Hornbacher’s ‘grade school years’ include mirrors and magazines which sway her verdicts regarding her appearance. Based on the account, Hornbacher’s mental vitality is chiefly invested on the body instead of the conventional ‘grade school’ engagements that are distinctive for child whose eating habits are customary. Hornbacher unremittingly evaluates her body and lobbies advice from magazines on how to be impeccable which bolsters the underpinning for her eating disorders. Palpably, fashion magazines that sponsor leanness could be galvanizations of eating disorders.
Hornbacher’s Eating Disorder
Hornbacher recollects, “My eating disorder had taken a sharp turn for the worse. I was bingeing, alone, whenever I could, with whatever money I had. Fast-food restaurants, diners, food from home, food from other people's houses. I was doing hours of calisthenics in my room, wondering if, at the age of fourteen, I could get a plastic surgeon to do liposuction on every inch of my body, suck each molecule of fat out, leaving me with nothing more than a gleeful clattering set of bones. I lay in bed each night and stared at my body with a hate that even now brings bile to my tongue. My hatred of the bulimia, as well, steadily grew. That hatred became, with a little time, an absolute commitment to becoming an anorexic. I ate less normally, began ‘dieting,’ lying to friends who were asking me about why I wasn't eating, whether I was throwing up, what the hell was going on. I began passing out in school. Flu, I said.”
The bingeing illustrates a zealous undertaking to guzzle as much food as she could. However, it occasions outlooks of being fat and thoughts regarding the prospects of liposuction. Accordingly, bingeing is not an unreserved medication for Hornbacher’s Anorexia; both are punishing disorders which confound Hornbacher’s welfare. Accordingly, anorexia is not better than Bulimia and vice versa; both are tremendously destabilizing. Hornbacher’s ‘passing out’ is a reverberation of the alternating ‘Bulimia and Anorexia’ which render her frail.
Journalism Seminar
Hornbacher remembers, “I sink into my seat and stare at my notes, trying to keep my hands from shaking, embarrassed at my own unchecked fury. That evening, back in the dorms where the participants are being put up, three young women come to my door to talk about the seminar. We discuss, in cerebral and theoretical terms, eating disorders. One of them asks me point-blank if I am anorexic. I say, Oh my goodness, no. We all laugh and talk about the presidential candidates. When they've left, I stand naked in front of the full-length mirror, certain that I've gotten fatter since I've been there, holding up a little compact to see myself from behind. Saddlebags, I can see them. I sit down on the floor and cry.”
Although Hornbacher is in denial about her Anorexia, the indications are unmistakable. Her colleagues’ interrogation deduces that Hornbacher is undernourished and feebly to the degree that her hands cannot be solid. Anorexia afflicts Hornbacher even when she is supposed to be absorbed in her profession.
