Review: Wasted

Marya Hornbacher was severely anorexic and bulimic from the age of nine into her college years. In this memoir she attempts to explain the experience of having an eating disorder. The picture is grim. Hornbacher cannot locate a single cause for her eating disorder. Certainly there are plenty of the regularly-accepted influences: a family that's weird about food, a society in which women are rewarded for being quiet and skinny, and so on. While living at boarding school Hornbacher was surrounded by girls with eating disorders, hers, too, was already formed. By the time she was in college Hornbacher was nearly dead.

The portrait of eating disorders that emerges from this memoir is complex and frightening. There are no simple causes and no simple answers. It is scary how easy it is for Hornbacher, as a desperately ill girl, to fall under the radar of anyone's ability to help, even parents and doctors. Hornbacher's analysis of her disease is thoughtful. She makes interesting points, and argues that anorexia in not, necessarily, an effort to remain a child. Light reading this is not, but essential for those who would like to understand more about eating disorders.

Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (Harper, 2006) ISBN: 0060858796 

Review: Ravenous

This book ended up being very different from what I was expecting. I was expecting a book about addiction and recovery, eating disorders, and similar. I was expecting a memoir, and most of this book is not a memoir. Instead, it's a recounting of a year that Macy spent travelling around to find out where her favorite foods come from, like bread, and organic produce, and chocolate. It's really more a story of looking for locally sourced, organic, and artisnal foods, but this isn't really a book about food politics either. I'm at something of a loss to say what this book is, because at the end of it, it seems like there isn't much there. The "freedom" that Macy's title alludes to comes from doing yoga and committing to portion control. The language of the book made me question just how "free" this awakening had made the author. She writes about food with a sense of near-lust. Obsession seemed more accurate.

I think the thing that bothered me most throughout the book is that there's little acknowledgement on the part of the author about how closely her food and yoga choices are tied into class privilege. There's a sense throughout the book that her "self-discovery" is broadly available. Macy is eating expensive and fine foods. She travels to farms, ranches, and food production facilities. Macy consults with leading yoga masters. She can wake up at 4 in the morning to do extensive yoga poses, a luxury well beyond many with long days at physically demanding jobs. While there is one chapter in which Macy recounts her experience volunteering at a soup kitchen, and how the experience fostered her gratitude, there's a real tone of pity and disgust for the sorts of foods that many people eat. Most of us can't spend a year on a journey of self-discovery, some recognition of that would have made a difference.

Dayna Macy, Ravenous: A Food Lover's Journey from Obsession to Freedom (Hay House, 2011) ISBN: 1401926916