Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and step into a netherworld where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Marya Hornbacher sustains both anorexia and bulimia through five lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and ultimately, any sense of what it means to be "normal." By the time she is in college, Hornbacher is in the grip of a bout with anorexia so horrifying that it will forever put to rest the romance of wasting away.
In this debut book, Glenny (Ph.D., English literature), a former anorexic, attributes the "omnipresence" of food in the writing of Virginia Woolf to her "premature weaning" (at ten weeks), the early death of her mother, and, most significantly, sexual abuse by her half-brother. While this densely written study breaks new ground in Woolf scholarship, Glenny goes too far by becoming an apologist for anorexia. Instead of simply showing how important food was as a metaphor for Woolf, Glenny makes disturbing comments such as "anorexia can, at its most positive, function as a bell-jar in which personal and political change is fermented."
Challenging the assumption that anorexia is an exclusively female affliction, this compelling memoir is the first to describe how a young man overcame this often fatal disorder.В Handsome and popular, Gary had baseball abilities that had attracted the attention of the big leagues, until a shaming inner-voice convinced him that he needed to be thinner, leading to an out-of-control compulsion to exercise and starve himself, causing multiple hospitalizations. Providing strategies for tackling the recovery process and examples of changes in the thinking needed to take those steps, this important narrative...
