Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher

hate menstruation.
    I loved it. I thought it meant I was that much closer to being grown-up and getting out of the house. I missed it a great deal when it stopped two years later.6 At this point in my life, nothing had validity until my mother confirmed it with praise. This was really the wrong place to look for praise. I kept my perverse enjoyment of bleeding to myself. In fact, I kept my bleeding to myself and didn't tell my mother about it for more than a year, when I ran out of cash and had to confess. I muttered that I'd just gotten my 6“Amenorrhea,” which is the loss of menstruation due to a lack of nutrition and/or body fat. It causes deterioration of bone mass because of insufficient calcium retention. A broken hip is a common primary cause of death in anoretics.
    period for the first time and could she, um, get me some, um, things.
    She got me pads and, naturally, did not pursue the issue further.
    I find out, nearly twelve years later, that she thinks menstruation is, at best, a major nuisance, hardly a thing to celebrate. So in the fifth grade, bleeding like a stuck pig and with only one pad on my way to school, I casually asked her if she thought one pad was enough. Of course, she said, tsking at my sheer stupidity. That day, wearing a new pair of white Guess pants and a T-shirt that I'd bought with my own money, I stood in the front row of choir, in the school gym. Some idiot yelled out: Hey Marya, what'd ya sit on? I turned around and looked at my backside: blood from my waist to my knees. I walked what seemed a million miles from the choir to the door with my chin up and went to the nurse, who informed me that they had no pads, because (stupid child) this is an elementary school.
    Oops! Excuse me, I thought I was in college. She picked up the phone to call my mother. I said my mother wasn't home. Where is she? At work. Oh . ( That kind of mother.) Well, who's home? My father. OH , I see. Well . She called my father, who rushed into the school wild-eyed and offered to take me to the doctor, and then offered to take me for ice cream. He receded as I slammed into my room. I crawled into bed, drew the blinds, and didn't come out for a week. I could hear whispered voices through the wall: What's wrong with her?
    whisper whisper. whisper crazy, whisper.
    The following summer I was eleven and took a solo trip to the West Coast. I stayed with my grandfather and stepgrandmother, who both drank nonstop and literally never ate. I remember eating an appetizer (they told me I didn't need to order an entree, that was too much food) of mussels in white wine while they got bombed and hobnobbed with the owner. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, bought a tampon from the machine. It was a dime. I remember looking in the mirror, my pink striped dress bought specially for the trip, thinking how grown up I looked. I lost weight at their house, subsisting primarily on mints and Shirley Temples, as I held drinking competitions with my grandfather (martinis). A letter to my parents, in my downward-slanting scrawl, ends: “P.S. I'm not gaining any weight!!!!!”
    Back home, my parents and I snapped at one another. I cried without
    cause and stormed around. I got “sick” more and more often, stayed home eating, curled up on the couch watching soap operas and game shows. When the food I was eating was gone, I'd throw up, go upstairs and get more food. And throw up. Etc. My bulimia developed in tandem with my body. I was soon throwing up almost every day.
    When I was home “sick,” I threw up several times a day. By the time I was eleven, I met the full diagnostic criteria for bulimia nervosa (severe and uncontrolled); and by the time I was eleven, my body was fully developed.
    “Fully” was the key word here, much to the delight of the older boys at school who snapped my bra in the halls or came up to me during lunch, leering, saying, “Marya, do you wear a bra?” No, I said, staring at my lunch, the sticky ball of