A -retired career anorexic- examines herself and her, and our, culture in a masterpiece of confessional literature.At the age of four Marya Hornbacher looked in a mirror and decided she was fat. At nine, she was bulimic. At twelve, she was anorexic. By the time she was eighteen, she-d been hospitalized five times, once in the loony bin. Her doctors and her parents had given up on her; they were watching her die. But Marya decided to live. Four years on, now 22, here is her harrowing tale, powerfully told in a virtuoso mix of memoir, cultural criticism and psychological examination.Here is the amazingly articulate fury of a clever woman made stupid by her culture, who threw away her teenage years in a continuous cycle of bingeing and vomiting or just plain starvation.The first book to explore, from the inside, the intimate relationship between eating disorders and 1990s culture-s historically unprecedented obsession with body, diet and gender; not a testimony to a miracle cure, but the
