Wasted By Mayra Hornbacher: An Analysis

The body is an empowering creation that serves many purposes: the purpose of movement, insulation, and defense, the purpose of speaking, talking, smelling, seeing, and touching, and the purpose of interpreting and understanding thoughts and speculations. Any modification done to the body, through skewing sleeping patters and behaviors, changing exercising habits, or altering the diet, could either benefit the body or mutilate it. The mutilation of the body and its consequences are depicted through the protagonist, Mayra Hornbacher, in her memoir, Wasted. She uses the symbols of food and death to help the readers better understand her tragic journey and disposition as a bulimic and an anorectic. Food serves as a symbol of sin and death serves

However, the one significant similarity between the two is that both are represented as objects of need and desire. They both, in a way, are Marya’s true companions and lovers. Every path she crosses and every journey she undertakes during the different phases of her life, middle school, high school, college, both food and death inevitably appear. While she avoids food to the best of her ability, her desire for it escalates. She even claims that, “food is the sun and the moon and the stars, the center of gravity, the love of your life. Being forced to eat is the most welcome punishment there is” (131). Through this quote, she claims that there is nothing greater in this universe than being welcomed by food, alias her lover. However, it is a different form of love than death, itself. Food is the form of love that Marya avoids, but inevitably desires. Death, on the other hand, is a form of love that she embraces and willingly accepts. She is not afraid of falling in love with death, but she is afraid of falling in love with

Her journey is filled with traumas, tragedies, and self-animosities as she consistently visualizes herself as a “fat,” “ugly” piglet. By engaging in anorexia, bulimia, and eventually cutting, she de-normalizes herself to become something she is not. By de-normalizing herself, she loses her true identity and takes on an identity of an anorectic and bulimic person. As a girl suffering with an eating disorder, Marya’s constant war with her body eventually denies any consumption of food and openly welcomes death. Food and death are important symbols in her memoir. They are predominant elements that make up a huge fraction of her life as a girl suffering from eating disorders. Without any consumption of food, death is inevitable. Food serves as a symbol for sin, while death serves as a symbol for fascination, hope, and eventually desire. Death is a symbol that provides hope when she realizes that the life she has lived for is wasted. Though each symbolizes a different aspect of Marya’s life, they both are represented as Marya’s true companions. They are companions that she either denies, like food, or embraces, like death. This struggle continues until she declares her epiphany and comes to her senses, knowing she is headed down a deadly path. Eventually, she resolves to make a better living for herself and her body by