RH: Towards the end of Wasted, you say that writing the
book wasn't a therapeutic experience.
MH: Writing the book was actually a nightmare in some ways.
In other ways, it was instructive for me both as a person and as a
writer. The process of writing your first book is fascinating and
wonderful and very rewarding. So as a professional it was a
rewarding experience. As a person it was really difficult.
I don't believe in literature as catharsis. I know that people's lives
can be exploited and that I was walking a very fine line in writing
about my life. I'm not a confessional person. I don't write
autobiographical stories, I don't publish confessional poetry. It's not
my thing. I keep a lot of secrets; that's common for people with
eating disorders. Revealing about myself what I wrote in the book
was a journalistic decision. I had originally planned to write a
research book on my theories about the philosophical roots of eating
disorders and the ways in which treatment needed to look at the
cultural elements and change. But halfway through that book, I
decided that I was being an irresponsible journalist by keeping out a
huge component of the story? Why do I know all this? I know all this
because this is my daily life. I live with the philosophy and the
cultural impact. I was being such a liar by posing as a theoretical
clinician when I was just a writer who had this book on my mind.
I decided that the responsible thing to do as a journalist was to write
about the facts. The facts involved me. That bothered me. But this
book is a microcosm of a much larger picture. When people come to
readings, they often tell me, "You told my story." That's what I
wanted to do: give a language to something that is very silent and
secretive.
RH: You did manage to reincorporate a lot of your research,
though.
MH: The writing of the book went through phases. I'd go
through a week of getting down the facts, and then I'd step back for
a while, look at the passage. I'd look at the thought patterns and
behaviors that I was writing about, and see how they mirrored the
theoretical writings, and then I would write about how what
happened to me fit into the theory. Somehow I was able to weave in
so many of the ideas that were important to me to weave in. I'd
literally pull back to explain, "The point of this is..." I think in webs,
and I can't write in one straight line. Things have too many
interconnections. I couldn't have written a book that just went
through one straight line.
RH: One technique that intrigued me was the use of "you" to refer
to certain periods of your own life as if they were happening to
another person.
MH: I didn't realize I was doing that until after I'd already
written some of those passages, and I immediately realized that I
would have to leave those passages like that because it was how I
meant them. That's how the writer in my head, without thought and
before language, was thinking.
I was disconnected from those periods of my life, and I
remember thinking of myself at that time, especially between the
ages of fifteen and eightteen, as "you," not as "me" or "I." "You're too
fat. You need to go run another twenty miles. You need to stop
eating."
Some of the passages I chose to use it in were the most graphic
sections of the book. I wanted them to feel more realistic, and I
wanted the immediacy of "you," as well as the transference of the
experience to the reader. And, in fact, for many readers of the book,
those ARE their experiences. But I also wanted to get the experience
across to readers who don't have eating disorders. They may know
about eating disorders, but few of them have any idea what an
eating disorder is actually like.
RH: When you attempted to reconstruct your medical history,
what sort of difficulties did you have getting access to your
records?
MH: In several instances, they didn't believe I was me. I got
that excuse a lot, even when I had photo identification and even
though there aren't a lot of Marya Hornbachers running around the
planet. For some of my earlier hospitalizations, they would try to
charge me a dollar a page for a four thousand page file, or I would
have to be observed while viewing the files, or I'd have to sign legal
disclaimers promising not to sue the hospital or libel them. But my
point wasn't to write about the hospitals and what they might have
done wrong or what they might not have done. I needed the files just
to get the facts about my life, and they were useful in reconstructing
the history, because there's a lot of things I didn't remember, or of
which I have very scattered memories. Just seeing the documents
would bring the memories back and fit them into a coherent
structure.
RH: Things are better now than they were then, but are you
cured?
MH: Food and I have a daily fight that's been going on for
most of my life. But I live a pretty normal life. I don't go around
talking about eating disorders all the time. Good God, what a bore. It
would be awful. My life instinct became stronger, and I got much too
busy to die. I have another book due. I'm married, I have a lot of
friends, I have cats, I have to water the plants...life took over. I have
a life now. You can't have a life and an eating disorder at the same
time. You can play the game and fool everybody for a really long
time, but it's like the difference between life in a grainy black-and-
white film and in Technicolor. Life is so muted when you have an
eating disorder -- and that's the point. If you don't like life, you can
turn it down and have your own little sadomasochistic affair with
yourself.
People often misunderstand eating disorders as a wish to go back to
childhood. They write eating disorders off as an adolescent problem,
but eating disorders affect women at every age in every background,
as well as men. We want to see it as a phase, because if we really
look at an eating disorder, we're confronting some ugly facts about
human nature. There are days when all of us want to just pull the
covers over our heads and not deal with anything; some of us just do
really elaborate versions of that, combined with a self-destructive
disrespect for the body and a terror of failure. Avoiding life is
paradoxical for people with eating disorders, because in many cases
they're extremely caught up with succeeding. They're workaholics,
perfectionists. They seem to be throwing themselves into life, but by
getting caught up in work they're avoiding having to deal with
people emotionally.
RH: Even though you're 'better,' it's too late to avoid the
consequences.
MH: The damage to a lot of my systems is irreparable. I can't
have kids. My heart is three-fourths the size of a normal heart
because the muscle mass was eroded. My bone mass was eroded
throughout. I have a heart murmur. I have ulcers up and down my
esophagus which makes getting the flu potentially lethal. I'm
drastically underweight for my height, although I hide it very well,
as many adult women with eating disorders do. If people tell me that
I look great, part of the reason is because culturally there's
something wrong with their eyes. I look great because I don't look
like I'm going to drop dead. But I'm not going to have a happy
ending. I've been hospitalized twice in the last year. Think of an
eating disorder as a life-change syndrome. When my life changes
drastically, and I can't cope with the stress, my default mode is to
not eat.
The best advice I can give to people with eating disorders who don't
want to relapse is: get a life. When I was nineteen, and literally had
to make a choice between life and death, instead of the boring choice
between not eating and getting better, I started to learn what I could
have if I didn't give in to my eating disorder. Now when I backslide,
I know what I have to get back to.
RH: One of the hardest obstacles to recovery is that many people
without eating disorders are still preoccupied with weight, making it
difficult to find support.
MH: It's absolutely maddening. If you look hard enough, you
can find people, but you have to make careful decisions about who
you want to spend your time with. If this is a person who obsesses
about their body or their weight, they're going to make you crazy.
My friends are all mad as hatters, but they're so normal about food
that it's like I've died and gone to heaven. We go out and everybody
just orders whatever they want. It seems normal to people without
eating disorders, but for me it's like being in Disneyland.
You have to decide that you want to stop obsessing. You have to stop
assuming that part of being a woman is obsessing about your weight.
Lots of women don't, and some of them write really good books. I'd
put money on Toni Morrision not being concerned about her
weight.
RH: Remember Oprah's public obsession with her fluctuating
weight?
MH: What a nightmare. Given her ripple effect, I'd love it if
she went on TV and said, "All of us have to stop obsessing about our
weight." No more getting together with other women for tiny meals
followed by comparisons of your arm fat. No more dieting. There's a
$33 billion diet industry and I want it gone. I think of the thousands
of dollars I've spent on diet pills and laxatives, half of which are now
off the market because they were toxic. I ate that stuff. It was
my lunch for years.
It terrifies me what women and men do to their bodies without
concern. They'll say to themselves, "Oh, I won't have lunch today."
That literally messes with your brain cells. It occurs to me on a daily
basis now that if I give in to my eating disorder, I run the risk of
brain damage. I have a conflicted relationship with my body, but it's
a godsend for me to be able to think that I have to take care of my
mind, and that I won't be able to do that without my body.
RH: What are you working on now?
MH: A novel, and it's wonderful to be working on it. I've been
writing short fiction forever, and I thought this was a collection of
stories, but when I realized that all the characters knew each other, I
also realized that it was a novel. That took me a while to deal with,
but once I got over the first novel anxiety, it's become such a
beautiful process, like mental chess. I sit down to write at 8:00 and I
get up at 6:00 and I love my life.
Wasted was written very quickly, and I remember the whole
time as being very relaxed, even though I was writing for sixteen,
eightteen hours a day. People were always telling me, "Well, you had
to write about your life first." Since when is that a writer's job? It's a
ridiculous idea. Lots of people write memoirs about their hard lives,
but that wasn't my intention. Anybody who knows me well knows
that I spent months agonizing over whether I should even write
it.
RH: So there's no sense of competition with the rest of the memoir
pack?
MH: Not on my part, anyway. It's not even the memoir of a
person; it's a memoir of my disease. Writing a memoir at 23 would
be, I suppose, less absurd for me that for other people because I've
lived a lot, but it would still be pretty absurd. What was important
for me was to talk about the eating disorder itself. This is what it
looks like. It's gruesome, it's gory, it's not romantic, it's not
glamorous. Get a grip, get on with your life. That's what I wanted to
say, so I said it, and now I'm writing a novel.
