It is a rare speaker who can make a Wesleyan audience nervous about whether laughing at something is inappropriate. Marya Hornbacher achieved this rarity. On Tuesday evening, she stood before an audience of students and faculty in Memorial Chapel and read aloud from an issue of the satirical newspaper “The Onion.”
“Ladies, in the name of all that is alluring, raise your calorie intake,” she said. “Feminine fragility is hot, but if I actually snap your arms while having sex with you, that’s not. No one wants to bang a concentration camp prisoner.”
Hornbacher was the guest speaker for a lecture sponsored by the Body Image Group, the Department of Psychology, the HealthFull Words Funds, the Community Development Fund and the SBC. She is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of “Wasted,” The New York Times bestseller that she wrote when she was 21 and recovering from anorexia and bulimia.
“What’s amazing and different about her is that she is able to remember and talk about [her illness] very clearly and with a lot of personal reflections,” said Rachel Wertheimer ’06. “She’s not disconnected at all.”
Hornbacher took the audience back in time with her and told her story chronologically. She used a format similar to a sort of audio journal that was, at times, like listening to horror on tape. She punctuated every few sentences with an update on her weight, methodically giving life to a process of slow death.
“Without eating, you find that you can stay alive just a little, enough to feign life…Sixty-one pounds,” she said, keeping up an unflinching narrative of her declining weight.
She charted her descent from eating slightly less each day to her disastrous, self-congratulatory decision to use laxatives on top of not eating anything. She explained that as she tossed in bed, her bed bruised her. She talked about her visit to a doctor, who seemed to think she was absolutely normal.
Hornbacher chronicled her obsessive need to maintain control over what she ate, leading her to design a system in which she divided all her food into units. One unit was about 80 calories, or a slice of bread. She worked her way down from 16 to 4 units a day, giving her 320 daily calories. The clinical definition of a starvation diet is 900 calories a day.
Hornbacher explained that this fervent worship of systems was often the only way to believe that she was in charge of her own body, or anything at all.
“Systems are very important,” she said. “They are our alphabet, the only certain things that keep the uncertainty of things at bay.”
Her system turned into a fixation when she started to eat certain foods specific ways. Yogurt was eaten by only skimming the melted parts on top, and slowly licking the back of the spoon, methodically, until the spoon was empty. To her, it was yet another form of greed and hubris, directed by aggressive ambition.
“It was a single-minded desire for success to be thin, and to do it better than anyone else,” she said.
Hornbacher talked about waking up in a hospital and being told that she had a life expectancy of less than a week. It was then that she resolved to not let herself die. Recovery was not easy, and she stressed that recovery is not a static point one reaches, but a continual never-ending process.
“You never quite come back, not quite,” she said. “Like Persephone, you are free to roam the earth, but your body and soul are still underground.”
Her talk was followed by a question-and-answer session in which she fielded queries about the effects her eating disorders had on her relationships and advice on how someone can constructively support a friend with an eating disorder
To many in attendance, Hornbacher’s willingness to speak on any intimate aspect of her ordeal made her a very appealing speaker.
“I was impressed by how amazingly gracious she was in talking about this,” said Nicole Weiskopf ’06. “Some people were asking very personal questions, but she seemed perfectly happy to come and share.”
Hornbacher’s ultimate message was one of optimism. She ended her talk by stressing that humor was paramount. One absolutely had to learn to laugh, even if it seemed inappropriate.
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