The endless, self-perpetuating cycle of deprivation and excess, reflecting a search for power that renders a woman powerless. Horror of the binge, with its simultaneous embrace and rejection of passion there's the obsessive ritualism of the anorexic ''meal,'' in which needs and feelings are starved away along with body fat there's There are many more brutal, and perhaps predictable, descriptions: there's the grotesque Standing on a chair with her hands on my hands as we kneaded the dough,'' a lovely encapsulation of yearning and its association with food. Hornbacher is at her best when she zeroes in on the specifics of eating disorders and their origins: ''Hungry,'' as she defines it, ''was begging my mother to bake bread, thus securing a proximity to the scent of her perfume, With her illness, can Hornbacher turn her experience into something larger than the sum of its harrowing parts? ''Wasted'' is written from the raw, disintegrated center of young pain: there is power in this approach At the same time, the gym scene raises a question about distance: at 23, still living in a ''state of mutual antagonism'' Or ''Recovery'' speaks to her respect for their insidious power and persistence. This lack of resolution is both the book's strength and its weakness: ''Wasted''is a gritty, unflinching look at eating disorders, and Hornbacher's refusal to tie the story up in a neat package labeled ''Triumph'' The glee that bubbles up when she realizes she's lost weight, then hits the treadmill and runs for 90 minutes, until her bad knee ''feels like it's exploding.'' Hornbacher's entire young life has beenĭominated by an eating disorder, one so extreme it pared her down to a near-fatal 52 pounds, and as she reveals here, she is by no means ''cured.''

N the final pages of ''Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia,'' Marya Hornbacher describes a recent trip to the gym: she steps on the scale, notes Read the First Chapter of The Secret Language of Eating Disorders By CAROLINE KNAPP Are people with eating disorders desperate for control or just too sensitive for their own good?

Wasted eating disorder book