Marya Hornbacher
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Marya Hornbacher (born 4 April 1974) is an American author and freelance journalist. Her book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, is an autobiographical account of her struggle with eating disorders, written when she was only twenty-two. It was nominated for the 1998Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction and has since been translated into fourteen languages and sold over a million copies in the U.S. Her only other book to date is the critically praised 2005 novel, The Center of Winter, which follows a family in the aftermath of a suicide.
[edit] Life
Marya Hornbacher was born in Walnut Creek, California but raised in Minnesota. Her parents, Jay and Judy Hornbacher, both worked as professional theatre actors and directors; her mother also worked as a school administrator. Hornbacher became bulimic at age nine and had developed drug and alcohol problems by age thirteen. At age fifteen, she was accepted into the prestigious arts boarding school Interlochen where she entered Alcoholics Anonymous and developed anorexia. The summer following her first year at Interlochen she was hospitalized for her eating disorder and the following fall she moved to her father's ex-wife's home in Southern California. While there she met her future husband, Julian, but her eating disorder steadily worsened and she was rehospitalized after Christmas. She was released in February but readmitted again after only two weeks. In March her insurance pulled out and, unable to find any other affordable option, her parents sent her to Lowe House, a residential treatment hospital for adolescents with severe, long-term mental problems. After her release that summer, she enrolled in special program for high school students at a Minneapolis university and started writing for the local paper, where she dated one of the photographers. She turned eighteen that April and, despite her continued eating disorder, signed out of treatment. In the fall of 1992, she entered college at American University in Washington D.C.. Her eating disorder rapidly worsened and by the winter she had dropped to fifty-two pounds. On a visit home to her parents she was admitted to the ER and given one week to live.
Fortunately, Hornbacher survived her ordeal; she has been left with many physical ailments as a result however, including Osteoporosis, a heart murmur and possible infertility (to date, she has not been able to produce children). However she has reported that since her recovery she has grown three inches (from 5' to 5'3"), a result that pleases her. After her final hospitalization, Marya continued to struggle with her underlying emotional problems, and in 1994 attempted suicide. She also began to self-harm. Marya ended up marrying her best friend from California, Julian, but they divorced after the success of Wasted. Marya has said that this was due in part to her problems with drugs and alcohol. She has now been sober for over five years. Marya later married and also divorced Jeff Miller, a fellow recovered addict.
Marya is now known for more than just her eating disorder. Her second book, The Center of Winter, received excellent reviews, and readers write to her expressing their enjoyment of both her books. She is currently at work on a second memoir, this one covering the years following those written about in Wasted. Not as dark as Wasted, but equally funny and relevant to readers' lives, this new book is a laugh-out-loud, cry-out-loud account of coming of age in this culture at this time. Hornbacher writes full-time, working at her home in Minneapolis, and says she's the luckiest person in the world to be able to do what she loves. She still writes occasional journalistic pieces for a number of magazines, and was recently honored with a major award for music journalism, a profile of jazz great Oscar Peterson. Her essays and articles focus primarily on the arts, especially music and visual art, and her profiles and criticism have won many awards over the years as well. She has plans for another novel and more nonfiction in the coming years.
