Disponible:*
Bibliothèque | Type de document | Numéro de cote topographique | Nombre d'enregistrements enfants | Emplacement | Statut | Réservations du document |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Recherche en cours... Central | Juvenile Book | YA 616.85 HOR | 1 | Juvenile Fiction | Recherche en cours... Inconnu | Recherche en cours... Indisponible |
Recherche en cours... South | Book | YA 616.85263 HORNBACHER | 1 | Juvenile Non-Fiction | Recherche en cours... Inconnu | Recherche en cours... Indisponible |
Recherche en cours... South | Book | B HORNBACH MARYA | 1 | Biography Collection | Recherche en cours... Inconnu | Recherche en cours... Indisponible |
Relié avec ces titres
Commandé
Résumé
Résumé
Marya Hornbacher grew up in a comfortable middle-class American home. At the age of five, she thought she was fat. By age nine, she was secretly bulimic. She added anorexia to her repertoire a few years later and took pride in her ability to starve. This is the story of her difficult recovery.
Critiques (5)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
"Eating disorders have the centripetal force of black holes," states Hornbacher, 23, midway through this riveting, startlingly assured account of her bout with anorexia and bulimia, a decade-long struggle that brought her to the brink of death at age 18 and left her with chronic physical ailments. The only child of the troubled union between a former theater director and his actress-turned-school-administrator wife, Hornbacher was bulimic by the age of nine and anorexic by 15, finding in masochistic self-denial a seemingly dependableand quickly indispensableway to control the anxiety that wracked her. Repeatedly hospitalized during high school, she studied briefly at American University while also working as a journalist, until the final crisis, when her weight dropped to 52 pounds and doctors gave her a week to live. Hornbacher's unblinking testimonial has the nuance and vividness of an accomplished novel, and is evenhanded enough to shake the whiff of solipsism that often clings to tales of personal woe. While her fluent prose occasionally seems too off-the-cuff, for all its apparent spontaneity her narrative supplies a wealth of information from varied psychologists and theorists, and she sensitively traces the crazy quilt of overlapping motivations and influences behind her disease. Eating disorders, she argues, are as much a biochemical addiction as a psychological disorder. While rooted in familial dysfunction, generational malaise and our national obsession with feminine thinness, these disorders quickly take on, she says, a life of their own. It is to Hornbacher's credit, and to readers' profit, that she eventually managed to kill the golem that had laid waste to her childhood and teenage years. First serial to New Woman; author tour; dramatic rights: Frances Goldin. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Critique de Booklist
Why, Hornbacher asks in this profoundly distressing chronicle of her struggle with eating disorders, do so many young women suffer from self-hatred, a mania for being thin, and the twisted sense of power self-starvation engenders? Hornbacher entered with the realm of the body-obsessed at the precocious age of nine, came a frail heartbeat away from dying in her teens, and now, at age 23, has the gumption to tell her wrenching story in an effort to expose the societal roots of this complex disease. In spite of coming of age during the 1980s, an allegedly sophisticated and open-minded time, she was denied the same basic information about puberty, sexuality, and self-respect that women have always been denied, a crime made even more deplorable by virtue of the media's glorification of thinness. Hornbacher's severe illness was willfully ignored by every adult in her life, from her parents to her therapists, a failure to recognize the severity of her self-destructiveness appalling in its implications. Hornbacher's courage and candor may help solve the riddle of why young women punish themselves for being female. --Donna Seaman
Critique de School Library Journal
YA-Eating disorders are frequently written about but rarely with such immediacy and candor. Hornbacher was only 23 years old when she wrote this book so there is no sense of her having distanced herself from the disease or its lingering effects on her. This, combined with her talent for writing, gives readers a real sense of the horror of anorexia and bulimia and their power to dominate an individual's life. The author was bulimic as a fourth grader and anorexic at age 15. She was hospitalized several times and institutionalized once. By 1993 she was attending college and working as a journalist. Her weight had dropped to 52 pounds and doctors in the emergency room gave her only a week to live. She left the hospital, decided she wanted to live, then walked back and signed herself in for treatment. This is not a quick or an easy read. Hornbacher talks about possible causes for the illnesses and describes feeling isolated, being in complete denial, and not wanting to change or fearing change, until she nearly died. Young people will connect with this compelling and authentic story.-Patricia Noonan, Prince William Public Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Critique de Kirkus
Bulimic since she was 9 years old, anorexic since she was about 15, the author reveals how and why women with these eating disorders can be helped and, most of all, how long it takes for that help to take hold. Hombacher, a freelance editor and writer, is now 23 years old and, if not well (""it's never over, not really""), at least ingesting and keeping down enough food to sustain life and begin the repairs of the heart and other organs that were ravaged by over a decade of vomiting and starvation. Not yet convinced that she will survive, she struggles each morning over her bowl of ""goddamn Cheerios"" to let go of the urge to be thinner and of ""the bitch in your head"" who says, ""You're fat."" With the help of journals and thousands of pages of her own medical records, Hombacher explores why she began trying to make herself disappear. Although in many ways she fit the profile of a person with an eating disorder--her family life was emotionally chaotic, she was a perfectionist--Hombacher feels there is more to it, including society's dictate that ""you can't be too rich or too thin."" In and out of eating-disorder clinics and mental institutions for many years, she also encountered general practitioners who accepted her extremely low weight--she bottomed out at 52 pounds--as normal. Descriptions of both the desperate need to binge and purge and the grip of the addiction to not-eating are vivid. Along the way, Hombacher was involved with drugs and promiscuous sex but managed to keep her habits and her lifestyle a secret. Hombacher's message is a warning about the complexity of eating disorders--that they are not simply about food or parental missteps or even ""thin is in,"" but about a tapestry of dysfunction that gives rejection of nourishment a terrible potency of its own. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique du Library Journal
This gritty, bluntly honest personal account read by the author tracks Hornbacher's downward spiral from bulimia at age nine to life-threatening anorexia requiring five lengthy hospitalizations. Interwoven with the remarkably vivid chronicle of this struggle is an adept examination of the complex causes of eating disorders. While accepting that a troubled, chaotic family life and the relentless bombardment of cultural messages exhorting thinness played a role, the author acknowledges that her underlying neurotic intensity and perfectionism contributed to the problem; she concludes that she is "a victim, primarily, of myself, which makes victim status very uneasy and ultimately ridiculous." This abridged version sharpens the focus of the original text, and the outstanding narration by Hornbacher enhances the unblinking tone of the work. Highly recommended for all public libraries.Linda Bredengerd, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Bradford, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.