Marya Hornbacher

Marya Hornbacher (2013)

Marya Hornbacher (born April 4, 1974 in Walnut Creek , California ) is an American author and freelance journalist based in Minnesota. She gained fame through her autobiography Alice in Hungerland , in which she describes her life with bulimia and anorexia .

Life

Hornbacher was born in California and raised in Minnesota . She is the daughter of the former theater director Jay Hornbacher and his wife Judy, who works as a teacher. Teasing her classmates made her feel too fat at the age of five. She started vomiting when she was nine, which is the beginnings of bulimia. At the age of 13 she developed problems with alcohol and other drugs . After getting a place at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Boarding School, her eating disorder worsened and she became anorexic at the age of 15. After a year she was taken from school and taken to an inpatient eating disorder ward. She was able to gain some weight, but her desire to hold onto the eating disorder outweighed her desire to get better. She left the clinic at the end of the summer and moved to live with her father's ex-wife and stepbrothers in Southern California.

At her new school she met Julian - her future husband. Her illness got worse and so she was admitted to the clinic again after Christmas, discharged in February, but admitted again after two weeks. She was eventually taken to the Lowe House, a psychiatry for children with serious, long-lasting mental problems, where they remained until the summer of 1992, when she was released with a healthy weight. She continued with her education and set out to become a journalist. She started writing for a local newspaper where she met photographer Mark Trockman and began dating him. Her weight began to decrease again, but slowly and continuously. Eventually she accepted the offer to go to American University in Washington DC. When she left there in the fall of 1992, their relationship ended.

In Washington, her anorexia worsened, and so the risk of collapse increased. As she worked for a newspaper and attended its classes, she got busier and overworked. This made her weight life threatening. She ate a single bagel and a small fat-free yogurt a day for three months. In Alice in Hungerland , she vividly describes this time and talks in detail about the after-effects of her body on the extreme weight loss. She had to stuff her shoes with paper towels because her foot bones felt like they were poking through her skin. She also lost most of her hair. Her weight was only 55 pounds in the winter of 1992/1993, and after flying home to her parents' home, she was admitted to the emergency room and given a week to live.

Fortunately, she survived her ordeal and is now "cured" of her eating disorder. However, she has still experienced some physical ailments as a result, including osteoporosis , irregular heartbeat, and possible infertility . Even so, she has reported having grown eight centimeters since she was healed. After her final hospital stay, Hornbacher began addressing her subconscious emotional problems and attempted suicide in 1994 . She also began to harm herself.

Eventually she married her best friend from California, Julian, but divorced after Alice's success in Hungerland . Marya Hornbacher said this was because of her self-absorbedness, especially problems with alcohol and other drugs. She is no longer in contact with Julian. She was then married to a cured alcoholic whom she had met through Alcoholics Anonymous . In 2005 the couple separated.

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Hornbacher's 1998 autobiography Wasted (German 1999 as Alice im Hungerland ) has been translated into 14 languages. In it, she reports in detail about her life with bulimia and anorexia. For Alice im Hungerland she received the White Award for Best Feature Story . The book, written at the age of 22, was nominated for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in the non-fiction category. This work has been seen as a determined portrayal of her 17 year struggle with anorexia and bulimia nervosa, as well as one of the most realistic and terrifying examples of the extreme nature of eating disorders. The book gained worldwide praise for its expressive writing, its sincerity, and its ability to change other people's lives.

Hornbacher's debut novel The Center of Winter (German: You didn't say I love you ) was published in early 2005 with critical praise and attention. The story is about the aftermath of suicide and is told from the perspective of different family members. This type of narrative illustrates the different ways people deal with tragedy and grief.

Another work by Marya Hornbacher with the title Madness was published in April 2008 . This book describes life with bipolar disorder. This book has not yet been translated into German.

Web links

• Official Site Marya Hornbachers (English)