MARYA HORNBACHER

Cuando una mujer está delgada, demuestra su valía. Creemos que ha hecho aquello que ninguna mujer puede hacer: controlarse�. Y una mujer capaz de controlarse es casi tan buena como un hombre. Una muj

For those who dont believe in Godor dont know whether they believeNew York Times best-selling author Marya Hornbacher offers an insightful, moving approach to the concept of faith.Many of us have been trained to think of spirituality as the sole provenance of religion; and if we have come to feel that the religious are not the only ones with access to a spiritual life, we may still be casting about for what, precisely, a spiritual life would be, without a God, a religion, or a solid set of spiritual beliefs. In Waiting, Hornbacher uses the story of her own journey beginning with her recovery from alcoholism to offer a fresh approach to cultivating a spiritual life. Relinquishing the concept of a universal "Spirit" that exists outside of us, Hornbacher gives us the framework to explore the human spirit in each of us--the very thing that sends us searching, that connects us with one another, the thing that "comes knocking at the door of our emotionally and intellectually closed lives and asks to be let in." When we let it in and only when we do, she says, we begin to be integrated people and can walk a spiritual path. There will be many points along the way where we stop, or we fumble, or we get tangled up or turned around. Those are the places where we wait. Waiting, youll discover, can become a kind of spiritual practice in itself, requiring patience, acceptance, and stillness. Sometimes we do it because we know we need to, though we may not know why. In short, we do it on faith.

Why would a precociously intelligent, imaginative, talented young girl go through the looking glass into a netherland where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak? A secret bulimic at age nine, an accomplished anorexic by 15, Marya Hornbacher grew up in a comfortable middle-class home in Minnesota. Fearful of her developing adolescent body and dismayed by her seemingly voracious appetites for food and love, she embraced anorexia and bulimia with a passion that resembled love. Through five lengthy hospitalizations and endless therapy, she sustained a secret life of binging and purging, starving, self-mortification, alcohol, drugs, and sex, deceiving those who loved her and those who tried to help her. When her weight slipped down to 52 pounds, however, mind and body entered into mortal combat, and Marya began to fight desperately for her life.aIlluminating the tangle of personal, family and cultural causes that underlie eating disorders, Wasted takes us inside the experience of anorexia and bulimia in a way no one else has done before. A harrowing story of obsession, passion and madness, physically graphic and emotionally wrenching, this landmark book promises to do for eating disorders what William Styrons Darkness Visible did for depression and Sylvia Plaths The Bell Jar for madness.

A searing, unflinching and deeply moving account of Marya Hornbachers personal experience of living with bipolar disorder. From the age of six, Marya Hornbacher knew that something was terribly wrong with her, manifesting itself in anorexia and bulimia which she documented in her bestselling memoir Wasted. But it was only eighteen years later that she learned the true underlying reason for her distress: bipolar disorder. In this new, equally raw and frank account, Marya Hornbacher tells the story of her ongoing battle with this most pervasive and devastating of mental illnesses; how, as she puts it, it crept over me like a vine, sending out tentative shoots in my childhood, taking deeper root in my adolescence, growing stronger in my early adulthood, eventually covering my body and face until I was unrecognizable, trapped, immobilized. She recounts the soaring highs and obliterating lows of her condition; the savage moodswings and impossible strains it placed on her relationships; the physical danger it has occasionally put her in; the endless cycle of illness and recovery. She also tackles the paradoxical aspects of bipolar disorder how it has been the drive behind some of her most creative work and the reality of a life lived in limbo, caught between the world of the mad and the world of the sane. Yet for all the torment it documents, this is a book about survival, about living day to day with bipolar disorder the constant round of therapy and medication and managing it. As well as her own highly personal story, the book includes interviews with family, spouses and friends of sufferers, the people who help their loved ones carry on. Visceral and inspiring, lyrical and sometimes even funny, Madness will take its place alongside other classics of the genre such as An Unquiet Mind and Girl, Interrupted.