I've avoided this memoir for a very long time, out of some deep-seated fear. I just read it, in the better part of two days. Most of this post will be in the form of chosen quotations, as they are both integral to understanding this text and more coherent than any of my "words in review" would be.
Two small interpretations:
1. It is quite noticeable and notable to me that (in contrast to the rest of the memoir) she does not name any of the people by whom she is surrounded, in her residence and classes, in her most severe year of sickness - denoting only an anorectic's capability for extreme distancing and her inability here to make friends.
2. There is a notable difference in the content and tone of the afterward from the original edition, in 1998 (where she speaks of still being underweight and having forever one foot in and one foot outside the rabbit hole mirror), to the updated afterward from 2014 (where she writes, point-blank: "If this illness feels right now like a cage, please try to hear me: it isn't locked. It has been open all along. You are free to go." (Hornbacher 301) ) I want to know what the difference has been, besides 16 years. When she talks about "full recovery, the real thing, not that wan, halfway, half-assed recovery many of us have been told was the best we could hope to achieve" (300), how did she get from the 1998 edition to here? She is an active Facebooker, even with her fans, and I think of messaging her to ask this very question - but I think her individual answer is in here, too: something about the giving oneself the permission to live and to let go. I suppose you have to figure out, first, how to want to let go.
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"I have never been normal about my body. It has always seemed to me a strange and foreign entity. I don't know if there was ever a time when I was not conscious of it. As far back as I can think, I was aware of my corporeality, my physical imposition on space." (13)
"Eating disorders are addictions. You become addicted to a number of their effects. The two most basic and important: the pure adrenaline that kicks in when you're starving - you're high as a kite, sleepless, full of a frenetic, unstable energy - and the heightened intensity of experience that eating disorders initially induce. At first, everything tastes and smells intense, tactile experience is intense, your own drive and energy themselves are intense and focused. Your sense of power is very, very intense. You are not aware, however, that you are quickly becoming addicted." (105)
"I was on a mission to be another sort of person, a person whose passions were ascetic rather than hedonistic, who would Make It, whose drive and ambition were focused and pure, whose body came second, always, to her mind and to her 'art'. I had no patience for my body. I wanted it to go away so that I could be a pure mind, a walking brain, admired and acclaimed for my incredible self-control" (107-8).
"You begin to rely on the feeling of hunger, your body's raucous rebellion at the small tortures of your own hands. When you eventually begin to get well, health will feel wrong, it will make you dizzy, it will confuse you, you will get sick again because sick is what you know. I cannot explain why I remember this year with such joy. Perhaps it is because it was just the beginning." (111)
"People have this idea that eating-disordered people just don't eat. Wrong. They have rules about what they eat, and eat 'safe foods'" (113)
"People who've Been to Hell and Back develop a certain sort of self-righteousness. There is a tendency to say: I have an addictive personality, I am terribly sensitive, I'm touched with fire, I have Scars. There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. How dull." (131)
"The body, many of us find to our great dismay, will always win. Either it will survive despite our best efforts, dealing a blow to our egotistical notion that we can control it, or it will die, making emotional survival utterly moot." (134)
"But at the same time, physical contact has not come naturally to me. It seemed, and seems, laden with significance, so laden that one might like to avoid it altogether. One might, in fact, over a few years, begin to avoid it like the plague, begin to claim such absolute ownership over one's own body that contact itself - the brush of a hand, even, let alone the startling number of emotional and physical nerve endings jangled by an embrace - begins to seem a threat." (202)
"Self-mutilation. And he shook his head. I just don't understand that, he said. I understood. I understood so well, in fact, that I would begin to do that very thing a few years down the road. After my eating disorder was 'over', I would go in a blind search for something else with which to tear myself apart. I found a razor blade worked quite well. In Lowe House, what this girl was doing to herself made perfect sense to me. It seemed to me only that our means were different; our ends were very much the same. Carving away at the body to - symbolically and literally - carve up an imperfect soul." (206)
"In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank." (266)
"There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why you are who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up and still there are holes and you are a ragdoll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way." (279-280)
"There is a difficult factor in deciding to end the game, and that is that most women are playing it at some level of intensity or another - and all of those levels have sublevels of dangers, not just the over-the-top-mortality-stat type of disorder. Eating-disordered people, for the most part, don't talk to one another. It is usually not a little sorority where it's all done in a very companionable way. It's usually intensely private. And when you decide you are tired of being alone with your sickness, you go out seeking woman friends, people who you believe can show you by example how to eat, how to live - and you find that by and large most women are obsessed with their weight. It's a little discouraging." (282)
"I threw out my scale. When I bought another one, I threw that one out too. I kept doing this until the absurdity of it outstripped the anxiety I felt without having a way to measure something totally irrelevant. To this day, when I'm at the doctor, I stand on the scale backwards and ask the nurse not to tell me my weight. After all this time? Yes. It's habit by now. It's a good habit." (303)
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