There’s a scene in Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia where she describes reading philosophy in all-night cafes, drinking black coffee after black coffee, while debating the materialist ontology.

This, I remembered thinking the moment I read the scene. This is what it is like to have anorexia. Forget the magazine obsessive, model-thin striving stereotype that I had seen again and again and again. This was the ‘real’ anorexic–not a hunger for beauty or thinness, but a hunger for knowledge and nothing but. As Hornbacher states in several places in the memoir, being bulimic was something bodily, corporeal–while anorexia was ethereal, saint-like. To be an anorectic was to be knowledge incarnate.

The first time I read Marya Hornbacher’s memoir, I was twenty. I had just finished my second year of university and it was the summer vacation before I would start a third year. I was a joint English Literature and Women’s Studies major–so Hornbacher’s exceptionally well written memoir where she documents her downfall over the course of nearly a decade, while also working as a reporter in Washington, DC and referencing many other English Lit classics was perfectly suited for me.

I was also in ‘recovery.’ I use the quotation marks because, even at twenty, I was far more skeptical about the labels of sick and recovery than I was about my own precarious conception of my health. All the information I’d ever heard about anorexia seemed wrong in some way–even after I was institutionalized. At fifteen years old, I’d weighed eighty-five pounds (which seems downright heavy when compared to Hornbacher’s lowest at fifty-five) and by sixteen, I’d completed a rigorous four month treatment program where all my freedom was taken away. I couldn’t pee without someone watching. I couldn’t walk from the hospital doors to a car without people freaking out. And of course, my food was monitored. Oddly enough, my food supervision was the one thing about the program itself I didn’t mind. I never resisted the eating, especially when I was given empirical evidence that I had a low weight. I relented. I conceded. I was too thin, sure. Okay.

But the one thing I did resist were the classes on body image and the beauty myth. Classes where we were taught, over and over again, that modelling our lives on the models in magazines was a bad plan. Instead, we should be proud of our bodies as women. We should stop comparing ourselves to Kate Moss or Giselle Bündchen and just accept ourselves and all our unique beauty.

I stood there in my sweatpants, thick glasses, and tattered notebook, utterly confused. I was not emulating models. I could say that definitively. Even my mother, who also wore no make-up and didn’t pay attention to beauty regimes peddled in mass-market magazines, was skeptical about this treatment. Up until a doctor presented her with my weight, and my vitals, she would have never, ever thought that her kid could have anorexia nervosa. “She’s too smart to fall for that,” my mom had actually said to one of our family friends, perhaps when she realized how thin my face was getting. “She knows the models in the magazines are airbrushed. None of that is real.”

It was only when my anorexia was proven empirically, through numbers and weight and not necessarily ideology of beauty, that my mother relented. She shipped me off to an institution, even though I begged to come home. I promised to eat at home. I ate in the program, I ate anything they wanted me to, and I stopped walking and running since these activities were now deemed “excessive exercise” and forbidden–but my God, I wanted to come home so I could read my books. So I could not go to these stupid classes where I was told I had gotten this way because I wanted to be like Kate Moss. I didn’t. I was too smart for this.

Eventually, I completed the program. I followed their rules and said back the correct explanations at how I ended up in this position. In the hallways, away from the all-seeing eyes of the doctors and nurses and counsellors, I read as many books as I could smuggle in. I wrote in my notebook voraciously. I thought I’d pen my own memoir about anorexia nervosa, explain to everyone that this behaviour was not me trying to be a model. I was too smart for that.

As it turned out, Marya Hornbacher had already done the same thing. In spite of my wandering through the aisles upon my release from the hospital, looking for sick lit to inspire me, I didn’t find her work. My institutionalization was in the summer of 2004, while Hornbacher wrote her memoir in 1998. It did remarkably well. Some of this has to do with that car-crash mentality that exists in a lot of literature of this kind. We always want to crane our necks to watch the corpse and see the blood on the road. There are passages of Wasted that are pure tabloid gawking; pure mania and descent into madness that is part of the genre she’s writing in. We like to read people’s downfalls, I get it.

But the book also presents a cogent narrative of a disorder that doesn’t have a standard happy ending. Hornbacher doesn’t tell the reader that her family or faith or something saved herself, and that everything is all better now. In fact, she resists any type of tight narrative closure. Near the end, after being hospitalized at fifty-five pounds and doctors telling her she has a week to live, she writes:

There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or 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 rag doll, invented, imperfect.  And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.

At twenty, this was a book I needed to read. It stunned me that someone could represent what I had thought had only been in my own head; that someone else’s descent into madness could fit so well into what I’d also experienced. Because even if I wasn’t basing my behaviour on models, I was still pretty skinny. I wasn’t eating enough. And when you’re hungry like that, your thoughts get weird. Everything is tuned to a fine point. Colours change. Smells change. Even the word food seems like an attack, an invocation. Everything, as Hornbacher puts it, is sort of like magic. It can feel as if you will cross over to another side, step through Alice’s looking glass, and you will emerge in a fantasy land where you can be what you want. In typical eating disorder narratives, that ‘be anything you want’ is usually distilled into an image of a beautiful woman.

But for me, it was distilled into an image of pure thought. I could do and be anything I wanted, as long as I was smart while I was doing it. Nothing was more important than that.

Yet, as the days I had spent in the hospital seemed to disappear on the horizon of time, I was also supposed to embrace ignorance. I could be smart in school, but I wasn’t allowed to know things about food anymore. I was supposed to forget what a calorie was and what fat and carbohydrates were–a difficult feat considering all that information is printed on the food labels–if I was to be deemed healthy again. That was what ‘recovery’ meant–it meant I couldn’t go back to my bad behaviour. To know this calorie information would be to become sick again. And if I didn’t want to be sick again–a fear that was only exacerbated when I lost weight again at sixteen–I was supposed to forget. To not know. After spending a semester at sixteen doing nothing but reading and reading and reading so I didn’t have to think about food itself, I had tried to embrace ignorance. When I would be confronted with a problem to do with food, to do with exercise, or even a difficult social situation, I would back out. I’d excuse myself. I have an eating disorder, sorry. I can’t know or do or be involved in this. I was recovered, so I had to leave.

When I went away to university, this fracture of knowledge and health became much deeper. The first few months, I tried to remove all decisions from the realm of food so I could focus on my studies. I’d order what my roommate got in the dining hall. What the person in front of me had. A special of the day. I’d eat two dinners–just in case–since I was studying so much. All food preferences disappeared, especially as I moved out of the dorms and into my own place. I removed labels from my food, so I couldn’t see the calorie count. I’d snack and shop; eat dinners and then eat out, never saying no to food, while also never saying no to knowledge. As my weight yo-yoed for years, I still didn’t think about it. What was important was that I was getting a degree. I was smart. I wasn’t anorexic. Nope. Not at all. How could I be when I absolutely refused to even look at my food some days?

Yet… I still associated these two acts together. Every summer when I’d come home, I’d long to go back to school. I’d throw myself into reading and reading and reading, smuggling books like I once did in the hospital, as if novels were a secret love. So it was no surprise that at twenty, I did eventually find Wasted at the library and took it out. I devoured it, quite literally, because even as I found some sense of solace and recognition in Hornbacher’s examination and her story, I also felt bad. I was dissecting–loving, almost–my own prior anorexia, which meant I was sick again. Right? So I ate food. The closer and closer I got to understanding myself, understanding what I wanted, I was forced to realize that I was learning things about something so forbidden.

So I ate.

In the hospital, that was how I fixed being anorexic. So I ate and ate and ate. I balanced that same tightrope that I had during my undergrad, except that now, I understood it a little more. And I grew to resent it. If I could ever pinpoint an event that made me long for higher education and graduate research, it would be that reading session of Hornbacher when she describes reading Hume over black coffee. I wanted to repeat that. I wanted to stuff more and more information into my mind. I wanted to think critically again–but think critically about myself. About what I had experienced. I wanted to be–in a strange way–anorexic again.

That day, while reading and unravelling all that I had known, I had fused the ideas that to hunger for knowledge was the same thing as starving myself. I had completely mismanaged and misrepresented food and knowledge and power and embodiment. The more I’d read, the more I’d learn–the more I’d then eat. I’d go through periods of longing for anorexia, when I really longed for more academic structure. I’d enter an MA program and spend the first month and a half eating nothing but doughnuts and ice cream because, deep down, I felt as if I was somehow starving myself.

But I wasn’t showing up to a room with my notebook and thick glasses and being told to forget. To think of myself as a beautiful woman. Or to chant mindless slogans. I was finally showing up to a room that told me my reading was a good thing. That my academic life was a valid life.

Eventually, through graduate school, I started to untangle these ideas of food and thought and knowledge. I stopped feeling guilty for wanting to learn. I started to question my own institutionalization. The labels we apply to anorexia. I wrote papers on it. I continued to question the idea of ‘recovery’; I made claims about how we view anorexia; and how a standard cisgender perspective tends to inform who is allowed to be thought anorexic. I completed a dissertation. Once I finished that dissertation, something strange happened.

I realized my weight had maintained. For over a decade–ever since I was fifteen years old–my weight had gone up and down and up and down as I tried to learn and then felt bad about it. But my weight during my PhD years had started on the high end and then gone down, and down, and then plateau. Evened out.  I had hit my normal weight, whatever ‘normal’ meant, and I was relieved.

Which meant that my next challenge had to be a revisiting of Marya Hornbacher, and all her book Wasted had once meant.

I was scared to read it. I simultaneously dreaded and longed for that scene of her drinking black coffee to come up again. I got my own black coffee at a cafe and read philosophy. I listened to Open Yale lectures. I walked and walked and walked around my city, like Hornbacher described walking and walking all night around Minneapolis.

For a while, I ate and ate and ate to compensate.

But then I reached the end of the book. I sat with it. I thought about it. And I realized that I had completely misread Hornbacher insofar as I always thought her depiction of anorexia had been so completely and utterly accurate.

It wasn’t.

But neither were the depictions that I had forced on me in the institution, either. Neither were the depictions on TV shows or movies of the week or even in Netflix’s To The Bone.

Why? Because anorexia is a strange disease that is a personal as it is empirical. Each anorexic that I met in treatment had their own reasons, their own brand of magical thinking, around food. Even Hornbacher’s and my version of anorexia, though we both longed for knowledge, ended up completely different. She wanted to become thought, to leave the body entirely, ultimately because that body was a burden.

I wanted to know as much about the body as possible.

Really, I just wanted to know things. And to keep knowing them, without feeling guilty that I knew.

When I got to that black coffee scene, I read it again. That’s…hunger, I thought. And that is all it is.

– Evelyn Deshane