Writing disorder: the harmful and healing effects of writing in Hornbacher’s Wasted and other anorexia memoirs

Abstract

A growing body of evidence points to the potential of life writing about anorexia to foster “disordered reading” practices in certain readers (Seaber, 2016), with particular concerns raised about the breakthrough eating disorder memoir, Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted (1998). With this article, I shift the focus from readers to authors, exploring the positive and negative health consequences of writing as depicted in Wasted and three anorexia memoirs by British authors, selected on the basis of their meta-literary reflections. On the one hand, these memoirists describe various forms of what I term “disordered writing”, or writing that is implicated in the perpetuation of illness. On the other, these memoirists accord writing a role in recovery: affording metacognitive insights, it allows them to challenge the “anorexic voice” and nurture a voice of their own. I suggest that in texts that ascribe both harmful and healing effects to writing, the co-ordination of narrative voice has consequences for narrators’ reliability. Where the three British memoirists clearly differentiate between experiencing and narrating “I”s, and structure their texts to perform recovery, Hornbacher’s highly ambiguous project to “translate” her body leaves ample scope, I argue, for “disordered reading”.