Eating Disorder Memoirs

Precociously intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and ambitious, Marya Hornbacher grew up in a comfortable middle-class American home. At the age of 5, she returned home from ballet class one day, put on an enormous sweater, curled up on her bed, and cried because she thought she was fat. By age 9, she was secretly bulimic, throwing up at home after school, while watching Brady Bunch reruns on television and munching Fritos. She added anorexia to her repertoire a few years later and took great pride in her ability to starve. Marya's story gathers intensity with each passing year. By the time she is in college and working for a wire news service in Washington D.C., she is in the grip of a bout of anorexia so horrifying that it will forever put to rest the romance of wasting away. Down to 52 pounds and counting, Marya becomes a battlefield: her powerful death instinct at war with the will to live. Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and slip into a netherworld where up is down, food is greed, and death is honor? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Marya Hornbacher sustained both anorexia and bulimia through 5 lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, the loss of family, friends, jobs, and ultimately, any sense of what it means to be "normal." In this vivid, emotionally wrenching memoir, she recreates the experience and illuminates the tangle of personal, family, and cultural causes underlying eating disorders.

Have you ever found yourself covered in cookie crumbs with an empty container next to you after an argument with your spouse, but you have no recollection of eating an entire box of Thin Mints? Do you struggle to stay committed to a diet meal plan because you just are constantly hungry? Does food provide you comfort in your loneliest moments? In this thought-provoking and practical book, When Food Is Your Drug will help you determine the extent of your emotional eating issue and how to go about addressing it. Emotional eaters know they have a relationship with food that is not “normal” ...

When Mallary Tenore Tarpley lost her mother at eleven years old, she wanted to stop time. If growing up meant living without her mother, then she wanted to stay little forever. What started as small acts of food restriction soon turned into a full-blown eating disorder, and a year later, Tarpley was admitted to Boston’s Children’s Hospital. With honesty and grace, Slip chronicles Tarpley’s childhood struggles with anorexia to her present-day experiences grappling with recovery. This book tells Tarpley’s story, but it also transcends her personal narrative.

In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as "wildly undisciplined", Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care.

Seventeen-year-old Elena is vanishing. Every day means renewed determination, so every day means fewer calories. This is the story of a girl whose armor against anxiety becomes artillery against herself as she battles on both sides of a lose-lose war in a struggle with anorexia.

Growing up unknowingly autistic, Livia spent the majority of her young life seeking worth and validation in external achievements. She excelled in her honors classes, competitive sports, and eventually, an eating disorder. Until the control she so desperately sought nearly killed her, Livia made the hardest decision anyone with an eating disorder can make: to trust and surrender to the recovery process.

For almost 30 years, Susan Burton hid her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret.

Seventeen-year-old Stevie is trapped. In her life. And now in an eating-disorder treatment center on the dusty outskirts of the New Mexico desert. Life in the center is regimented and intrusive, a nightmare come true. Nurses and therapists watch Stevie at mealtime, accompany her to the bathroom, and challenge her to eat the foods she's worked so hard to avoid.

Millions of families are affected by eating disorders, which usually strike young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty. But current medical practice ties these families' hands when it comes to helping their children recover. Conventional medical wisdom dictates separating the patient from the family and insists that 'it's not about the food', even as a family watches a child waste away before their eyes.

The Longest Match: Rallying to Defeat an Eating Disorder in Midlife is a beautifully written and heartfelt memoir illustrating the trajectory from early childhood, through adolescence and early adulthood, to midlife when eating disorder thoughts and behaviors took over the author’s life. Journal entries reveal occasional negative thoughts about her weight or food in younger years, but the stressors of midlife knocked this high functioning woman off her feet.

Growing up in a house filled with dirty feather boas and fearless mice, Emi Nietfeld dreams of escaping to the Ivy League. Emi’s single mom believes in her, but can’t stop hoarding—catapulting Emi into the underworld of troubled teen treatment, foster care, and homelessness. When her shot arrives to trade sleeping in her car for the hallowed halls of an elite college, Emi must decide: How far will she go to market herself as a perfect “overcomer” when her problems are far from over? And what will it cost to maintain that illusion at Harvard and into adulthood?

In a world of distraction, overcommitment, and often overwhelming social expectations, are you craving depth, meaning, and true connection? Join Susan Cain, an international best-selling author on the power of introverts who will help you tune out all of your everyday stresses and conflicts and tune into living a Quiet Life. In seven steps, Susan will show you exactly how to lead your own Quiet Life. She’ll help you connect with the part of yourself that’s drawn to the quiet, the deep, the beautiful, and the kind.

A no-holds-barred account of folk legend Judy Collins's harrowing struggle with compulsive overeating and of the journey that led her to a solution.

This is a deeply personal story of a young woman’s journey through addiction; the loss of her child’s father through an overdose, her mother’s suicide, and the tragic consequences that those lifestyle choices bring. At 15, Shelley was submerged into the seedy world of the red-light district of Honolulu. As the warm-up act for the strippers, she became a topless dancer only to discover she was not emotionally prepared for the lewd attention. Pills and heroin helped her to cope with a lifestyle that was beyond her years.

Patients with eating disorders frequently feel that they aren't "sick enough" to merit treatment, despite medical problems that are both measurable and unmeasurable. They may struggle to accept rest, nutrition, and a team to help them move towards recovery. Sick Enough offers patients, their families, and clinicians a comprehensive, accessible review of the medical issues that arise from eating disorders by bringing relatable case presentations and a scientifically sound, engaging style to the topic.

Driven by the pursuit of perfection and the desire to truly be loved and accepted, Cynthia battled an eating disorder for thirteen long years. “Starving, Bingeing, Purging” is her raw, authentic story, told firsthand; a story not just of suffering, but of resilience, victory, and hope against all odds. In this book, Cynthia openly explores the complex issues of anorexia, bulimia, purging, and food addiction, and shares the intimate details of her journey to reclaim her life.

Weight loss advice, laughter, and inspiration from the delicious, caloric, yet uncomfortably large life experiences of a formerly fat man. Allen Zadoff spent years believing that a big, healthy man should have a big, healthy appetite and that his rapidly increasing girth was just a regular guy thing. However, at 350 pounds, it became clear that what had started as a minor weight issue was now threatening his well-being. In a desperate search for a new way of living that would guide him toward a healthier future, Zadoff began to focus less on what he ate and more on the physical and ...

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent more than three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.

All her life, Andie Mitchell had eaten lustily and mindlessly. Food was her babysitter, her best friend, her confidant, and it provided a refuge from her fractured family. But when she stepped on the scale on her 20th birthday and it registered a shocking 268 pounds, she knew she had to change the way she thought about food and herself; that her life was at stake.

Lady Injury is the raw, honest experience of coping with eating disorders, self-harm, and facing the childhood traumas that led to psychiatric care. Handwritten journal entries that filled a series of books over the course of an approximately six-month period of inpatient stays for self-injury and bulimia were the foundation for much of the verbatim quotes within this memoir. Wounds and scars were hidden for years under layers of clothing or behind lips with closed secrets. The shame of self-harm made speaking about it difficult within an environment where this was expected. The silence ...