Eating disorders “explained” : the Gothic underworld of Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted

In 1978, Hilde Bruch described anorexia nervosa as an “enigma”, and recent studies in the field indicate that first line treatments of eating disorders are still woefully inadequate, with long term recovery rates at less than fifty per cent. In the last two decades, research by a group of psychoanalytic attachment theorists led by Peter Fonagy in Britain has prompted a re-evaluation of the aetiology of eating disorders. In this new model, trauma and attachment related difficulties with self-regulation are placed at their core. These are difficulties that, according to eating disorder specialist Finn SkÃ¥rderud, have to do with understanding “other people’s mind, one’s own mind and also minding one’s own body” (2009, 86) — in other words, what is known as “mentalization” (Fonagy et al. 2002, 2). These researchers’ model of what they call the three pre-mentalising modes of understanding the self has provided a useful means of accounting for the often strikingly Gothic character of eating disordered phenomenology. In this paper, I will be analysing Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia in terms of its Gothic features. I will be suggesting that the eating disordered body moves through the spaces of Hornbacher’s autobiographical landscape in a way that not only enacts the primary struggle with abjection that can occur at the heart of the nurturing relationship fantasy, but also one that is further haunted by an expectation to effect what might be called a genre of eating disorders “explained”.