The maddening in Hornbacher's Wasted : digression as a performance of the eating disordered body

Through their seemingly exaggerated attention to the most mundane details of embodies experience" the body's unavoidable need for food as well as its feel in the varying circumstances of living" eating disorders remind us of that which most exceeds the totalising promise of a constructed, written presence. In this paper I will be arguing that, in autobiographical writing about these issues, the unsettled eating disordered body is performed by the digressive features of the text, and that this takes place in a manner in which the binary of 'disordered', and its implied opposite, 'ordered', eating experience is disturbed. Since Ross chambers's Loiterature, there has been considerable interest in the role and features of narrative digression. Most recently, Samuel Frederick has questioned the long assumed equivalence of narrative and plot. He states that far from working counter narrative, digression, as the effect of the desire to tell, 'rescuers the insignificant'" all that is 'small, silly, maddening, or monotonous', and therefore 'incompatible with the plotted whole'" from 'being forgotten'. Through an analysis of the digressive aspects of Marya Hornbacher's memoir Wasted, I will be investigating the way digression performs the unsettled eating disordered body through its provocative engagement with eating, purging and denying food in a text that resists closure, as well as how the notion of the whole is affected by this performance. Finally, in view of Merav Shohet's findings about the way more open-ended and 'multiply interpretable' narrative practices, as evident n Wasted, might seem to impede the full recovery of the eating disordered subject, I will be discussing what Hornbacher's subsequent memoir. Madness, further suggests about the work of digression in the context of widespread expectations about the beneficial features of a unified plot.