She suggested we meet at Spyhouse, a coffee shop only a block from my apartment. Treating the person as a whole, rather than as separate mind and body only circumstantially localized, I see in eating disorders the kind of unstable paradox that invites my reflection on memoir-the foggy notions of self personified, literalized.Īfter reading Marya Hornbacher’s memoir Madness: A Bipolar Life as well as Wasted, I wrote to ask for an interview. What Hornbacher borrows from Nietzsche shows the true menace of the illness: the attack is self-reflexive. Marya Hornbacher’s first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, opens with an epigraph from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else and soul is only a word for something about the body.” It’s a provocative way to begin a book about eating disorder, which we might be inclined to think of in starkly dualistic terms: the body under attack by something-call it mind, call it soul-distinctly nonphysical. Parker that explores the nature of the composed self through conversations with memoirists, theorists, artists, and possibly musicians. Stories of Self is a(n approximately) monthly essay series by Scott F.
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