Marya Hornbacher
Marya Justine Hornbacher is an American author and freelance journalist.
Her book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia is an autobiographical account of her struggle with eating disorders, written when she was twenty-three. This is the book which originally brought attention to Hornbacher. It has been translated into sixteen languages and sold over a million copies in the U.S.
Biography
Hornbacher was born in Walnut Creek, California, and raised in Edina, Minnesota. She is the only child of Jay and Judy Hornbacher, professional theatre actors and directors. When Hornbacher was fourteen years old, she was accepted into the prestigious arts boarding school Interlochen in northwest Michigan. She later enrolled in the University of Minnesota and started writing for the university's student newspaper The Minnesota Daily. In the fall of 1992, she entered college at American University in Washington, D.C. She eventually obtained her degree in philosophy and poetics from the New College of California.Personal life
Hornbacher married Julian Daniel Beard in 1996. They divorced after the success of Wasted. The marriage, and eventual divorce, is also discussed in Madness where she attributes the nuptial failure in part to problems with drugs and alcohol, and largely to her ill-managed bipolar disorder. Hornbacher then married Jeff Miller.She has been sober since 2001. She was honored with a major award, the ASCAP Award for music journalism, for her profile of jazz great Oscar Peterson. She is also a two-time fellow at Yale. She has also been awarded the Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction, the Logan Fellowship for social justice journalism and the Fountain House Humanitarian Award.
As of 2014, Hornbacher was working on several projects. She is currently working on a nonfiction book about sex and sexuality in literature. She is also completing a manuscript of poetry and a manuscript of essays and has a novel in the works. Along with her journalism and articles, she teaches in the graduate writing program at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She still publishes occasional journalistic pieces, as well as short fiction and poetry.