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I read Marya Hornbacher's memoir Wasted at the same time as I read two other books about the lives of women: Margaret Negodaeff-Tomsik's Honour Due and Jenny Walton's Packing for a Woman's Journey. Honour Due is the biography of Dr. Leonora Howard King, a Canadian-born physician who spent 47 years practising medicine in Imperial China in the late 19th and early 20th century and who was the first Western woman to be made a mandarin. Jenny Walton is the pseudonym of Nancy Lindemeyer, the editor of Victoria magazine.
These books tell an interesting tale about this century, especially when read together. Leonora Howard King exemplified the devotion and service that Victorian women strove to achieve in their day-to-day lives. Nancy Lindemeyer's gentle account of a hopeful woman's life is full of the optimism typical of the 1950s and '60s. But there is nothing genteel or gentle about Marya (pronounced Mar-ya, we are reminded) Hornbacher's no-holds-barred account of a young woman's struggle with an eating disorder in the 1980s and '90s. As the 20th century ends, the number of Western women who are dissatisfied with a normal body weight is increasing. And here's a paradox: although the...