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a. Female, White, Young, Middle-Class
In the eating disorder, the main character is usually a girl. The girl has desire to fix her body which is to get slim. She will start her eating disorder from a
very young age. She also lives in middle-class family. The condition is suitable for Marya who becomes the main character of Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and
Bulimia. So I get to be the stereotype: female, white, young, middle-class. I cant
tell the story for all of us. I wrote this because I object to the homogenizing, the inaccurate trend in the majority of eating disorders
literature that tends to generalize from the part to the whole, from a person to a group Hornbacher, 1998: 7.
By this quote, Marya fulfilled the requirements of the stereotype to be the main character in eating disorder story. A young, white, middle-class woman shows
more enthusiasm to be slim than a black, low- class woman. It is the reader’s belief
and culture that an eating disorder story should fulfill.
b. Religious
The main character of eating disorder story is usually a religious girl. Marya is raised as a Christian. The religion has important role in her life.
She thinks of the saints: their flagellums, their beds of nails, their centuries-late apologies for Eve who doomed all women to the pains of the
flesh by giving in to the pleasures of that flesh. They lacerate their own flesh in penance for Eve, for the sins of the world, which they shoulder as
their own. They wear hair shirts, or razors next to their skin. She reads books on the saints. The sainted anorectics, who, in their holy asceticism,
insisted that God was telling them to starve. She considers God. She determines he, if they were on speaking terms, would tell her to starve for
general sins Hornbacher, 1998: 86.
In the memoir, Marya often reads books on the saints. Her belief in God is shown through her eating disorder’s activity. She depicts herself as sainted anorectic who
believes that God tells her to starve.
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c. Intelligent
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