Hornbacher not only survived a nightmare, but she emerged with deep understanding and insight. “With haunting candor, Marya Hornbacher takes us on a searing but heroic journey. Followers of Wasted…will clamor for this.” “eartbreaking…both disturbing and deeply moving, giving true insight into what it’s like to live with this most stubbornly intransigent of mental disorders. Hornbacher is so gifted a writer that I was more than willing to go along for the ride.”

“In staccato bursts of present tense makes us inhabit her brain and experience the extremes of her highs and lows, which are not mood swings as much as all-engulfing tsunami waves. “…has the same intimately revelatory and shocking emotional power that marked Wasted.” “Hooks readers from the start…As whips around this rollercoaster ride, her unflinching style keeps us firmly seated beside her.” “ tiptoes along the same high wire as Plath, Lowell, Woolf…Her talent has created a third self, an appealing, rueful narrator who can look back on three decades of manic-depressive illness, much of it untreated, and spin a story that is almost impossible to put down.” How Hornbacher fights her way up from a madness that all but destroys her, and what it is like to live in a difficult and sometimes beautiful life and marriage-where bipolar always beckons-is at the center of this brave and heart-stopping memoir. Through scenes of astonishing visceral and emotional power, she takes us inside her own desperate attempts to counteract violently careening mood swings.

Hornbacher’s fiercely self-aware portrait of bipolar, starting as early as age four, will surely powerfully change the current debate over whether bipolar can begin in childhood. In Madness, Hornbacher relates that bipolar can spawn eating disorders, substance abuse, promiscuity, and self-mutilation, and that for too long these symptoms have masked, for many of the three million people in America with bipolar, their underlying illness. Now, still a young woman, Hornbacher tells the story that until recently she had no idea was hers to tell: that of her life with Type I ultra-rapid-cycle bipolar disorder, the most severe form of bipolar disease. In 1998, at age twenty-four, Marya Hornbacher published the Pulitzer Prize–nominated, best-selling Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia.

Wasted by Marya Hornbacher