“Wasted” Memoirist Marya Hornbacher Considers Privacy

Best-selling memoirist Marya Hornbacher has laid herself bare in multiple riveting accounts of her struggles with eating disorders, mental illness, and addiction. 2paragraphs asked her to write about privacy.

E. M. Forster wrote, “Only connect.” We connect through our stories. We tell one another stories in order to learn about and strengthen the substance of connection between selves, to learn about our common denominators, about the places where we intersect—and it’s at that site of intersection where we are no longer alone. The whole endeavor of telling stories or cobbling together any kind of art hinges on this: we must connect with the person who encounters our work. If we fail in that, we fail at the project of creating connections across the span of separate selves. If we succeed, we have done at least that element of our job.

The divisions we try to maintain between our private and public lives are often those we try to maintain within ourselves: the seamless, polished self we say we are, and the messy but more accurate inner self that lives in the shadow of how we wish to be seen. This habit of splicing ourselves into the story we tell and the person we are divides and obscure the truth of what it’s like to be a human having the marvelously weird experience of being alive. But the truth is that we are not either/or, neither a total wreck within nor a perfect seamless self without. We are—in art as in any other form of human encounter—more capable of connection when we allow some degree of transparency between those public and private stories; that transparency creates a window from the outer to the inner world. If I leave that window open just a little bit, you can climb in; if I keep it shut and tell myself it must never be unlocked, you and I are both permanently stuck with our faces and hands pressed up against the glass. // Marya Hornbacher