The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite - Laura Freeman

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“One sheds one’s sicknesses in books”, wrote D.H. Lawrence, in an oft-quoted letter of 1913. The idea of literature as a source of solace, and even of medicinal healing, has a long history, dating back to Plato’s assertion that the arts exist not for “mindless pleasure” but rather as “an aid to bring our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself”.

This established discourse of literature-as-medicine didn’t stop me approaching Laura Freeman’s account of her own book-fuelled recovery with some degree of trepidation and scepticism, however. Wary of the dangers of trivialising mental illness, the presentation of an illness as serious as anorexia nervosa as something one might be able to read oneself out of set alarm bells ringing.

Fortunately, such concerns proved redundant. Far from trivialising the gravity of anorexia, Freeman’s nuanced and bravely honest account sheds important light on an illness so often shrouded in misconception. She dispels, for example, the reductive assumption that anorexia is an illness of vanity. “It is not prettification of the self that drives the illness”, she writes, “but annihilation of self. It is the scraping-back of flesh from bone, it is punishment, will to destruction. It is the belief that you are not worthy of food, nourishment, life. Vanity, beauty? They have nothing to do with it” (24). Perhaps the greatest triumph of her prose is its attempt to make comprehensible the irrational thinking that drives anorexia, a disorder whose logic can be so impenetrable from the outside. Anorexia, Freeman writes, “up-ends your thoughts, turns bone into flesh, makes life unlivable, death seem glorious. What you see and hear are not real; but how real they look, how real they sound.” (236)

Books are by no means presented here as a substitute for psychiatric treatment. The recovery her memoir charts is not the clinical progression from a state of extreme starvation to the restoration of a healthy BMI and a sufficient diet, but rather “what comes next … the pouring in of sunlight after more than a decade of darkness and hunger” (14). It documents her rediscovery of food as something not just necessary for survival, but something to be enjoyed in its own right. With literature as her guide, Freeman begins to see food as a vehicle to life’s greatest pleasures: as sustenance for travel and adventure, a platform for communal experience and social connection, but also as one of those pleasures in and of itself, part of the fabric of what makes life exciting and valuable.

She begins with Sherston, the semi-autobiographical hero of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man. In Sherston’s ferocious appetite for boiled eggs and cocoa, she discovers a world devoid of “kilojoules and kilocals”, in which food is fuel for boyhood adventures, and in which a body exists not “be despised and criticised” but to “field cricket balls, swings its legs over a cob, march into battle” (40). Bolstered by Sassoon’s prose, she replaces her ritualistic breakfast of watery porridge with Sherston’s soft-boiled eggs, and so begins a journey of literary-inspired culinary exploration. In Dickens, she finds the courage to try a spoonful of Christmas Pudding on Christmas Day, while Laurie Lee’s tales of Spanish adventures embolden her to stop for saffron buns while on a walking holiday with her boyfriend. The war poets help reconcile her to cups of tea, and Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles helps her overcome a fear of dairy. In Virginia Woolf, she finds a kindred spirit, but also a powerful counter to the ‘clean eating’ trend: “never once does she eat a chia seed or a goji berry” (136). Such breakthroughs may seem trivial to a reader unfamiliar with the anguish of an eating-disordered mind, but to Laura, “every splash of milk, every lone boiled egg was a quiet, private victory” (47). She describes these victories with such vivid poignancy that one cannot help but share her joy in each new discovery, and triumph with her in battles won over Yorkshire puddings, Moroccan couscous and plum jam.

Freeman’s memoir is the product of a long and debilitating illness, that consumed much of her youth and, as she freely admits, is something she continues to grapple with. Yet The Reading Cure is not a sad book. Far from it. It is, rather, a celebration of the power of literature, not only to move and to enlighten, but to heal.