Feasting on books gave me back my appetite

BEL MOONEY

PASSIONATE readers know that books are lifesavers: thrillers and romances can transport you far from your woes, while the greatest literature reassures you that everything has been endured — and overcome — before.

But literary classics as dietary aids? This is new to me — and makes Laura Freeman’s delightfully original memoir as fresh as a basket of organic greens.

Freeman was not yet 14 when she was first afflicted by anorexia nervosa, ‘an illness of wretched isolation’. One summer day, dreading the start of the new school term, she felt there was something ‘irreparably wrong with my body’. From that point, the downward spiral into hunger and misery began.

Such is the self-deceiving mania of anorexia that she thought the doctor would diagnose her as ‘grotesquely obese’. He told Freeman’s parents the recovery could take ten years.

The first pages of this book form as vivid an account of what it feels like to be anorexic (‘chaos, misery and misrule’) as I have ever read. But there is nothing of the misery memoir here. Freeman’s aim is to describe how books became her guide to being well. She succeeds deliciously.

Now 30, Freeman (pictured) does not dwell on details of her illness and hospitalisation.

But for three years after diagnosis, she was, she says, ‘weeks from death’ and only survived thanks to her mother’s nursing and patience. The writer’s sense of guilt and gratitude is vivid — and all the more moving for being understated.

After years of ‘eating just enough’, in her 20s Freeman found Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs Of A Fox-Hunting Man. Reading how he tucked into boiled eggs and cocoa planted a thought that ‘hearty, warming food might lead to a richer life than the mean, restricted one I had been living’. Then she moved on to Dickens and saw her life taken over by the master’s genius. She longed ‘to dip just a teaspoon into the milkpot of Dickens meals’.

Strangely, the words of the great novels achieved something all her mother’s patient cajoling could not, in making Freeman realise that there is no moral virtue in the hunger she had helplessly inflicted on herself.

Warm and insightful, Freeman takes us on an exhilarating journey through the privations of the writers of World War I, Hardy’s cool description of Tess’s dairy, the pleasure taken by Virginia Woolf (herself most probably an anorexic) in fruit trees, asparagus and mushrooms. How strange it is that out of one young woman’s terrible struggle should pour such a cornucopia of foodie delight.

Like the alcoholic, an anorexic is never cured: ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be rid of them completely, the voices that say you are worthless, you have no right to eat, you don’t deserve a life.’ Yet The Reading Cure will inspire anybody who is as addicted to words as to chocolate. It is surely a must-read for anyone suffering from a disease of the mind, with its courageous message: ‘Keep going.’