Now there’s a turn-up for the books
What the Dickens! Crippled by anorexia, Laura Freeman was literally starving herself to death... until a literary giant helped her fall in love with food again
At first glance, a book in praise of food written by an anorexic may seem as unlikely as a book in praise of God written by an atheist. But all the best books approach the world from an unusual angle, and The Reading Cure is a very good book indeed.
Laura Freeman remembers the exact moment she became an anorexic. Aged 13, she had just got out of a swimming pool. She was drying herself in the sun when she felt for the very first time that, in her words, ‘there was something wrong, irreparably wrong, with my body. My skin didn’t seem to fit. I was ugly, formless, lumpen. I was revolted by the heaviness of my limbs and my swollen, inflated stomach’.
To anyone else she would have appeared to be the same slim girl who had emerged from the pool. But inside her brain, something catastrophic had occurred. For the next 10 years a voice would keep telling her that she was ‘fat... disgusting, sluggish, worthless’.
And she obeyed it. First she gave up sweets, biscuits and crisps, then all red meat, then chicken and fish, then pasta, potatoes, bread and rice, then eggs and anything dairy.
Within a year she was skin and bones, having given up all fruit, too, and any drink other than water and mint tea. ‘There was soft, grey down all over my stomach, back and arms. My clothes hung on shrunken arms and legs.’ Even though her self-starvation gave her crippling headaches, she refused to take Nurofen tablets because they came in a sugar coating. Vitamin C and cod liver oil tablets were also out, as each contained two calories.
Her parents took her to the doctor. She was sure he would conclude that she was not only overweight but ‘grotesquely obese’. She even wished she hadn’t been so weak-willed as to have eaten an apple the week before. Instead, the doctor diagnosed anorexia. The recovery would, he said, take between five and 10 years.
For the next three years she was, she says, ‘weeks from death’, and only survived thanks to her mother’s nursing and her inexhaustible patience. ‘How did she endure with such outward calm those awful meal times? I would
weep until I choked with tears over a bowl of yogurt or a slice of toast, raging that I would not, could not eat it.’ Among Laura Freeman’s many other qualities as a writer – qualities that include warmth and clarity – is her lack of self-deception; or, rather, she is now able to look back on this time of almost deadly self-deception with eyes that are open and all-seeing. Her descriptive powers are so strong that she makes the anorexic mindset vivid to those of us who have, up to now, found it unfathomable. ‘You share your head with a monster whiffling malice and nonsense, burbling that you are fat, foul, snivelling, worthless... It is a shape-shifting illness. Too many times I have pulled across the bolts, sunk to the floor, thought I had quieted it, only to find it slithering under the door like a flat-nosed snake. I have watched as it has transformed itself back into a monster and seated itself, gloating, in my chair, in my book room, my head.’
If this were just a misery memoir, it would be suitably upsetting. Somewhere between her cheerful primary school and her more competitive secondary school she ‘somehow... lost the knack of happiness, and with it any joy in eating’. Consequently, she knows what it is like ‘slowly and with quiet and determined purpose, to starve your body near to death’.
But though misery is certainly present, the book is about finding a path through the dark wood. ‘This is not a book about the anguish... of anorexia,’ she writes. Instead, it is ‘about what comes next. About the pouring in of sunlight after more than a decade of darkness and hunger’.
By the age of 24 she had become what the doctors call a ‘functioning anorexic’, eating just enough to get by, and feeling guilty when she ate normally. It seems that part of her anorexic frame of mind was to turn everything into a test of will, and to set herself challenges: for this reason she decided to read the complete works of Dickens in the space of a year.
And through reading Dickens it began to dawn on her that food is something not to shun or to fear but to celebrate. ‘There is no virtue in hunger in Dickens,’ she noted. Instead, it is a symptom of poverty, of deprivation. She found his characters delighting in food; just reading about Miss Pinch’s peppered beef-steak pie, or Mr Wemmick’s biscuits or Mrs Cratchit’s Christmas pudding blazing in brandy made her begin to feel that food was a gift. ‘I began to want food. To share it, savour it, to have it without guilt... Dickens was making me feel better.’
In many ways, Laura Freeman’s memoir reminds me of the film
Babette’s Feast, in which mirthless and abstemious Danish villagers are transformed by a delicious feast cooked for them by a French refugee. In its subtle, undogmatic way, The Reading Cure is a tale of joy winning against piety, and the triumph of life over death.
It is also a literary study of the way food is employed as a symbol of magnanimity by so many authors, ranging from JK Rowling to Elizabeth David. In their books, she says, ‘Food isn’t just company, home and warmth, it is care and kindness.’ Laura Freeman had managed to reach the age of 26 without ever having had a proper cup of tea, with milk and sugar. Instead, she would pedantically count the calories – two cups a day equals 40 calories, 14 cups a week 280 calories, and so on, up to a 873,600 calories saved by a lifetime not drinking tea. But reading the writers of the Great War, with their brief, snatched pleasures in their cups of tea, made her count her blessings.
Thomas Hardy, too, taught her the life-affirming pleasure to be gained from even the simplest food and drink. In Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, he ‘painted milk in the sweetest, palest, colours, made it something quite lovely, a cool, marble-white balm for a dairymaid’s soul’. And so reading Tess weaned Laura Freeman off soya and other needlessly puritanical non-fat substitutes: she ‘made me feel not that I ought to drink true, court-beauty milk, but that I wanted to’.
The Reading Cure is, then, both a stimulating argument for the power of fiction as a force for personal change and a wise memoir of anorexia. Moreover, it is never pat, always intelligent, full of enthusiasm, and almost entirely free of self-pity.