The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite

by Laura Freeman

At the age of fourteen, Laura Freeman was diagnosed with anorexia. She had seized the one aspect of her life that she seemed able to control, and struck different foods from her diet one by one until she was starving. But even at her lowest point, the one appetite she never lost was her love of reading.
As Laura battled her anorexia, she gradually re-discovered how to enjoy food - and life more broadly - through literature. Plum puddings and pottles of fruit in Dickens gave her courage to try new dishes; the wounded Robert Graves' appreciation of a pair of greengages changed the way she thought about plenty and choice; Virginia Woolf's painterly descriptions of bread, blackberries and biscuits were infinitely tempting. Book by book, meal by meal, Laura developed an appetite and discovered an entire library of reasons to live.
The Reading Cure is a beautiful, inspiring account of hunger and happiness, about addiction, obsession and recovery, and about the way literature and food can restore appetite and renew hope.

Genres: Nonfiction, Books About Books, Memoir, Food, Mental Health, Biography, Autobiography

272 pages, Hardcover

First published February 22, 2018

About the author

Laura Freeman is chief art critic of The Times. She has written for the Spectator, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, TLS, Apollo and World of Interiors. Her first book The Reading Cure, a memoir about hunger and happiness, addiction, obsession and recovery, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018. She studied history of art at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

A debut memoir with food, medical and literary themes and a bibliotherapy-affirming title – this book ticks a whole lot of boxes for me. The very day I saw it mentioned on Twitter I requested a copy, and it was a warming, cozy read for the dark days of late December. As a teenager, freelance journalist Laura Freeman suffered from anorexia, and ever since she has struggled to regain a healthy relationship with food. This is decidedly not an anorexia memoir; if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll want to pick up Nancy Tucker’s grueling but inventive The Time in Between. Instead, it’s about the lifelong joy of reading and how books have helped Freeman in the years that she has been haltingly recovering a joy of eating.

If asked to name a favorite food, Freeman writes that it would be porridge – or, if she was really pressed, perhaps her mother’s roast chicken dinner. But it’s been so long since she’s thought of food in terms of pleasure that written accounts of feasting from the likes of M.F.K. Fisher or Parson Woodforde might as well be written in a foreign language. When in 2012 she decided to read the whole of Charles Dickens’s oeuvre in his bicentenary year, she was struck afresh by the delight his characters take in meals.

While I was reading Dickens something changed. I didn’t want to be on the outside, looking at pictures, tasting recipes at one remove, seeing the last muffin go to someone else. I began to want to want food. To share it, savour it, to have it without guilt.

This nascent desire for a broader and more sumptuous food repertoire fuels the author through her voracious reading: of war writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves with their boiled eggs and cocoa; of travel writers Laurie Lee and Patrick Leigh Fermor and their enthusiastic acceptance of whatever food came their way on treks; and of rediscovered favorite children’s books from The Secret Garden through the Harry Potter series with the characters’ greedy appetite for sweets. Other chapters are devoted to Virginia Woolf, whose depression and food issues especially resonate for Freeman; food writers; famous gluttons; and the specific challenge of chocolate, which she can’t yet bring herself to sample because it’s “so tangled up in my mind with ideas of sin, greed and loss of control.”

It’s these psychological and emotional aspects of food that Freeman is so good at capturing. She recognizes a tendency to all-or-nothing thinking that makes her prey to clean eating fads and exclusion diets. Today she still works to stifle the voices that tell her she’ll never be well and she doesn’t deserve to eat; she also tries to block out society’s contradictory messages about fat versus thin, healthy versus unhealthy, this diet versus that one. Channeling Dickens, she advises, “Don’t make a Marshalsea prison of rules for yourself – no biscuits at tea, no meat in the week, no pudding, not ever. Don’t trap yourself in lonely habits.”

Freeman’s taste in both food and literature seems a trifle old-fashioned, leaning towards jolly ol’ English stuff, but that’s because this is about comfort reading as much as it is about rediscovering comfort eating. Her memoir delicately balances optimism with reality, and encourages us to take another look at the books we love and really notice all those food scenes. Maybe our favorite writers have been teaching us how to eat well all along.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Evie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"For fifteen years before taking Bevis off the shelf, I had been hungry. Sometimes acutely so, sometimes less, but always going to bed each night empty and cold. For two of those fifteen years, I had been starving."

This was a delicious read! Laura Freeman takes us into her confidence, and shows how crippling anorexia was for her, and the years thereafter when she was recovering. A voracious reader from a young age, she read herself well with classics like Dickens, memoirists of WWI, and Virginia Woolf's fictitious meals and diary entries.

I've never made it through a Dickens novel; I've attempted David Copperfield and Oliver Twist at various stages of my life, and all unsuccessfully. Freeman went through all of his works in one year, looking for solace, comfort and appetite in the meals he wrote about and the characters that ate with such gusto.

She even goes back to reading children's classics that feature healthy relationships with food like The Wind in the Willows and Swallows and Amazons. Honestly, most of the books mentioned were books I haven't read yet. My To-Be-Read pile grew by a foot, and I can't wait to dive into them! The authors I'm most excited to read are food writers M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David (authors I'm familiar with already). Unknown authors to me were travel writers like Patrick Leigh Fermor and Laurie Lee's autobiographical books about his walking travels after leaving Britain.

"Paddy's happy, effortless eating is perfected in Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese. At Kalamata in midsummer, with his girlfriend Joan and friend Xan Fielding, Paddy sits down to dinner above the quayside flagstones that throw back the heat like a casserole with the lid off. They step fully dressed into the sea and carry their table a few yards out, then three chairs. They sit up to their waists in cool water:

The waiter, arriving a moment later, gazed with surprise at the empty space on the quay; then, observing us with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure, he stepped unhesitatingly into the sea, advanced waist deep with a butler's gravity, and, saying nothing more than 'Dinner-time', placed our meal before us—three beautifully grilled kephali, piping hot, and with their golden brown scales sparkling. To enjoy their marine flavour to the utmost, we dipped each by its tail for a second into the sea at our elbows."

Now that is mindful eating! I'm determined to work my way through all of Fermor's books! Not to be outdone, Woolf gets her own chapter! It was one of the most insightful and moving ones in the book. I've yet to read any Woolf, but she moved me so much!

"While Woolf has been the most extraordinary consolation—and no other writer has so helped me make sense of my own mind, nor offered such a rubric for how I might mend it—she is also a writer who frightens me. For long periods she succeeded in reigning in and stabling her galloping horses, tied them, kept them in hay. For years, she managed it. And this from her 1935 diary, January, when she was fifty-two:

'I wish I could find some way of composing my mind—It's absurd to let it be ravaged by scenes...On the contrary, it is better to pull on my galoshes & go through the gale to lunch off scrambled eggs & sausages.'

That is the remedy to: 'I can't fight any longer.' That is what I hold tight from Virginia Woolf. Galoshes. Courage. On."

I'm sitting in a hotel pub in Ireland looking over notes and pages from this book while a feast is laid before me as I write this review. Plenty of local people chatting each other up. It's great. I can't help but think of how much more I appreciate it after this book. It's a fab one. Get your hands on a copy!

[Andreea Toader · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 ⭐️

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the young age of fourteen, Laura Freeman was diagnosed with anorexia. Where everyone saw a really thin girl with almost transparent skin, she saw something utterly different in the reflection in the mirror. It was the culmination of months of avoiding certain foods, before almost stopping eating completely until she reached the point where she was starving to death. While she let very little pass her lips in the form of nourishment, she still devoured books, and it was literature that was to hold the key to her recovery.

The road to recovery for an anorexic is long and fraught and it was no different for Laura, but where others just had the mental battle, she had the extra support from the books she was reading. In between the covers of Dickens, Sassoon, Woolf, Lee and Leigh Fermor, she would discover how they were able to consume vast plates full of roast beef, bowls of soup and exotic sounding breads without a care in the world. She reads of soldiers who treasure the moment of a scalding hot cup of tea after an intense battle in World War One. In fact, what she discovered was that these authors loved food; they reveled in the taste of what they were eating and sharing the moment with others. These passages in the books, slowly gave her the confidence to rediscover food for the pleasure of eating it rather than purely as a fuel.

Even though her mind had driven her to the point of abhorring food, one thing that she never lost was her love of reading. Most people do not realise just how debilitating anorexia is and there is some painful moments in here as she recalls the lowest points of her illness. But there are the moments too, where she is sustained by her mother's love, an invitation from a friend that arrived at just the right moment. I have read a fair number of the books that Laura talks about in here and whilst the eating and celebration of life between friends and strangers is a key part of them, it is not something that particularly stood out for me, until now. Just reading the descriptions quoted in the book made me very hungry! However, it did for Laura and this list of childhood favourites and other classics has played a crucial role in her accepting that food is not something to avoid and can be enjoyed.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to give The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite a second try, eight years after I gave up on page 24 because I was uncomfortable reading about food and anorexia recovery. My relationship with food has improved so much in the past five years that now felt like the time. And I found reading it no problem, although I was frequently reminded of similarities and differences to my own experiences. In such a situation, I think as a reader you have a responsibility to acknowledge these comparisons while taking a step back to engage with the writer's words on their own terms. Freeman has written about her recovery experiences in an honest and brave way. She explains clearly and succinctly the trials she has had fighting against her fear of eating. Reading both fiction and nonfiction helped her to gradually widen the range of things she would eat, as well as reminding her of the pleasure that food can bring.

Her reference points are, and I'm not sure there is another way to put this, posh. Perhaps this is especially visible to me because that my own background is semi-posh. I found it interesting how this context shaped the types of books and foods she looked to, both of which were often traditional English fare or English travelers' encounters with overseas cuisine:

I knew Elizabeth David's England in a way I couldn't know Mary Francis' Californian beaches, ranches, vineyards, West Coast boarding schools, and Hershey's bars. The England of Elizabeth David, though separated by seventy years from the one I grew up in, was recognisably my England: an England of nannies, Wellington boots, Regent's Park, Primrose Hill, expeditions to see the windows in Selfridges (where Elizabeth ran up bills for roast chicken, cream, and coffee); the Tate Gallery; the Sunday Times; Scotch eggs for picnics; fish at school on Fridays with custard and tinned fruit cocktail (the staples of Godstowe in the 1920s, and my London primary school in the 1990s); Agas; 'hellish' summer weather and Woolworths.

She evidently found the thread of cultural familiarity comforting. Dickens is heavily discussed, notably the difference between stingy villains who deprive children of food versus heroic protagonists who feed their guests generously. The chapter on Virginia Woolf, whose diaries Freeman read, is particularly moving. Woolf suffered from recurrent mental illness and killed herself in 1941. Freeman found a kinship with her diaries that helped her to understand herself, yet was also frightened by Woolf's fate and resolved to avoid it.

Towards the end of the book, Freeman laments the rise of 'clean eating' that caused a relapse in her severe food restriction. I imagine that the advent of GLP-1 medication must also very difficult for recovering anorexics. Those drugs creep me out, to be honest. The book concludes with a powerful and well-articulated message:

When I am besieged by noise I forget why I ever wanted to travel, why leave the house, why eat, why go on. It is then very difficult to see how I can bear to live in a body that will make demands every day, three times a day for food. How will I eat meal after meal, year after year, when starving seems so much easier? At such times, the future looks a long, old slog and I worry that my boots are not up to it. But the only way to know is to try, Boots, courage, on.

In writing this book, I want to say both that it is possible to get better from an illness, to make for yourself a life worth living, and also that there will be days when it seems impossible. There will be times when you think: I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, I cannot hear myself think. I cannot remember how to be happy. I cannot keep going.

I say: keep going.

After being ruthlessly ignored for many years, appetite can be difficult to awaken. Taking inspiration from books in an ingenious approach to this. I hope that Freeman continues her recovery and manages to try chocolate again someday, even just once. I know people harp on about it, but good chocolate really is delicious.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Anorexia tells you that you cannot eat, that you do not deserve, that you may not have or hope for. It tells you that you are worthless. It’s a way of thinking that is hard to break.’

In ‘The Reading Cure’ Laura tells us the story of her long ongoing battle with anorexia and how getting back into reading the works of Dickens, Woolf, Rowling and more inspired her to find a love, joy, want and passion for food.

This book hit home. I’ve dealt with anorexia for three years now and never have I had someone understand my thoughts so clearly as Laura Freeman does. The restriction, the lack of energy, the jealousy, the torment of the voices in your head. I want to thank her for making me feel less alone. I am now at a much healthier place, mentally and physically.

I only had one problem with this book which I feel the need to explain.

Eating plant-based is the only thing that has kept me alive after slowly recovering from anorexia. In Freeman’s world, chicken, butter and ‘real’ milk are good and lentils, hummus, avocados and other foods considered ‘healthy’ are bad. I am not depriving myself by not eating roast beef and cheese toasties. I eat a wide variety of foods and they are all, if I do say so myself, bloody delicious.

‘This isn’t food. This is freakery.’

Eating healthy alternatives and trying to avoid meat and dairy is not absurd. Trying to boost your immune system and overall health by eating clean foods isn’t dramatic and a plant-based diet does not have to be strict and depriving. These comments which were dropped relentlessly throughout the book came across as a bit ignorant to me. These constant insults didn’t ruin my reading experience, they just pissed me off and felt unnecessary in order to get her points across.

It’s clear to me that Laura Freeman had extremely well meaning intentions with this book, and overall I really enjoyed it and related to it a lot - let’s just say I cried more than once!

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir is at once lovely and disturbing. Freeman writes with unwavering honesty about her illness, and in doing so, gives a real insight into what it is like when your mind is not your own. Such a narrative has the potential to be immensely bleak; overwhelming. This instead, is balanced. It is as much a story of a lengthy battle against an unrelenting illness, as it is a love letter to books and reading. It is a reminder that when the world fails us, when our minds fail us, there is always solace and healing to be found in books.

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book with appeal on so many levels. What is it about books about books that readers so love? Is it the opportunity to see what others have gleaned from books they also enjoyed, and whether they can learn something new? And then, when you trust this intrepid guide, you avidly see what else they can recommend to you?

This book has a lot of that. It also has beautifully written prose, especially on the subject of food, even if much of that is borrowed from the referenced authors. But there is another layer to this journey through books on food and eating. The author is also guiding us through her lived experience of anorexia and what it is like to suffer with this particular affliction, and also, how she found her way out of the labyrinth after a decade of suffering, through reading.

Do not be put off. This is not a depressing book; in fact it's uplifting. It is also very enlightening. Freeman not only corrects a common misconception that anorexia is a disease of vanity, she explains further: 'It is a disease of self annihilation.' In fact, anorexia--the slimming disease--is more a manifestation of deep anxiety and self loathing, which simply eating (if that were possible for the sufferer) will never cure.

Freeman's journey to wellness began when she imposed the task on herself (anorexics love tasks and pushing themselves) to read all of Dickens' oeuvre in a year. Completing this task altogether highlighted many truths to her about what Dickens has to say about food. How the lack of it is used to punish, being mean with it shows an evil character, being generous the opposite. Starvation is an ugly, terrible thing. An abundance of food and drink means cosiness, love and security, and importantly, goodness. Personally, Dickens' descriptions of hot rolls and coffee have always inspired me to indulge in these comestibles. Something about the hotness, the repeated rounded O sounds indicative of roundness and fullness. It seems I wasn't the only one so inspired! And then there are the hot spiced rum punches and so on and so forth. The best food in Dickens is hot and steaming to combat the mean coldness from outside.

Freeman moves on from here to writers during WWI such as Sassoon, Graves and Laurie where good hot food was not only much needed nutrition in bad times, but a symbol of comfort and home. Sassoon inspires her to try eggs again.

And on we go through many other well-known books, with Freeman casting her mental demons as Carroll's Jabberwocky and how books gave her the vorpal sword she needed to fight off the nasty horrid voices telling her she was worthless and didn't deserve to eat. The writing becomes even more voluptuous with Mary Francis Fisher and Elizabeth David's writings on preparing food and their mutual love affairs with eating. Surprisingly, even though I am the most suggestible reader ever (damn you Elizabeth Strout for always having Olive Kitteredge tripping off to Dunkin' Donuts!!), I did not feel the urge so much to try the foods described so sumptuously. Somehow it was more about the writing and the author's healing process, if that makes sense.

Most telling, however, is when Freeman approaches Virginia Woolf. If she related to Dickens being unable to sleep, she certainly embraces Woolf's refrain, 'I am going mad.' Woolf had her own voices to contend with and it terrified Freeman that they finally did for her. Woolf's mental health issues also manifested in her refusing to eat and there are many references in her diary of Leonard making her eat, or the weight she needs to be; but in contrast, her diaries are also full of descriptions of food and her enjoyment of it. Freeman writes out her empathetic reading of Woolf, unwilling to label her anorexic (who is SHE to say what went on in another woman's head?) but she certainly relates to the fear and the discipline Woolf imposed on herself to constantly walk it out - a solution both women use to fight off the voices.

I didn't want Freeman's journey through these wonderful books and foods to end--that's what a good writer does to a reader--and she doesn't soft soap us with a perfect happy ending either. She describes lapses and the ongoing fight and how she still cannot touch chocolate. Any crisis, or allowing herself to go hungry and tired, or feeling depressed is a doorway for the voices to return, but reading has given her tools and self-knowledge to combat the vicious Jabberwocky. This book is therefore an insight into her humanity, and the wisdom and strength she has hard-earned to simply live her life. And her ultimate advice is worth repeating: no one can tell anyone how to manage their own mental health journey, but a solution that is good for anyone comes from Merlyn in the Once and Future King: 'The best thing for being sad, is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails.' A focus outside ourselves, concentrating on learning something, whether it be a language, a musical instrument or simply the names of wildflowers. Or in Freeman's case, reading and cooking and travelling.

I cannot say enough good things about the experience of reading this book. Read it for its beauty, read it for its reading recommendations, read it for its sensual/sensuous descriptions of food. And read it to remind yourself of the struggles many people undergo simply to BE.

Maybe this book could help someone you know.

[Felicity · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up on a whim in Waterstones Piccadilly and am so glad I did.

I love books about books if they are well written and this book made me aware of the numerous feasts in literature. Laura Freeman started to suffer from anorexia at the age of 13 and at the age of 30 she can't quite manage to try chocolate as she is worried she will lose all control and not stop eating.

I found her story about her illness interesting as instead of a book about the initial diagnosis and that difficult time, you have a book which focuses on her recovery over a long period of time. Freeman was very honest about how she heard voices and how she still can't eat like normal people. She has always been an avid reader and literature helped her get over a lot of food fears. Oddly after I bought the book I found out a student has been diagnosed with anorexia!

Freeman has educated me further about anorexia and has inspired to read Virginia Woolf and many other writers I had never heard of. A well crafted and interesting book.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had had my eye on Laura Freeman’s memoir, The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite, for quite some time before I borrowed it from my local library. I, like many other readers, am consistently drawn to books about books, as well as those about health and medicine. Freeman’s memoir, which discusses her long battle with anorexia nervosa, marries the two quite wonderfully.

When she was fourteen, Freeman was diagnosed with an eating disorder which made her daily life incredibly difficult. Even when her recovery ‘seemed impossible, the one appetite she never lost was her love of reading’. Reading was her salvation; with each book she immersed herself in, she began to rediscover how ‘to enjoy food – and life – through literature.’

Freeman comments, early on, that her book differs from many other memoirs of anorexia, which ‘often stop at the first signs of recovery. This book is about what comes next. About the pouring in of sunlight after more than a decade of darkness. About Charles Dickens giving me the courage to try a spoonful of Christmas pudding. About crumbling saffron buns on a walk with Laurie Lee… and picking teeth-staining mulberries with Elizabeth David.

Following her diagnosis, her mother would take her to every appointment each week: ‘… once a week to the doctor, twice a week to a therapist, a specialist in anorexia, and once a week to the Daunt bookshop on Marylebone High Street.’ Freeman continues: ‘What else was there to do but read? And so I did, piling books on the floor by my bedside table. If words had been calories, I would have been gorged. Reading was an escape when I was most desperate. Later, it was medicine of a different sort.’

Freeman writes extensively about the books which she read, and the sheer variety of foodstuffs which each mentioned, which began to bestow a new perspective upon her – that food should be enjoyed. At first, Freeman does not set out to read books about food, but as she gets further into her recovery, these are increasingly what she reaches for. They give her the courage to try new foods, and reintroduce those which she has not eaten in years – like butter – or ever – such as cups of tea – into her life. She talks about bad food, and good, in Dickens; then she moves on to memoirs written by several war poets, who remember things like bread and jam, and homemade pies, so fondly. She tells us: ‘Reading Dickens had made me receptive to breakfasts, lunches and teas, and as I picked my way along the duck-boards with Sassoon, Blunden, Graves and Jones, I found myself noticing what they ate and what meals meant to them.’ Of Laurie Lee’s memoirs, which seem focused around his sheer delight for food, she writes: ‘What a thing to be ravenous, then to eat until bursting. I only knew how to eat enough to take the edge off hunger, not to silence it completely.’ In short, the more Freeman read about food, and the process of eating, the more she was able to try.

Of this period, she makes clear: ‘… nothing I had read had been strictly food writing. When food came into a book, it was incidental, giving colour and savour to the story. The meals I had read dropped like plums, unexpectedly, undesignedly, into my lap… I was eating more widely, more easily, more cheerfully.’ She finds particular solace in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, which ‘struck a balance between not wanting to eat and knowing she must eat. In her writing there is a spring-like pleasure, pinking and blossoming, cautious and gradual, in food and in her attempts, often haphazard, to cook.’

Throughout, Freeman’s writing is highly evocative, and filled to the brim with similes and comparisons. In her introduction, she comments: ‘Let us call it by its proper name from the beginning. Anorexia. It is a difficult word. It does not come easily. Anorexia nervosa. You cannot mumble it under your breath and hope no one has heard. I do not like the length or uniformity of the word, its harsh X, like a pair of crossed femur bones. You think of X-rays and skeletons.’ She then goes on to explain, in what was clearly an incredibly painful period in her life, the onset of her eating disorder in the summer of 2001. She details the foods she gave up, the things she hid from others, and the hunger which was always present. Freeman tells us: ‘Writing this does not come easily. When I think of the worst of my illness, it still stirs something close to grief, mourning those years lost to hunger.’

The Reading Cure is candid, and the author is always keen to share her experiences. She expresses, with incredible honesty, how her disorder affected her selfhood: ‘I have called my illness a Jabberwock… Anorexia is very like a Jabberwock. You share your head with a monster whiffling malice and nonsense, burbling that you are fat, foul, snivelling, worthless. In the library of your mind, it tears its claws through pages, stamps dirt across covers, lashes at pen pots and ink stands with its tail and beats its high-domed head and scaled shoulders against the door when you try to shut it out. 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, in my head.’

Freeman writes very openly about some of the fears surrounding food which she still harbours: ‘I may be nervous about cheeses, cakes, red meat, puddings, breads, and bagels, but I will eat them. I can quiet my nerves, the more so if politeness – at a dinner, in company – demands it.’ She is still unable to eat chocolate, but can manage most other things. This is not a book of failures, though; she writes at length about the struggles which she has overcome, and the courage which she has displayed time after time. She says: ‘What I have found in reading isn’t a dictionary of foodstuffs – A is for apple amber, B is for beautiful soup, C is for cheese on toast – but a whole library of reasons to eat, share, live, to want to be well.’

Although The Reading Cure was selected as part of various Books of the Year lists in 2018, I do not recall reading much about it, even at the time. I pulled the following words from the many glittering reviews which can be found strewn about the paperback version: ‘miraculous’, ‘a tale of joy’, ‘enchanting and original’, and ‘healing, mouthwatering’. I agree, and want to add that The Reading Cure is a book well worth picking up. Freeman writes at length about why literature is so wonderful, and the ways in which it helped to save her life. The books which she mentions are many and varied, and the chapters about children’s literature especially – The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh – are rather delightful.

The Reading Cure is a truly engaging and considered memoir, which includes a lovely balance of warmth and honesty. Freeman touchingly describes so many elements of her struggles and recovery, and those pieces of writing which have sustained and encouraged her. The Reading Cure is a really lovely appreciation of so many things – books, the pleasure of eating, the company of others, the joy which can often be found in trying new things, or reuniting with an old favourite.

[Karen Ireland · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the age of fourteen, Laura Freeman was diagnosed with anorexia. The Only joy in her life is her love of books when she is bedridden we meet the authors whom help her get through this difficult time and help her look at food in a new way.

This was a very moving read and the author shared every up hill battle she had when it came to eating and how to this day it still a fight she faces.

I loved how Virginia Woolf own struggles with food came up and how the author found a kindred soul in Virginia, I would like to read Virginia Woolf letters. I have read some of Charlies Dickson books but love the idea of take a year to read them all.

This was a book for anyone whom has struggles in life to show them that you can get through it in time and you will have good days and bad but keep pushing forward and hopeful one day you will find some happiness again.

[Beth Bonini · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What I have found in reading isn’t a dictionary of foodstuffs - A is for apple amber, B is for beautiful soup, C is for cheese on toast - but a whole library of reasons to eat, share, live, to want to be well.”

Laura Freeman is a self-confessed ‘glutton’ for books, and she makes an eloquent case for the ways in which reading - and specific writers - have taught her to eat enough to not just live, but take pleasure in living. Having starved herself through most of her adolescence - and having spent at least one year of that time bed-bound - Freeman’s grip on life was shaky in the extreme. Books became a way of connecting to a sane world, a joyous world, at the very least a different world. First of all, books were a way of escaping from her own dangerous mind; later, they became a potent form of ‘deprogramming’ the dangerous messages that anorexia had carved into her psyche. As she read her way through all of Dickens, through the World War I poets and memoirists, through food writers like M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David, through travel writers like Laurie Lee and Patrick Leigh Fermor, through Virginia Woolf, through beloved childhood classics, through Harry Potter, Freeman began to reconnect the idea of food with pleasure, with health, with strength, with energy, with kindness and generosity, with recovery from illness. Gradually, mostly tentatively, but sometimes with ‘zest’, she began to eat enough to enjoy life again.

I’ve always believed that reading is solace, escape, mental stimulation and emotional succour - and Freeman’s joy in words, and her own great talent for deploying them, make a pleasure out of reading what is at times quite painful.

Although Freeman is definitely more comfortable with feelings couched in metaphors, and cravings and greediness at a literary remove, she manages moments of piercing honesty about the self-flagellating mental tortures of anorexia. She describes the irrational, starved mind as both a gibbering ‘Jabberwock’ and a smashed library. If you have never experienced an eating disorder, and cannot understand why someone who is starving ‘just won’t eat’, then perhaps you will glean some insight into this torturous, self-punishing state of mind. If you have suffered from anorexia, or have been a first-hand witness at that battle, then this book may stir up moments of intense recognition and emotional discomfort. In the Epilogue, particularly, my throat kept catching with choked-back tears. I think it is partly because one senses how strong a grip the disease still has on Laura Freeman, for all that she will now (occasionally) permit herself eggs or butter or a small ice cream. Her struggle is so present and ongoing, despite the great distance she has travelled in her recovery.

At the very least, this memoir will probably make you want to wallow in a great many books.
4.5 stars


”Reading has also given me spells to say under my breath, charms against Jabberwock voices. Galoshes. Courage. Good supper. Strong Tea. Learning something. Learn how the world works and what wags it. On.”

[Tumblyhome (Caroline) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my goodness I loved this book. I didn’t want to ever finish it.

My Mum read it not so long ago and talked my ears off about it. We don’t normally read the same books. In fact, although we both love reading, we couldn’t be more different in the books we pick up.

So when she bought me this one, having enjoyed it herself so much, I was sceptical. I had a stack of other books planned for reading next but out of politeness for the gift I thought I better read it first.

But I was in heaven reading The Reading Cure. It is a truly beautiful book. It isn’t a book about Anorexia, it is a book about how books and food bring comfort, companionship and warmth to the soul. It is how books open our world and challenge us in the most unexpected ways. It is about encouragement in our darkest hours and it is about wonder.
The book made me gasp, cry, laugh, rush to the book shop, pick beloved books off my shelf and flick through the pages again. It made me desperately want to make a ‘haystack of toast’ and cocoa. It made me dream of sitting in the Mediterranean sunshine eating fresh ‘bread and stew warmed to idiocy by wine in a mountain tavern’
It made me order every Virginia Woolf book I haven’t got and start on her diaries…
Basically I can not recommend this book enough.. it has given me a ‘marvellous hunger, a voluptuous hunger, a swooning, insatiate, invincible hunger.’ For reading and food.
My mum is a truly brilliant and intrepid cook… and now I can add this book to Dickens and My Family and Other Animals as the only books we totally agree on.

[Sophy H · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

What I liked about this book, as the author herself points out, is that usually stories of eating disorder "survivors" end when the individual "recovers" from their "struggle period"; whereas here, the whole of the story concentrates on the ongoing after-struggle and the tools used to cope then. I use inverted commas above entirely unpretentiously, as survivor, recovery and struggle can't ever really encompass what those with eating disorders experience, and its never that cut and dried.

I like the way Laura describes how every meal and every experience with food will always be a grapple of some sort, but the books she has read, the pages she has immersed herself in, and characters she has met upon the many pages have strengthened her resolve somewhat in the scuffle.

Her writing is not astounding or groundbreaking, more homely and truthful.

Some phrases which stood out for me were:-

"..........there is redemption in reading." (so true)

(about her mum) "....She wanted only for me to have enough energy to read books, go to school, .... to have friends, .....to visit galleries, to sketch, to walk in the park, travel abroad, to have a life worth living."

"I may bankrupt myself, the shelves may buckle, but I could never be sated, never be too fat, full, gorged with books." (hear hear)

Whatever the ailment, reading is always the cure.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not finish. Very boring and fails to make connection between how the books actually made the impact to her life which would expand her "cure" to other people more effectively if that was the goal of writing such a book.

[Mahala · Rating 4 out of 5]

I cried so much reading this book. I have never had anorexia, but I have lived with this blistering loneliness, the isolation that comes with knowing your problems are eating you alive and yet don’t seem worth treating or even talking about. I’ve known the feeling of not having earned my existence, of denying myself sleep or the next meal unless I met whatever task I’d set for myself. Laura is so graphic in her deprivations, of simmering a chicken sliver in drops of stock, nibbling cereal bars in Italy etc, but what hits the reader like a punch to the gut is the shrinking of her heart as she starves herself, her yammering ‘Jabberwock’ that steals our breath.

The flip side is the food she finally grants herself and the way she relives the books that inspire her appetite. Roast per Dickens, butter via Mary Fisher, the potatoes of wartime poets - they draw her out of her cave. The children’s book section was my favourite - I read the Secret Garden’s classic line ‘How does tha’ like thysel’?’ and my heart leapt. This book looks quiet and literary, another biography about a writer’s life in books. Don’t let that fool you. This book is a RIDE.

[Kaisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent memoir on illness, reading and food. I was expecting to “like” this book as it is about food and books (big fans of those, I am) what I didn’t expect was to “love” this book. What a thoughtful, honest and talented writer Laura Freeman is.

[Thelastwordreview · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura Freeman is a freelance writer and has written for magazines and newspapers such as The Spectator, Standpoint, The Times, TLS, and Slightly Foxed to name but a few. Laura has recently released her first book and what a read this really turned out to be. Not hard to see why I have always enjoyed reading Laura’s writing. The Reading Cure: How Books Restored my Appetite is a memoir. Laura at the age of fourteen was diagnosed anorexia and his is her story, a journey of how books and reading helped her on her road to recovery.

I know at first hand as a family member suffered from anorexia for many years with little or no help apart from the love of her family around her. For Laura Freeman like all who have suffered from anorexia, they come to loathe themselves and will avoid eating and any situations that will involve food. For more than fifteen years Freeman has been a recovering from this dreadful illness. There was one part of Freeman’s life that she continued to enjoy and that was her love of literature and through reading she discovered food and learned to start enjoying food through the pages of her favourite books.

The journey to recovery is never an easy journey to take and not always a successful one as she writes in her memoir. After spells in hospital and various treatment programmes she read Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man and this tells of him devouring boiled eggs and cocoa. So this was the beginning of the road to recovery for Laura Freeman. Then she progressed onto Dickens and we all know of how well food is talked of in Dicken’s novels. From here she clearly could see that there was a better life to be had.

Freeman writes just beautifully and it is inspiring. She openly talks of her younger life and how her anorexia started and the chaos that her life became, her descriptions of food are just bountiful that you can almost taste the fare on offer. Freeman’s joy of literature and reading is there to be enjoyed and to rejoice at. The optimism of how she copes on her journey is just breathtaking. This is her story of hunger and also obsession, there is happiness here to. The Reading Cure is a brave account of her recovery. Books and reading can cure. Here is the proof if it was ever needed moving and evocative. Delighted to recommend The Reading Cure by Laura Freeman.

272 Pages.

[Lisa Starr · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book

[Owen Townend · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know very little about anorexia so the prospect of learning through the medium of literature seemed very attractive to me. That being said I only really benefited from Freeman's personal experiences as this is more of a memoir than a formal guide to the disease (by the author's own testament).

She has managed to make reading a ballast through the tougher days of her condition: something for her to aspire to. She reads about Dickensian meals with great relish and feels a strong affinity with Virginia Woolf's thoughts on depression. Indeed Freeman's taste in literature appears to be mostly classic in nature. Most of the authors and titles featured have, of course, stood the test of time and can certainly be heartening but I still came away feeling that this all was a very cultured middle-class approach to treating anorexia and therefore potentially isolating to those with the disease that have not had the same opportunities as Freeman.

While she is honest about controversial aspects of the disease and goes into some detail about her own support network, I did find myself wanting to know more about her daily experiences. Discussions of food in literature may have initially been the main draw for me but I soon craved to know more about her relationships and memorable incidents where she triumphed over the voice in her head telling her not to eat. By the last page, I felt like I only knew so much about Freeman's struggle and admired her enough to want to know much more.

As such I am loathe to recommend The Reading Cure to those seeking to learn about anorexia. In fact I believe this would be a much more rewarding read for those who have started formal treatment and are looking for extra support. Also, if you are hungry for chapter essays on the delicious dishes of English Literature past, this might prove a book to devour.

[Nikki Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I went in to this book thinking in was fiction, but was surprised to find out that it is in fact a story of non-fiction.

At the age of fourteen, Laura was diagnosed with anorexia and this is her story of how (while she still battles at times with the illness), books and the many culinary tales she has read helped to overcome many challenges and get to a more stable, healthier place in her journey.

While Laura’s story is heartbreaking, provides hope in overcoming illness and encourages one to keep going, the way this book is written, her story becomes very lost in the detailed descriptions and copied texts from the stories she has read - I understand that these stories helped her along the way, but and it just made for a tedious reading experience.

Laura has a very poetic way of writing, that is beautiful and there’s definitely a born storyteller here, her story also had a fairytale vibe, which captures both the dark and light of her illness. She does note how much writing this book has helped her and I hope she continues to write to continue on her journey of healing.

[Joanne Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An utterly incredible book for so many reasons - the strength and bravery of the author to write such an honest book, the power of mother love, the insightful description of living with anorexia (evidence that the person best placed to understand their mental illness is indeed the individual themselves) and the power of books to teach and heal. This book had me in tears at Laura's despair and saying 'well done' to her when she defeated her Jabberwock in an internal battle and allowed herself to eat something previously forbidden.
Such an amazing book and an ode to the wonderfulness of food.

[Elizabeth Bridcut · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book, highly recommended. This is a memoir of a journalist/writer who developed anorexia nervosa as a teenager. The author does describe some of what her teenage years, when the anorexia was at its worst, were like but primarily this is an account of what happened next and the role that reading played in helping her move from a 'functional anorexic' subsisting on a highly restricted diet to someone with a much healthier attitude to food - albeit that old monsters do still lurk and rear their heads from time to time. This book will also expand your 'want to read' pile!!

[Nik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eating disorders are hard to explain to people. This book does a pretty good job of describing the hell that is experiencing it and the ongoing, slow process of "recovery" - not really a road, more like trying to find your way through a forest. And learning to love eating again is often the hardest part.

This isn't a hold-your-hands #blessed sort of a book. This is an honest book. Although it does come off as a bit pretentious sometimes, the narrator is self-aware enough to understand her own failings and the impact her eating disorder has on her family, especially her mother.

[Tara Lepore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful book found totally by accident while perusing the clinical psychological treatments section at the library. This is anything but clinical; finding a way to gradually, gradually begin to nourish the body after years of feeding the mind with books, focusing on their delightful descriptions of food. Also goes far to ridicule clean eating fads and how detrimental these reductionist diets are for people in recovery. I'd recommend this to anyone who's ever had problems around eating, as a welcome antidote to more popular self-help books, as it offers an alternative view to how you can turn to art and literature to begin to build up meaning in your life in personalised, joyful and incremental ways.

[Stephanie Affinito · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a beautiful, lyrical emotional journey through one woman's recovery through an eating disorder and the books that helped her heal. Part memoir, part personal transformation, this book will deeply resonate with anyone connected to disorders and anyone who believes in the power of books to heal.

[Paulina Rowińska · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave it three stars, because the talented author knows how to write beautifully. The book, however, was boring, and I thought I'd give up.
This wasn't the biggest problem though. The author is very, very sick, but keeps mentioning that she's so much better — basically, almost recovered. I'm not judging her for her struggles, of course, but this is sending a wrong message to anyone struggling with an eating disorder. This is not what being recovered looks like! Being terrified of chocolate, eating just a morsel of a leftover cake and writing a good few paragraphs about it, saving some foods for special occasions, going on daily walks — this is not what healthy people do. Not to mention that food obsession, which this book is the best sign of, is one of the most common effects of starvation. So, the book should have serious trigger warnings at the very least, and a foreward that highlights these, and many other, problematic parts.
I wish the author all the best and I hope that she'll fully recover. But I'd STRONGLY discourage anyone who's ever had any issues with food from opening this book.

[Rachana Hegde · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a tremendous gift. There was something deeply satisfying about sitting down to read this with hot cups of oat milk and dark chocolate or with a dinner of warm pasta drowned in Parmesan cheese and white sauce.

It was the reference to the Edge Chronicles and the harvests from the Deepwoods that finally brought on a wave of nostalgia. I had read that series years ago craving earth apples and delberries. I was obsessed with the escape it gave me as a kid.

And there are so many beautiful, wonderful quotes in here:

'This is what Mum had tried to tell me. That eating would allow me to pursue the things I loved.'
'She wanted only for me to have enough energy to read books, go to school, then to university, to have friends...to sketch, to walk in the park, travel abroad, to have a life worth living.'
'When I read, when I walk, when I am taken out of myself I am quiet, my mind is steady.'

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an incredibly beautiful read I'll remember for a long time. For me, food has always been a joyful experience. My reading life has always been tied to food, too, so the concept of this book fascinated me from the get-go. 

The generosity with which Freeman shares the darkest moments of her anorexia gave me an understanding of an illness I can't even imagine. Somehow, even in those dark chapters, she lovingly weaves in descriptions of the most sumptuous and scrumptious literary feasts, powerful in their nostalgia and instantly warming.

But I think the parts of this books I will take with me are the moments of hope. In the relentless struggle with her mind Jabberwock, books provide solace and comfort, and a reminder that there's always another day. "And another, and another, and another yet to come."

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite' is a memoir written by Laura Freeman. Given that this is a book that explains how the author helped overcome an eating disorder by reading about food, initially I found the title concerning. Declaring anything a ‘cure’ has a couple of unfortunate associations: it makes it sound like a self-help manual, or some bit of nineteenth-century quackery (‘water cures’, etc). I was worried that the book would try to end by pressing its method on the reader. The media is flooded with cheap self-care solutions as a substitute for real treatment of mental health problems, and too often this becomes a way of transferring responsibility onto the shoulders of the sufferer. For young people today, breathing exercises and dietary hygiene are sometimes talked about as if they were a substitute for decent working conditions or access to healthcare.

Happily, this book does nothing of the kind. In spite of the title, it never actually suggests that one could ‘cure’ anorexia via mouth-watering descriptions of food. Instead, it provides an appreciative survey of food in literature with reflections as to how the books mentioned became a part of the author’s life. Though reading did help with Freeman’s anorexia, there’s no attempt to turn this into a system, or to look at it through the lens of psychology or psychotherapy — and for that I was grateful. It makes no great claims. It is simply a considered expression of what worked for the author.

Dickens is perhaps the keystone here. All the others matter, but it is to him the author returns again and again. There are two aspects to this: the lush, plentiful, homely descriptions of food and drink in his novels; but also the scenes of penury, both accidental and deliberate. Early on, Freeman is especially repulsed by those characters (so common in Dickens) who indulge themselves while deliberately depriving others. An important realisation comes when she realises that anorexia has a way of turning herself into one of those mean-spirited souls, with that same selfishness both created by and inflicted upon herself. How much better to be one of the good and the kind — the eaters, the sharers.

There’s a brisk streak of Britishness — mostly Englishness — that runs through this book. From Dickens to the poets of the First World War through to Laurie Lee and Patrick Leigh Fermor, most of the writers cited are part of a fairly familiar old school Eng Lit canon. Their names exude a certain sort of small-c conservative establishment quality. There’s nothing here to scare the horses. Rabelais is mentioned only because the author finds him repulsive. Virginia Woolf is the closest we get to modernism, and even then Freeman is initially only preoccupied with her diaries and letters; the novels come later. She admits to a certain tendency towards male voices in her writing, with a few notable exceptions (like the great American food writer MFK Fisher). For the most part there is a great deal of manly men eating manly food. ‘Niminy-piminy’ — a contemptuous descriptor for a certain effeminate primness — is frequently invoked, with a certain self-consciousness, as the antithesis of everything good here.

But if the book has a good deal to say about the gendered implications of its taste in food, it has little to say about the question of class. A couple of observations are offered: that it is often the poorest characters in Dickens who are also the most generous; and that so many of the writers she quotes weren’t cooks themselves, but had their meals cooked for them. Not much is made of either of these aspects. Eating as a necessary daily act is barely present here; eating anything is always special, always rarified. There is no sense of food as anything else. There’s a part of me which thinks perhaps this is always how we ought to think about food. But it seems irresponsible to forget that for many people, cooking is work first; and if we think about cooking as only the means to a delightful end, that might lead us towards thinking the work doesn’t deserve to be recognised as such.

Cooking is only a small part of the pleasurable dynamic of eating in this book — it’s there, but it isn’t the main course (so to speak). If the book has a thesis you could summarise it as follows: that the generous eating of wholesome foods is a good in itself, but it’s best considered as a preparation for work to come. Eating not just for the experience of eating, but eating as a means of fortification, consolidation, restoration, before embarking on some noble labour.

There is something disquieting in this. It isn’t so much that I disagree — my own feelings about it are more or less the same, up to and including a certain contempt for the ‘clean eating’ movement — but it is difficult to shake the sense of a conservative work ethic looming behind it all. If you want to work, you must eat, and vice-versa; gluttony as a relation of laziness is to be deplored. What if one person can’t work as hard as another – do they not get to eat as much? It’s an intense way of characterising food which seems like an evolution of those thoughts which prompted the original disorder: that every bite must in some sense have its final justification. But perhaps this is the only way to live with such thoughts. If you can’t get rid of them, you might as well turn them into something with which it is possible to live.