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.
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