The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite

By Laura Freeman.
Published by Weidenfeld.

Laura Freeman still craves hot chocolate, drunk from a tiny blue-and-white cup and saucer, “the sort Renoir painted”. But she’s unlikely to let it past her lips any time soon. Freeman hasn’t touched chocolate since consuming a third of a Mars bar from an airport vending machine in her teens, wrapping it neatly “because lord knows I like things to be neat” and throwing it away in disgust. 

It was the same year that, aged 15, she was diagnosed with anorexia. For two years she had secretly starved herself while the voices in her head told her: “You are worthless, you have no right to eat, you don’t deserve a life.” 

It wasn’t always so. As a child she relished food. At one point in this memoir she ponders: “Was I ever more content than reading my Harry Potter while Ed [her brother] read his, each of us breaking our teeth on bars of Toblerone?” 

What destroyed her once- healthy relationship with food? She points the finger at her “bullying” all-girls secondary school. Being academic and overly sensitive, at the start of her third year she vowed to make herself less “conspicuous”. So she stopped eating. Almost every food group was meticulously struck off, down to her cod liver oil tablets, until she was two stone underweight.

A freelance journalist who writes regularly for The Sunday Times, Freeman is bracingly honest, her fresh voice and considered words describing a misunderstood illness that has seen hospital admissions for the under-19s double in England over six years. Take this metaphor of her teenage mental state. 

Being a bookworm, she asks the reader to imagine a healthy mind as a library. Light, airy, ordered, inviting. In hers, “the bookcases have fallen, their glass fronts smashed, their contents in disarray across the floor...Rain and damp have got at the books, spoiling their bindings and soaking their pages.” 

Admitting to hearing voices (her own “Jabberwocks”) was her most painful revelation. One night she tucked her skeletal body into her wardrobe and closed the doors, “because I thought I could shut out the noise”. She lay in the dark and cried, “the voices howling louder and louder”. 

Her brilliant mother and her doctors kept her alive during the hunger years, until she could feed herself and go up to Cambridge where she gained a double first in history of art in 2010. Soon after, she read Siegfried Sassoon’s description of boiled eggs in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and her curiosity was “piqued”. “Were there other writers with as hearty an appetite?” she asks. 

This is the book’s theme. How culinary morsels, filleted from the works of Sassoon, Dickens, Robert Graves, Virginia Woolf and dozens of other authors helped Freeman face down her fear of food. In the bibliography, 169 books are name-checked. 

Perhaps a prix fixe menu might have been more digestible than an endless Babette’s Feast of literary food references. Because while she did eventually eat a Yorkshire pudding, not dissimilar to Mrs Ellerbeck’s in JL Carr’s A Month in the Country, made Elizabeth David’s fabulous break, beat, butter, shake omelette and sampled much more (but never conquered chocolate), one wonders if this really “restored” her appetite, as the book title suggests. By page 193, she instinctively reveals that her favourite food is... porridge. As plain as Oliver Twist’s. 

When pushed for a favourite supper, she says: “Perhaps... I could ask for a leg from one of Mum’s roast chickens, skins as crisp as parchment”, and “just one or two frabjous new potatoes”. 

What is more likely, and makes more interesting copy, is how her voracious appetite for reading helped keep the voices “bridled” and her mind distracted. Freeman admits as much in the epilogue when she writes: “If you remember the words of only one person in this book, let it be Merlyn” (in TH White’s The Once and Future King), who says: “The best thing for being sad is to learn something. Learn why the world works and what wags it.” 

If Freeman can continue to do that and write about it in her engaging style, surely a novel beckons. Hot chocolate drunk from a tiny blue-and-white cup can wait.