The Reading Cure by Laura Freeman

This first book by the journalist and literary critic Laura Freeman is the “reverse of a misery memoir”, said Ruth Scurr in The Spectator. Although it’s partly about anorexia, its overall mood is “celebratory”, as Freeman charts her recovery and how she learnt to “savour life again by doing what she most loves: reading”. Diagnosed with anorexia at the age of 14, Freeman became dangerously ill – and was for three years, she tells us, “weeks from death”. Nursed by her mother, she eventually became a “functioning anorexic”, able to attend university and share occasional meals with friends, but still horrified by the idea of eating normally. This finally changed when, in her mid-20s, she set herself the task of reading all of Dickens in a year. The descriptions of food captivated her; she realised that there was “nothing brave” about starvation in his work. Subsequently, other writers – among them Laurie Lee, M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David – proved similarly valuable companions “on the long journey back to eating with ease”.

The book’s title, The Reading Cure, implies that Freeman’s anorexia is behind her, said Cathy Rentzenbrink in The Times. Her recovery, though, still “feels too fragile”. Not long ago, the “newspapers started to fill up with articles about clean eating”. For a time, Freeman embraced the fad, and her anorexia “came howling back”. While she writes “beautifully about books”, her descriptions of the disease are even more memorable. This book reminded me, at times, of the film Babette’s Feast, said Craig Brown in The Mail on Sunday, in which “mirthless and abstemious Danish villagers are transformed by a delicious feast cooked for them by a French refugee”. Subtle, intelligent and largely free of self-pity, this book is a “tale of joy winning against piety, and the triumph of life over death”.