Laura Freeman

Food has long been a staple of the literary. For readers, literary descriptions of mealtimes and culinary goods can provide fodder for the task of historical inquiry, snapshots of a milieu in a particular time and place, while also being a source of pleasure. The growing trend for recipe books inspired by particular writers, like Pen Vogler’s Tea with Jane Austen and Dinner with Dickens, speaks to an increasing cultural appetite for cooking as a mode of engagement with the past, putting into practice what has long been a feature of readerly consumption. The food writer Bee Wilson suggests that ‘The pleasure of reading about what others eat and drink is somewhere between the satisfaction of feeding and that of being fed’ (‘Pleasures of The Literary Meal’, New Yorker, July 15 2015.) Reading about food, unlike watching a cooking programme, demands of readers an imaginative capacity, and for this reason it is a site of both curiosity and satiation, suspended between the two. At first glance, Laura Freeman’s memoir The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite, appears to turn this narrative on its head, rooted not in the possibilities and pleasures of satisfaction but the deprivation of disordered eating and anorexia, which Freeman was diagnosed with at the age of fourteen. It is the conceit of Freeman’s book, however, as its title suggests, that the vicarious pleasures of reading about food can in turn offer a path to healing.

Freeman’s account of her struggles with anorexia begins by attending to the profound relationship that matters of eating and the body bear not only to literature, but to language itself. In a compelling close reading of our everyday vocabulary, Freeman writes that the disorder’s ‘proper’ name anorexia nervosa has a ‘harsh X, like a pair of crossed femur bones.’ ‘Obese’ and ‘plump’, on the other hand, are ‘plump, greedy words’, as is ‘Rubenesque’, whose ‘rolling R’ and ‘bouncing B insist on ampleness and appetite’. There is something in stake in the words we choose to describe our bodies, and calling the disease by another name would no doubt alter the shades of its associations. Unlike ‘Rubenesque’, the term anorexic is lent no recuperating artistic metaphor, though neither is it ‘purified’ of ‘metaphoric thinking’, to quote Susan Sontag, who writes that ‘it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped’ (Illness as Metaphor, 1977.) It is the word’s very sound and graphology that feel figurative and prejudicing; as Freeman writes, the ‘X of anorexia is angular and alien.’

The Reading Cure is not invested in theorising the ‘alien’ in the same way as a text like Chris Kraus’ Aliens and Anorexia (2000), a hybrid work that also explores questions of women, reading and anorexia but arises from an altogether different, and counter-cultural, context. Where Kraus’ narrator identifies with the work of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, seeking to nuance her biographical fate as ‘the self-loathing and self-starving androgyne’, Freeman finds healing in the hearty, traditional fare of the British literary canon. It is, in the first instance, the historical sense of perspective these texts offer which provide Freeman with a foothold. The ‘gooseberry-and-rhubarb-jam teatimes’ remembered in Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves’ autobiographical writings are all the more vivid because they were ‘so often replayed and imaginatively recreated’ during the war, ‘when every dry biscuit, every tin of sardines came up in a ration wagon’ and ‘each cup of lukewarm trench tea might have been the last.’ For Dickens, the great narrator of the workhouse and the orphanage, there was ‘no beauty, nothing brave in starvation.’ Personal memories of culinary delight are thrown into relief by larger political landscapes, providing Freeman with an analogy for her own condition and its relation to the wider world.

The delights themselves are nonetheless the main event. There is a certain nostalgia that attends Freeman’s roster of classic fare and ‘rare luxuries’, like Sassoon’s ‘ham sandwiches eaten perched on a country gate’, and his ‘slice of cherry tart at a very good cricket tea.’ It is not only the senses of daily fortitude and unfazed indulgence that are being positively invoked but the bucolic way of life for which they are a shorthand, the innocence of a British past. Although this is complicated by chapters on Virginia Woolf’s personal turmoil, where Freeman draws strength ‘from knowing others have had their demons’, along with American women food writers like Elizabeth David and M.F.K Fisher, the book’s bibliography is a broadly traditional one. If the ‘image of a library’ is Freeman’s chosen analogy to ‘describe my mind’, a highly disordered room during the worst moments of her illness, then the shelf which restored some order to the chaos might reasonably be thought of as the one labelled ‘Classics’.

This also extends to the particular food items that prove most palliative, from a post-hike Ploughman’s lunch eaten after a month spent reading Laurie Lee, to beef puddings and Christmas geese. One reviewer identifies this ‘side of’ the book, its ‘Dickensian superfluity’ of meat, as being ‘uncomfortable reading for a vegetarian’ (Patricia Craig, The Irish Times, February 20 2018). Freeman’s descriptions of the foods that have helped her to eat indeed feel untouched by debates around eating meat and contemporary healthy eating discourses. This is no accident, and the book concludes with a polemical riposte against the culture of ‘clean eating’, a ‘wider set of fears about food’ that manifests in ‘absurd’, ‘extreme’ and ‘faddish’ ways, a fog of confusion that – Freeman implores – we must look past in order to ‘Eat with relish.’ This is the only section of the book in the imperative mood, and The Reading Cure is a subjective account of one person’s story, not a self-help book. It may be exemplary for some, and uncomfortable for others – this depends on matters of taste, affiliation and experience. Freeman is self-aware in this regard, writing that she does not ‘have the cure, the cold compress for anyone and everyone who is struggling.’ This candour is perhaps the book’s greatest strength, and Freeman’s charming, even cosy style is offset throughout by an unflinching attention to the devastating power of anorexic thinking. The Reading Cure is the work of someone who is not ‘quite there, but trying’; the road to recovery, like reading, is a life’s work, introducing new and unexpected pleasures along the way.