At the age of fourteen, Laura Freeman was diagnosed with anorexia. But even at her lowest point, the one appetite she never lost was her love of reading.
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.
‘[A] beautifully written hybrid of memoir and literary criticism . . . This book is about the anguish of anorexia, written by a bookworm unfurling her wings as a writer of considerable power’ Cathy Rentzenbrink, The Times
A Dickens of a Project
At midnight on New Year’s Eve 2012, as fireworks burst over Hyde Park, I was propped up in bed with a paperback feeling a terrific failure. The book was Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. I was 459...
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