A review by florapants84
The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite by Laura Freeman

5.0

"For fifteen years before taking Bevis off the shelf, I had been hungry. Sometimes acutely so, sometimes less, but always going to bed each night empty and cold. For two of those fifteen years, I had been starving."

This was a delicious read! Laura Freeman takes us into her confidence, and shows how crippling anorexia was for her, and the years thereafter when she was recovering. A voracious reader from a young age, she read herself well with classics like Dickens, memoirists of WWI, and Virginia Woolf's fictitious meals and diary entries.

I've never made it through a Dickens novel; I've attempted David Copperfield and Oliver Twist at various stages of my life, and all unsuccessfully. Freeman went through all of his works in one year, looking for solace, comfort and appetite in the meals he wrote about and the characters that ate with such gusto.

She even goes back to reading children's classics that feature healthy relationships with food like The Wind in the Willows and Swallows and Amazons. Honestly, most of the books mentioned were books I haven't read yet. My To-Be-Read pile grew by a foot, and I can't wait to dive into them! The authors I'm most excited to read are food writers M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David (authors I'm familiar with already). Unknown authors to me were travel writers like Patrick Leigh Fermor and Laurie Lee's autobiographical books about his walking travels after leaving Britain.

"Paddy's happy, effortless eating is perfected in Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese. At Kalamata in midsummer, with his girlfriend Joan and friend Xan Fielding, Paddy sits down to dinner above the quayside flagstones that throw back the heat like a casserole with the lid off. They step fully dressed into the sea and carry their table a few yards out, then three chairs. They sit up to their waists in cool water:

The waiter, arriving a moment later, gazed with surprise at the empty space on the quay; then, observing us with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure, he stepped unhesitatingly into the sea, advanced waist deep with a butler's gravity, and, saying nothing more than 'Dinner-time', placed our meal before us—three beautifully grilled kephali, piping hot, and with their golden brown scales sparkling. To enjoy their marine flavour to the utmost, we dipped each by its tail for a second into the sea at our elbows."

Now that is mindful eating! I'm determined to work my way through all of Fermor's books! Not to be outdone, Woolf gets her own chapter! It was one of the most insightful and moving ones in the book. I've yet to read any Woolf, but she moved me so much!

"While Woolf has been the most extraordinary consolation—and no other writer has so helped me make sense of my own mind, nor offered such a rubric for how I might mend it—she is also a writer who frightens me. For long periods she succeeded in reigning in and stabling her galloping horses, tied them, kept them in hay. For years, she managed it. And this from her 1935 diary, January, when she was fifty-two:

'I wish I could find some way of composing my mind—It's absurd to let it be ravaged by scenes...On the contrary, it is better to pull on my galoshes & go through the gale to lunch off scrambled eggs & sausages.'

That is the remedy to: 'I can't fight any longer.' That is what I hold tight from Virginia Woolf. Galoshes. Courage. On."

I'm sitting in a hotel pub in Ireland looking over notes and pages from this book while a feast is laid before me as I write this review. Plenty of local people chatting each other up. It's great. I can't help but think of how much more I appreciate it after this book. It's a fab one. Get your hands on a copy!