The only word that hurts

It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It up-ends your thoughts, turns bone into flesh, makes life unlivable, death seem glorious.’ In her first book, the literary critic and art historian Laura Freeman is determined to tell the truth about her recovery from the illness that ravaged her adolescence and early adult life. The result is the reverse of a misery memoir. Freeman’s celebratory book is about getting better and learning to savour life again by doing what she most loves: reading.

Freeman was diagnosed with anorexia when she was 15 and had already been ill for two years. She was told she faced a five- to ten-year recovery and was invalided out of school for many months, at her weakest leaving her bed only on weekly visits to doctors, therapists and bookshops.‘If words had been calories, I would have been gorged.