Making a meal of bland fears

EATING MYSELF

BY CANDIDA CREWE

Bloomsbury, 256pp, 12.99

CONFESSIONAL MEMOIRS are the darlings of publishers, whether their focus is alcohol or drug addiction, childhood abuse, serial infidelities, eating disorders or madness, always providing the confessor is prepared to dish the dirt. For most of us, daily life offers up more than enough middle-of-the-road dysfunction. We want pain and humiliation, lots of it.

Within the eating disorder genre, there's now quite a range to choose from. Anorexia and bulimia are a bit old hat, newer and increasingly popular is the compulsive chubby's diary. Two recent examples shine out. Fat Girl: A True Story, written by an American, Judith Moore, described her repellent eating habits, her abusive mother, the meaty stink of her own menstruation, and endless sexual rejection. Drenched with self-loathing, it was compelling.

Then came English journalist William Leith's battle against the blubber in The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict. Here was more self-loathing and lack of resolve, more big love-ins with the fridge, humiliating sex with his girlfriend, some hard research into the nation's rising obesity levels and an interview with Dr Atkins. Gripping stuff.

Now we have Candida Crewe on eating herself. Well, not literally, she's too restrained for auto-cannibalism, although she does explain what it is (the starved body starts breaking down fat, then muscle and eventually its organs to keep going).

It's a book about herself. She decided to tell her own story about her "dysfunction around food", because "it doesn't wildly differ from that of every woman I have known or ever met".

Crewe is a journalist and novelist, the daughter of former restaurant critic and author Quentin Crewe and novelist Angela Huth. In her early forties, she lives in west London with her husband Donovan Wylie, their three sons and her bad habit.

But how bad is it really? At the time of writing she weighs eight stone and 13lb. She is just over 5ft 5in. When she gets up in the morning, "I can walk downstairs and finally contemplate what is in store for me, over the next 12 hours or so, in terms of food."

Gosh, you wonder, what? She continues: "Rarely specifics at this early stage of the morning but projected volumes permissible in the course of the day ahead - minimal, normal or lots."

She says she doesn't eat breakfast. Or rather she does, but doesn't. I don't get that. Next, she observes that while historians and commentators are better placed to write about the cultural causes of eating disorders, she feels she knows "the whys and the wherefores, from traditional female oppression to today's pernicious influence of fashion, media and magazines and what have you".

She veers off to give us glimpses of her family and upbringing, both posh and privileged. Minor stately homes, her old-Etonian father, his snobby intolerance about language, her mother- a gorgeous Chelsea babe.

Later come the divorces and serial remarriages on both sides. Suddenly, she swerves off to describe early memories of food. "There was only one negative incident with food - we all have one, don't we, encrusted on the mind?" she writes. You think, hallelujah, a grotesque opportunity at last. She was sent down the corridor to polish off a plate of leeks. That's it.

Reading this is like being on a rambling car journey when the driver keeps getting lost and changing direction. It's all mixed up with no proper signage.

Umpteen different schools attended, but none named, a one-night stand "with a regret", no revelations about male responses to her naked body, few descriptions of food.

She wears a lot of black. She hates exercise. She likes to blend into the background at parties by standing against a wall or pretending to be interested in other people to deflect attention from herself. And when she walks into a room, she says: "I cannot settle until I have taken into account where I am in the pecking order of fatness and therefore where I am in the pecking order generally".

A paragraph later: "It is a quick and silent overall measurement I take and not a judgmental one."

What's she so scared of? We all assess each other's relative youth and beauty in a nanosecond.

Being judgmental is OK. Her morbid fear of offending anyone, the reader, her mother (her father has died), her husband (who, she says was horrified when he read the first bit of the book, not surprisingly) and above all herself, is far more of an impediment than her bonkers but banal fear of food.