No author can ever control what any reader does with their book: from burning it to misreading it to taking beautiful kinds of inspiration from it, it’s all up for grabs. But I tried, throughout the writing of this book, to make it very difficult for any reader to come away from their reading either with tips for “doing anorexia better” or with any feeling of wanting to do it better .

Then, I got to the end of the writing and realized that I had no idea whether I’d succeeded. So I ran a rather complicated experiment to find out. The publish/don’t publish criteria were crystal clear, and happily, the book passed the test.

The results of the experiment were published in the Journal of Eating Disorders; you can read the article here.

The book is published in paperback and ebook forms on Amazon; you can buy them, for example, on Amazon UK and US, or search for “troscianko very hungry anorexic” on any other Amazon marketplace.

The book is written mostly in dialogue form, initially as a conversation between two voices whose identities may or may not feel clear to you as you begin. Essentially, the book is about one example (my own) of what makes it possible to leave behind forever the desire to eat less, be thinner, subsist rather than exist. And the most crucial of the requirements is, of course, a huge amount of food.

I hope that this book’s many interleaving dialogues manage to trace some of the resolutely natural magic of what happens when you stop keeping yourself hungry and let real, sugary, fatty fuel do its work, in every grandest and tiniest aspect of what it means to be alive.

Here’s a bit of the first chapter to whet your appetite.