This book will be released in March 2025.
Pre-orders are charged at time of order and the book will be posted to you as soon as it becomes available.
UK postage is 99 pence per order.
Winner of the New Welsh Writing Awards 2017
Written for the sister of a man who died from anorexia, this is a young woman’s experience of the disorder while studying at the University of Oxford.
Catherine Haines’ lively account of student life is enriched with literary, philosophical and existential questions. As the Cambridge Weight Plan spins out of control, a post-graduate’s academic subject, ‘the mind- body problem’, goes through an existential phase to become ‘extraordinary morality’ rather than a mental health problem. The iron will with which Catherine imposes on herself ever more onerous conditions is awe-inspiring. The author is clearly fiercely intelligent, as we can see from the way she exposes the ugly truth behind historical depictions of women with eating disorders and indeed the way society frames abstinence from food as an ally of virtue. However, starving her body means that Catherine also begins to starve her brain. Incisive literary criticism of Hamlet descends into feverish noodlings about Einstein’s theory of relativity. Her descriptions enfold the reader in the hideous illogic of the anorexic.
This is a rigorous, philosophical case for regarding an eating disorder as pilgrimage. My Oxford is a personal exorcism, the kind which writers perform on paper while fighting with demons, fears, fate and death, an exorcism which, while painful, is also saving.
'Superbly written; and as an author myself, I love the sparseness of the text – as if the words were doing to the page what the writer was dong to the flesh. It is a perfect example of the connection between style and content.' – Stephen Stoneham
