My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss

This comes out in August but you want to pre order it now. Sarah's memoir is about 'thinking and reading, eating and denying your body food, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood.' I could not put it down, even when I was crying too much to see the words. It is not just her honesty, or her determination. It was the way she wrote the voices in her head that also have lived in mine. The way she took the books we grew up with apart, turned them upside down and shook the truth out. I was floored. Stunned. Unmade. Please please read this.

From the back

In the household of Sarah Moss's childhood she learnt that the female body and mind were battlegrounds. 1970s austerity and second-wave feminism came together: she must keep herself slim but never be vain, she must be intelligent but never angry, she must be able to cook and sew and make do and mend, but know those skills were frivolous. Clever girls should be ambitious but women must restrain themselves. Women had to stay small.

Years later, her self-control had become dangerous, and Sarah found herself in A&E. The return of her teenage anorexia had become a medical emergency, forcing her to reckon with all that she had denied her hard-working body and furiously turning mind.