Amber Husain TELL ME HOW YOU EAT with Eleanor Penny

Tell Me How You Eat

In a world where it feels as though the value of your life can be gauged by the goodness in your dinner, it is possible, even easy, to lose the will to live. This became particularly obvious to writer Amber Husain when suddenly, despite almost thirty years of practice, it seemed she had forgotten how to eat.
Medical wisdom tries fix the problem non-eater by teaching them the rules of Good Diet. But what if the problem is precisely the narrowing of life to questions of personal goodness? Suspecting there might be more to her stand-off with food than matters of identity and diet, Husain embarked on an enquiry into the special role of eating in our relationship with the world.
Combining a personal account of modern eating-disorder treatments, from the disturbing to the sublime, with a sprawling collective history of eating in hard times, Tell Me How You Eat unearths the astonishing effect of how we feed ourselves and others, not just on who we are, but on how we perceive our own political power. In doing so, it marks a bold and inspiring confrontation with our very understanding of food.

Amber Husain

Amber Husain is the author of Replace Me, Meat Love , and Tell Me How You Eat. Her essays on politics, literature and art have been published in Granta, the LRB, New Left Review, The White Review, Baffler, The Believer, LA Review of Books and New York Times Magazine.

Her books have been featured or reviewed in the national and international press, including The Guardian, la Repubblica and ABC Australia. Events include readings and discussions at the London Review Bookshop, the ICA London, and Edinburgh International Book Festival.

She has a PhD from UCL in the history of art and mind-body medicine in late-twentieth-century Britain. She teaches history of art, creative writing and criticism.

She has previously worked as a university research fellow, as a book editor, and as a magazine co-editor.

Eleanor Penny

Eleanor Penny is a writer based in London. She writes essays, journalism, fiction and poetry. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in outlets including The New Statesman, The Independent, In These Times, Verso Books and The London Review of Books, Bower Magazine, and beyond.

She is on the editorial team at The Ecologist

She co-founded and co-directs the independent media production company Planet B Productions

She teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths University of London, City Lit, the Poetry School and more.

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