In 2020, I ran out of all excuses not to write a book. It had been bubbling up inside me for years, not so much as the book I wanted to write, but the one I had to because otherwise other people were just going to keep writing it for me, abbreviated and sensationalised, softened and squashed into claustrophobic little corners of newspapers and never told in its full integrity, the way I lived it.

This book is for every person who ever asked me: ‘how do I recover from an eating disorder?’ And every parent who ever asked, ‘how do I help my child to recover from an eating disorder?’ For the many journalists who’ve prodded me to speak about anorexia and recovery, and brazenly asked for accompanying photos. For every medical professional who didn’t quite get it. For my mum twenty years ago, wondering aloud what she’d done wrong, when I didn’t have the words to tell her all the things she’d done right. But mostly I wrote this book for me; to make sense of the past; to lead old ghosts to rest; to laugh at the absurdly painful and the painfully absurd; to condemn cruelty and carelessness and suggest a more compassionate approach to treating mental illness; to vent anger that had been stifled by shame; to cry tears I’d blinked away, to thank some and challenge others; to remember; to craft a strange and dizzying time in my life into a story, to give it an ending and then, literally, to shut the book on that chapter. Really, it was to make my 11-year-old self feel seen and heard in the way she yearned to be, so that she could go back to playing and I could carry on with the rest.

This book has mature content and may be triggering for anyone who has struggled with an eating disorder. However, it’s what I needed to read before, during and after my eating disorder, so who I am to tell you what not to read? Use your discretion. I hope it makes you feel things.

‘As well as charting her adolescent battle with anorexia, it offers a darkly compelling, highly topical account of journeying from girlhood to womanhood in the spotlight of global celebrity.’ 

- The Mail on Sunday