Confessions of a Food Addict

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From a review of Confessions of a Food Addict by William Leith

The best writing in the book is his memoir of gaining weight. Leith writes about food addiction the way Hunter Thompson wrote about drugs and politics, with a hallucinatory desperation, a feverish imagining. He writes slightly ahead of the beat, his pulses quick. “Inside the binge, you are pure hunger — pure aspiration. Nothing else. You have created a time zone more present than the present. You know you shouldn’t do it, you know it’s not right, you know you’ll regret it, you know it will degrade your self-esteem, but none of these things matter, because you are hoping for this degradation — inside the binge, your degraded self-esteem is a ticket to freedom.”