Comfort Eating by Grace Dent

This book, the second memoir from the restaurant critic Grace Dent, will make you hungry. Dent is both a Guardian columnist and a Masterchef judge but like many of the best food writers – Nigella Lawson is another – did not start her career writing about food. Dent has written eleven novels for young adults and had a much-missed column called World of Lather about soap operas first. 

Comfort Eating the memoir shares its name with the podcast on which she interviews celebrities about the snacks they eat behind closed doors and plenty more besides. From Siobhan McSweeney and her snack of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk with cheese and onion Taytos and a swig of Guinness to Stephen Fry with his tinned fish, it is is a revelatory and intimate podcast. The book is far cosier than her previous memoir, Hungry (2020) which was a surprisingly profound account of her life so far – as she says it reflected on both “Findus Crispy Pancakes and Alzheimer’s disease.” 

The Hedgehog Diaries by Sarah Sands

A book about hedgehogs is not the obvious next step for Sarah Sands, the former editor of Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today, and before that editor of the Evening Standard. But then Sands has had a rough time of it lately. In The Hedgehog Diaries, she recounts the death of her father, Noel, the news broken to her by her brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who had to climb through a window of her Norfolk house to do so since she wasn’t answering her phone. Hesketh-Harvey, who was a writer and performer and a great favourite of the King, died not long afterwards of heart failure. Julian Sands, the actor made famous by his role in A Room with a View and the father of her eldest son, Henry, went missing while hiking on a Californian mountain in January this year, not long before Hesketh-Harvey died. The actor’s body was not discovered until June.

It might therefore be understandable that Sands has been thinking a great deal about life and death and that she latched on to the poorly hedgehog she and her two-year-old grandson found trapped in the netting by her pond one day.

This Is Not About You

The journalist Rosemary Mac Cabe’s first book This Is Not About You appears – at least at first glance – to want to have it both ways because whilst the title addresses the men she has dated, warning them this book is not about them, the subtitle describes the book as “a menmoir”. I have a feeling that Mac Cabe would not argue with the idea that she wants things both ways or at least that she wants to live on her own terms as this memoir seems to be a reaction to having pandered to other people for far too long. She writes with appealing candour – which is perhaps why the book is dedicated “To my mum, who will hate this”.  

Aside from a ‘Preface’ and ‘Epilogue’, there is only one other chapter, entitled ‘Beginnings’, which does not have the name of a man. All the other chapters, from ‘Henry’ to ‘Brandin’, are named after the man she happened to be dating at the time. This is far from a rose-tinted view of romance – she describes losing her virginity as “a little like the time I’d had a verruca frozen off in the doctor’s surgery: uncomfortable, but I had entered into this willingly.” It is notable that even the first time she had sex she lied about enjoying it, as she says it was important to her not to hurt a man’s feelings.  

Good Girls by Hadley Freeman

The journalist Hadley Freeman’s last book, House Of Glass, was a clear-eyed memoir of her paternal family’s experience of the Holocaust. If anything, Good Girls is an even more personal book as it is a lacerating account of the two-and-a-half years she spent as a teenager in and out of psychiatric wards, being treated for anorexia. Some of these sections are genuinely hard to read but will provide the only insight many of us have into a devastating mental illness. Good Girls is also a study of what anorexia is, who gets it and how it is treated and, as such, Freeman (left) talks to experts and former fellow patients as well as their families. While her writing is never less than compelling, the memoir and the more objective aspect of the book don’t always meld successfully, and at one point the whole threatens to be derailed by her exploration of the parallels between anorexia and gender dysphoria.

But Good Girls is nonetheless a valuable examination of what can fuel adolescent self-starvation and how one individual managed to outgrow it.

The Life Inside by Andy West

It seems unlikely there are many philosophy teachers with the family background of Andy West—his father, uncle and brother have all spent time in prison. West, in contrast, only teaches there (he is philosopher in residence at HMP Pentonville). As he relates in his memoir, The Life Inside, his compulsion to help is not simple do-gooding: he has a desire to fight against inherited guilt.

Some of the passages where he attempts to ignite debate in his classes about subjects as varied as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the black feminist thinker Audre Lorde and Caravaggio are not always easy to follow; but other passages succeed because of his wry humour. The men in one of his classes assume he is gay, and he doesn’t have the heart to tell them otherwise; women in another class argue over who will bring him tea.

Outside the classroom he is struggling with his own issues. He takes pictures of his oven as he leaves for work in the morning so he can reassure himself that he hasn’t left it on and inadvertently burnt his own house down.

Outside, the Sky is Blue by Christina Patterson

The journalist and broadcaster Christina Patterson’s memoir begins promisingly. She has a talent for vivid visual description, not least: ‘We are a pink and navy family. Two pink girls, a navy boy and a navy wife.’ Her early family holidays in Sweden, where her mother is from, are full of lingon-berries, hammocks and mini-golf. She recounts the story of her parents’ courtship as students and says of their relationship: ‘Love at first sight. Love for nearly 50 years. Love till death do us part’ — ominously pointing out how easy they have made love and marriage look. Most arresting, however, in this early part of the book, is her depiction of her elder sister Caroline’s nervous breakdown as a teenager. From her mother’s diary she quotes that her sister ‘says everything is her fault and mixes up bombs and security agents and hears children crying in the streets’.

Patterson writes about her sister’s schizophrenia with candour and sensitivity. Caroline’s lucidity about her own illness pierces the heart, particularly when a psychiatrist writes to their parents.