ALL CONSUMING

Tandoh writes this memoir from inside the experience rather than looking back at a safe distance, which means the book does not organize disordered eating into a tidy cause-and-effect story. Food, identity, and mental health get treated as tangled together rather than three separate topics, and the personal history is threaded through with cultural commentary and writing about food itself, so the book never turns into a straight clinical account of an illness. That mix is what keeps it readable as a memoir and not just a case study.

The most useful thing it does is refuse a recovery-narrative arc where things simply get better in a straight line; healing here is shown as something you return to and lose and return to again, a more honest shape than most books aimed at teens are willing to sit with. A teenager working through their own complicated relationship with food or their body will find a voice here that does not perform having it figured out. At 305 pages in paperback for ages 12 to 18, it reads as a book meant to be sat with rather than rushed.