My Oxford

Catherine Haines' lively account of student life is enriched with literary, philosophical and existential questions. As the Cambridge Weight Plan spins out of control, a post-graduate's academic subject, 'the mind-body problem', goes through an existential phase to become 'extraordinary morality' rather than a mental health problem. The iron will with which Catherine imposes on herself ever more onerous conditions is awe-inspiring. The author is clearly fiercely intelligent, as we can see from the way she exposes the ugly truth behind historical depictions of women with eating disorders andindeed the way society frames abstinence from food as an ally of virtue. However, starving her body means that Catherine also begins to starve her brain. Incisive literary criticism of Hamlet descends into feverish noodlings about Einstein's theory of relativity. Her descriptions enfold the reader in the hideous illogic of the anorexic.This is a rigorous, philosophical case for regarding an eating disorder as pilgrimage, a personal exorcism, the kind which writers perform on paper while ghting with demons, fears, fate and death, an exorcism which, while painful, is also saving.

Catherine Wesselinoff (nee Haines) is a teaching and research scholar in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Australia. She completed a Combined Honours Degree in English Literature and Philosophy at the Australian National University in 2009, a master's degree in English literature at the University of Oxford in 2012, and a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 2022. She lives in Sydney with her husband and son.