The Art of Not Eating to Atlantic

James Pulford, senior editor, acquired UK & Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) including e-book, audio and serial from Kate Evans at Peters Fraser + Dunlop in a competitive four-way auction, to Jessica Hamel-Akré’s The Art of Not Eating: A Doubtful History of Appetite and Desire.

Jessica Hamel-Akré is an award-winning historian of ideas, literature and medicine, and a social sciences consultant. An expert in the history of women’s health, the body and feminist thought, she was a postdoctoral scholar in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and Newnham College. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Montreal. Hamel-Akré co-created and presented on the BBC Radio 4 documentary The Unexpected History of Clean Eating.

A luminously original exploration of the relationship between appetite, diet, desire and oppression by an award-winning historian.

The day Jessica Hamel-Akré discovered the ideas of George Cheyne – an eighteenth-century polymath and London society figure known as ‘Dr Diet’ – it sparked an intellectual obsession, a ten-year study of women’s appetite and a personal unravelling.

In this bold and radical book, Hamel-Akré follows Cheyne through the pages of medical studies, novels and historical scandals, meeting ash-eating mystics, wasting society girls, impoverished female fasters and early feminist philosophers, all of whom were once grappling with nascent ideas around food, longing and the body. In doing so, she uncovers the eighteenth-century origins of both today’s diet culture and her own troubled relationship with wanting.

Blending history and memoir, The Art of Not Eating will change the way we look at appetite, desire and rationality, and show how it all got tangled up with what we eat.

James Pulford, senior editor, says:

‘I was completely mesmerised by Jessica’s high-wire investigation into the origins of society’s troubled relationships with food, appetite and the body. The Art of Not Eating is a bold and beautifully told journey through the past that reveals how men like George Cheyne medicalized female rationality and desire in the eighteenth century, and how these disturbing and oppressive ideas are still at work today. I can’t wait to publish this brilliant book.’

Jessica Hamel-Akré says:

‘I hope this book, through its immersive form and content, will offer fresh perspectives for how we think, speak, and feel about diet culture and body image by inviting readers to reflect in unique ways on the inescapable pressure these standards put not only on our physical bodies, but on our many interactions with those we love and with ourselves. Ultimately, is it a work of reconciliation with the self.’

 

The Art of Not Eating will be published on 22 August 2024 as a royal hardback, trade paperback and e-book.