In-Store: Amber Husain: Tell Me How You Eat w/ Andrea Long Chu

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/bxuJO-nxDWk
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact ZXZlbnRoZWxwIHwgYm9va3NhcmVtYWdpYyAhIG5ldA==.

An intimate and expansive exploration of how and why we eat, and the relationship between food and empowerment, through the historic feasts and fasts of radicals and tyrants.

Inspired by writer Amber Husain’s unorthodox route to healing from anorexia, Tell Me How You Eat examines not just how society views the refusal to eat, but how we understand the meaning and power of food. Suspecting that the standard courses of treatment—as disempowering as they are ineffective—might in fact be part of the underlying problem, Husain took part in an experimental psylocibin treatment study. Where the medical model typically tries to fix the difficult non-eater, this trial opened her mind to the idea that there might be more to fix beyond the self—that our relationship with food might be closely entwined with our outlook on the world.

Through five chapters taking in hunger, restriction, gorging, feeding, and the making of political demands, Husain turns away from thinking about how people are shaped by food to think instead about how food can inspire people to reshape the world. Each chapter searches for reasons to eat and live through histories ranging from pus-drinking medieval nuns to Black Panther breakfast programs; from 1950s lesbian dinner parties to modern-day Gazan food bloggers.

In a culture that insists “you are what you eat,” and makes every bite a fraught moral choice, Husain argues that we will only feel truly nourished when we can eat in the spirit of restoring a collective right to food, long eroded over centuries of systems and narratives that have normalized deprivation.

Amber Husain is a writer based in South London, UK. She is the author of Tell Me How You Eat, Meat Love, and Replace Me. Her essays on politics, literature, and art have been published in Granta, The New York Times, Baffler, and more. She has a PhD from UCL in the history of art and mind-body medicine in late-20th-century Britain. She teaches history of art, creative writing, and criticism. Visit AmberHusain.com for more information.

Andrea Long Chu is an essayist and critic at New York magazine. She was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for her work at New York. Her nonfiction book Females was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has been reprinted in Best American Essays 2022 and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. Her writing has appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents.

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