about
Ellabell Risbridger is a writer, cook and eternal optimist. She
lives in a tiny flat full of books in the East End of London,
where she grows things, makes things, and talks to herself.
of your recipes is
Bookstore
Q My favouriteSticky Coconut andStuck in a Black Rice
Salmon and
Chorizo
– mainly for its deliciousness, and also for the story
behind it. Sometimes your recipes are hard to read, because
the fear and anxiety you experience is real and raw and quite
moving. But then you overcome it – a small victory, you say
– and the recipes make it all okay again. Are they as hard
for you to write as they are, sometimes, to experience?
Writing always comes to me easily (she says, looking despondently at
the unfinished drafts of eight novels saved to her desktop). Writing
well doesn’t necessarily, but writing itself (words on a page) has always
seemed to me to be the easiest and simplest way to acknowledge and
control a feeling – and that acknowledgement and control really is at
the heart of the blog.
Writing is kind of the completion of the emotion: I am no longer
experiencing it, I have put it all onto paper, and put a full stop at the end. I actually wrote that recipe you
mention mid panic-attack, on the tube home – as a method of control. And it worked. The reason, I think,
that I keep blogging, is because it genuinely is the very best anti-anxiety medication I know.
Q
The reaction to Eating With My Fingers has been incredible. People love it and you.
Joanne Harris calls it ‘the best food blog on the internet’. (It is.) Do you think, in
some way, EWMF has altered some people’s perceptions of mental health?
I bloody hope so. I think so, anyway! I get emails from people telling me that it has changed their mind about mental
health problems: I think it makes people see the mentally ill as, you know, regular people just struggling to batter
through a disabling and debilitating illness – not as ‘frauds’, or ‘fakers’, or ‘lazy’.
I like that mental health is always there, on the blog, but it is underpinning the food: people come for the food, and pick
up the idea that mental illness is not a death sentence, that mental illness is not catching, that it’s a chronic illness that
some people just struggle with, and probably always will, and we don’t know why.
That’s definitely a secondary aim, though – I write it primarily for me, and for people who suffer a mental illness. They
write to me, too – and are extraordinarily honest about their own problems, and they talk about how the blog helped
them to feel less alone, helped them to get through a day. Those are the emails I really treasure. I can’t reply to them all,
because I am still pretty ill myself, and my doing-time is often pretty limited, but I read them all, over and over.
favourite
Q What is yourwhy? recipe on
the blog and
Midnight Chicken. First and best.