Half Serving

She’s eating again. That wasn’t always the case. Having grown up in poverty, just her and her obsessively thin mother, who migrated to Berlin from Ukraine, her future seemed immutable. Now, in her late twenties, she has things more or less under control. Sure, she goes jogging a lot, okay, she counts every calorie, but (almost) every morning, noon, and night, she eats some kind of food. Even if she does weighs up every cent it costs to buy and cook the food. Only very rarely does she succumb to her old habits of eating too much and then purging. But she's still making progress. And there are other changes on the horizon. Her first date, something that offers hope for a better life. Hope that she might finally break this vicious cycle. But could it really be that easy? 

In Half Serving, Elisabeth Pappe tells a highly personal story about eating disorders and growing up in poverty, and about the compulsions that go along with that. The novel illustrates why it is so hard to break with learned patterns of behaviour and to develop a healthy relationship with food and finances. And it looks into the question of how family not only supports us but also smothers us. A moving literary debut about a merciless illness and its tragicomic sides.

»I found Half Serving so insanely moving. It’s a novel that really hurts, but in a good way.« Caroline Wahl

»This book pulls the plug on you. The things Elisabeth Pape writes about, and how she writes about them, make you sad, furious – but also happy. She finds an unmatched, laconic and self-deprecating tone with which – despite having all reason to be furious – she emphasises the universal power of hope. A wonderful work of the new class-conscious literature.« Christian Baron