The Boy Who Loved Apples

Brave, honest and ultimately uplifting, The Boy Who Loved Apples is a compelling and beautifully written account of life with an eating disorder, and a gritty, moving testament to a mother’s love.

When it became clear that Amanda Webster’s eleven-year-old son Riche was not just a little too skinny but dangerously ill, people were often surprised. Do boys get anorexia? they would ask. How did he get it?

That was the question Amanda asked herself, too. She had trained as a doctor; she knew that every disease has a cause. And if her son had an eating disorder, she wondered what the cause could possibly be but something she and her husband Kevin had done—or failed to do?

Quick to blame both Kevin and herself, worried about how her two other kids were coping, Amanda also found herself at odds with a medical establishment that barely understood Riche’s illness, far less how to treat it. And as she embarked on the long, agonising process of saving her son’s life she found herself battling not just Riche’s demons but her own.

Amanda Webster graduated from the University of Western Australia as a doctor, following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather. She left medicine to raise a family with her husband, Kevin. Amanda turned to writing after her son Riche’s illness and is currently an MFA candidate in the low residency program at City University of Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in several US literary journals.