To read, hungrily

Last night I came across this passage from Doris Lessing's Martha Quest (1952). Reading it a couple of times, i thought, this is me she's describing.

"Then she came to herself and began to read, hungrily for some kind of balance. And more and more, what she read seemed remote; or rather, it seemed that throuhg reading she created a self-contained world which had nothing to do with what lay around her; that what she believed was separated from her problems by an invisble wall."