There is a sense in which Hadley Freeman’s Good Girls has been written by two authors: the anorexic teenager she once was and the recovered 44-year-old journalist with three children she now is (she was, until recently, a staff writer on the Guardian and, for almost a decade, its fashion correspondent). Anorexics tend to be unreliable witnesses when in the grip of the illness and, at times, there is an oddity about this book, a curious sense of separation between the suffering younger self and the aloof older self, but Freeman is a brave, illuminating and meticulous reporter and uses her experience wisely. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, hospital admissions for eating disorders have increased by 84% over the past five years, a fact that in itself should make this revelatory book required reading.
Freeman explores the anorexic’s warped thinking and brings us as close as is possible to understanding the incomprehensible – the consuming obsession with not consuming. It was a casual comment that ignited her illness. It often is, apparently. A skinny girl said to her: “I wish I was normal like you.” “Normal” triggered what would become her abnormal struggle (a “trigger”, she points out, is not the same as a “cause”). She grew up in a Jewish-American family – loving, comfortably off – and came to England from New York, aged 11. At home, she believes she absorbed the subtext that “food was the medium through which women express unhappiness”. She debunks the oversimplification that anorexia is caused by the fashion industry’s insistence on skeletal models, but emphasises that “the association between female self-denial and perfect femininity is entrenched in our culture. This doesn’t cause anorexia, but it gives it a fertile ground in which to breed.” She investigates new theories about the illness, including its possible connections with autism, OCD and metabolic rate. The book is garnished with expert opinion from doctors, psychiatrists and co-anorexics encountered in hospital, with whom she has been back in touch. Her tendency is to challenge reflex opinion and never to make the mistake of claiming to know more than is known. For whatever you thought you knew, the truth about anorexia is always more complicated. One of her most unnerving assertions is that anorexia is “not a desire to be thin – it is a desire to look ill”.
