Growing up as a Jewish teenager in west London, Hadley Freeman found herself tormented by a recurring nightmare. “I was trying to speak and no words were coming out,” the British-American bestselling author and journalist, 45, tells me as we shelter from the September heat at the back of a cafe near her home in Primrose Hill.
At the time of that nightmare, Freeman was battling anorexia, the eating disorder that left her hospitalised nine times between the ages of 14 and 17 and on which she has just released a searing memoir, Good Girls: A Study and Story of Anorexia. One of the truths about the disorder that she tries to get across in the book: that it is often a sufferer’s way of expressing their feelings, when they can’t find the words.
