![]() She grew up in a Jewish-American family – loving, comfortably off – and came to England from New York, aged 11. 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”). It was a casual comment that ignited her illness. 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.įreeman explores the anorexic’s warped thinking and brings us as close as is possible to understanding the incomprehensible – the consuming obsession with not consuming. 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. T here 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). ![]()
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