Hadley Freeman was 14 when a seemingly innocuous comment blew her life apart. Three years earlier her family had relocated from New York to London, and she enjoyed the special status that being American conferred on her among her British peers. But she struggled to find her place among teenage girls who were embracing bras and boys – “The grown-up world was pressing in, monsters making the door bulge inwards while I frantically tried to push it back.”
On this particular day, Freeman was in a PE lesson at school, sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, next to a girl named Lizzie. Noting Lizzie’s skinny legs, and her own “matronly trunks”, she asked Lizzie if it was hard to find clothes when you’re small. “Yeah,” she replied. “I wish I was normal like you.” At this, Freeman writes, “a black tunnel yawned open inside me, and I tumbled down it, Alice into Nowhereland. ‘Normal.’ Not ‘slim’, not ‘thin’ – ‘normal’. Normal was average. Normal was boring. Normal was nothing.”
Doctors often call the moments that set off anorexia in patients the “precipitant”. They are impossible to predict and, in isolation, cannot be held responsible for the illness taking hold because, as Freeman notes, “anorexia was a bomb inside us, just waiting for the right time, the single flame, the trigger”. After that fateful PE lesson, Freeman’s fall was “instantaneous and vertiginous”. She stopped eating, exercised obsessively and lost her capacity to feel joy. She would spend the next three years in and out of psychiatric institutions where she and her fellow patients would go toe-to-toe with staff over food. At one stage, Freeman’s mother was told to prepare for her death.
Good Girls, then, is her clear-eyed, sometimes upsetting but also bleakly funny account of this most slippery illness and what it feels like from the inside. Anorexia remains one of the most discussed and least understood mental disorders, so there is no underestimating the value of a former sufferer able to articulate the thought processes behind self-starvation. For Freeman – formerly a Guardian columnist and author of the family memoir House of Glass – anorexia was a way of shrinking and simplifying her world. There is no need to worry about school work, or what clothes to wear, if your sole responsibility is not to eat. Along with depicting the isolation, deep sadness and horrifying self-hatred, she reveals the “fierce fire” that often erupts from the sufferer when pressed to eat: “When it was in me, I was Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, possessed by the ancient demigod: ‘There is no Dana, there is only Zuul’.”
Elsewhere, she looks at the commonalities between anorexia and autism, and anorexia and gender dysphoria, and paints a troubling picture of today’s young girls who are at the receiving end of damaging messages about womanhood and among whom rates of self-harm have tripled since 2000.
Freeman also clears up some of the misconceptions about anorexia: that it is solely about a desire to appear thin (“Anorexics don’t want to look like models in magazines. They want to look ill”); that it is cured once the patient has been persuaded to eat; that parents, in particular mothers, are to blame. The author has nothing but compassion for those devastated parents who look on helplessly as their child self-destructs. “Just because your daughter develops anorexia, it does not mean you’ve failed as a parent,” she notes. “I wish I could paint that in red across the sky.”
Over time, Freeman’s desire to starve herself abated, though new problems replaced it, including OCD that made her wash her hands raw and, in her 20s, cocaine addiction. It was motherhood in her late 30s that signalled a turning point in how she viewed herself and her body, although she is careful to point out that children do not cure eating disorders. Now, she says, it still feels “like an hourly miracle to be free of the cold and the hopelessness and the loneliness and the palpitations and the exhaustion and the exercising and the guilt. But even though I’m free of it, I will never forget it.”
• Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia by Hadley Freeman is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
