Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia
From Hadley Freeman, bestselling author of House of Glass, comes a “riveting” (The New York Times) memoir about her experience as an anorexic and her journey to recovery.
In 1995, Hadley Freeman wrote in her diary: “I just spent three years of my life in mental hospitals. So why am I crazier than I was before????”
From the ages of fourteen to seventeen, Freeman lived in psychiatric wards after developing anorexia nervosa. Her doctors informed her that her body was cannibalizing her muscles and heart for nutrition, but they could tell her little else: why she had it, what it felt like, what recovery looked like. For the next twenty years, Freeman lived as a “functioning anorexic,” grappling with new forms of self-destructive behavior as the anorexia mutated and persisted. Anorexia is one of the most widely discussed but least understood mental illnesses. Through “sharp storytelling, solid research and gentle humor” (The Wall Street Journal), Freeman delivers an incisive and bracing work that details her experiences with anorexia—the shame, fear, loneliness, and rage—and how she overcame it. She interviews doctors to learn how treatment for the illness has changed since she was hospitalized and what new discoveries have been made about the illness, including its connection to autism, OCD, and metabolic rate. She learns why the illness always begins during adolescence and how this reveals the difficulties for girls to come of age. Freeman tracks down the women with whom she was hospitalized and reports on how their recovery has progressed over decades.
Good Girls is an honest and hopeful story of resilience that offers a message to the nearly 30 million Americans who suffer from eating disorders: Life can be enjoyed, rather than merely endured.
In 1995, Hadley Freeman wrote in her diary: “I just spent three years of my life in mental hospitals. So why am I crazier than I was before????”
From the ages of fourteen to seventeen, Freeman lived in psychiatric wards after developing anorexia nervosa. Her doctors informed her that her body was cannibalizing her muscles and heart for nutrition, but they could tell her little else: why she had it, what it felt like, what recovery looked like. For the next twenty years, Freeman lived as a “functioning anorexic,” grappling with new forms of self-destructive behavior as the anorexia mutated and persisted. Anorexia is one of the most widely discussed but least understood mental illnesses. Through “sharp storytelling, solid research and gentle humor” (The Wall Street Journal), Freeman delivers an incisive and bracing work that details her experiences with anorexia—the shame, fear, loneliness, and rage—and how she overcame it. She interviews doctors to learn how treatment for the illness has changed since she was hospitalized and what new discoveries have been made about the illness, including its connection to autism, OCD, and metabolic rate. She learns why the illness always begins during adolescence and how this reveals the difficulties for girls to come of age. Freeman tracks down the women with whom she was hospitalized and reports on how their recovery has progressed over decades.
Good Girls is an honest and hopeful story of resilience that offers a message to the nearly 30 million Americans who suffer from eating disorders: Life can be enjoyed, rather than merely endured.
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Community Reviews
"Anorexics…are like a child looking for their own vegetable patch, their own identity…So much of anorexia is about suppressed conversations…It really isn't about the food. It's about trying to say something without having to speak; it's about fear of sexualization and fear of womanhood; it's about sadness and anger and the belief you're not allowed to be sad and angry because you're supposed to be perfect; and it's about feeling completely overwhelmed by the world so you create a new, smaller world with one easy-to-understand rule: don't eat.”
“(There has never been a more perfect expression of that feminine desire for self-erasure than
‘size zero’)” with “a stomach so shrunken and sunken it becomes a sagging hammock strung between the hip bones…Thinness is proof of a woman's lack of appetite…You do become a good girl when you're ill and in bed, because nothing is expected of you, so there's nothing to be angry about.”
“Being anorexic traps you in the liminal state…like having a fear of flying and living forever in an airport, watching everyone else board the planes while you pace nervously around the duty free…I was trying to move back to my childhood, and sadly, British Airways doesn't do flights to there…There was a world away from steamed vegetables;” hope was an open window, a voice whispered on the wind: “This present moment is not all there is for you. A different future is still waiting for you, if you want it.”
“A voice from a dark and tender part inside myself says, ‘Lucky her, she is free to eat whatever she wants, and she'll still be perfect and free.’ But then the light comes in and I remember that the reverse is true: the more perfect I was, the less free I was to do anything…Even though I'm free…I will never forget…and even though I'm recovered, the splitting never fully mended, so I'm always standing a little to the side of myself, looking at the life I have and thinking about the one I don't…I raised my glass, to the past, present and future, and I ate.”
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