good girls by hadley freeman

the mail on sunday 16 april 2023

The journalist Hadley Freeman’s last book, House Of Glass, was a clear-eyed memoir of her paternal family’s experience of the Holocaust. If anything, Good Girls is an even more personal book as it is a lacerating account of the two-and-a-half years she spent as a teenager in and out of psychiatric wards, being treated for anorexia. Some of these sections are genuinely hard to read but will provide the only insight many of us have into a devastating mental illness. Good Girls is also a study of what anorexia is, who gets it and how it is treated and, as such, Freeman (left) talks to experts and former fellow patients as well as their families. While her writing is never less than compelling, the memoir and the more objective aspect of the book don’t always meld successfully, and at one point the whole threatens to be derailed by her exploration of the parallels between anorexia and gender dysphoria. But Good Girls is nonetheless a valuable examination of what can fuel adolescent self-starvation and how one individual managed to outgrow it. More people die of anorexia than any other mental illness, and Freeman’s doctor told her family to prepare for her possible death. The most heartbreaking aspect of her account, however, is that as she became progressively more ill, her anorexia became – as she puts it – ‘turbo-charged’ because she was being treated alongside people whose dysfunctional behaviour she could copy. There is no easy way out of any of this, and even after she recovers, she swaps anorexia for OCD and then a cocaine habit. Freeman is unflinching in describing the depths of her illness and never glib about her recovery. What a powerful inspiration her subsequent career is for anyone currently at the sharp end of this hideous disease.

This review originally appeared in the Mail on Sunday