Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia
by Hadley Freeman (Simon & Schuster, $28)
Author Hadley Freeman “evokes the mental processes of anorexia extraordinarily well,” said Catharine Morris in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The Londonbased, New York City– born journalist battled the illness for years, and given its complexity, her attempt to understand how she developed such an unhealthy relationship with food and eating was “a formidable task.” Her candor about her struggle “will make a great many people feel less lonely.”
The triggering event was a schoolmate’s “seemingly innocuous” comment, said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. The other girl was skinny, and during a conversation about the challenges of buying clothes, she said to Freeman, “I wish I was normal like you.” To Freeman, then 14, “normal” sounded like being a person of no interest, and she immediately stopped eating and began exercising obsessively. She spent the next three years being checked in and out of psychiatric hospitals, endangering her health to the point that her mother was told that death had become a potential outcome. In her “clear-eyed, sometimes upsetting, but also bleakly funny” account, Freeman “clears up some of the misconceptions about anorexia.” It is not about trying to appear thin but trying to appear ill, she says, and parenting is generally not to blame. She pinpoints her fears about impending adulthood. Starving herself, at that moment, “was a way of shrinking and simplifying her world.”
“The solution? No one seems to know,” said Sally Satel in The Wall Street Journal. Nor can experts predict who will recover. Anorexia is better understood than it once was, with plausible hypotheses linking it to metabolic factors and to personality traits such as perfectionism. Freeman, who’s now in her 40s, credits her initial recovery to an epiphany that struck her when she witnessed a 32-year-old fellow hospital patient throw a tantrum over being asked to eat a piece of buttered toast. Freeman decided she didn’t want to be like that when she reached 32. But she asks that we consider how many disorders that punish the body stem from similar anxieties, and she offers solid practical advice. “Things can get unimaginably better,” she writes. And it’s true.