There 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). 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. 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.
Freeman explores the anorexic’s warped thinking and brings us as close as is possible to understanding the incomprehensible – the consuming obsession with not consuming. It was a casual comment that ignited her illness. It often is, apparently. 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”). She grew up in a Jewish-American family – loving, comfortably off – and came to England from New York, aged 11. At home, she believes she absorbed the subtext that “food was the medium through which women express unhappiness”. She debunks the oversimplification that anorexia is caused by the fashion industry’s insistence on skeletal models, but emphasises that “the association between female self-denial and perfect femininity is entrenched in our culture. This doesn’t cause anorexia, but it gives it a fertile ground in which to breed.” She investigates new theories about the illness, including its possible connections with autism, OCD and metabolic rate. The book is garnished with expert opinion from doctors, psychiatrists and co-anorexics encountered in hospital, with whom she has been back in touch. Her tendency is to challenge reflex opinion and never to make the mistake of claiming to know more than is known. For whatever you thought you knew, the truth about anorexia is always more complicated. One of her most unnerving assertions is that anorexia is “not a desire to be thin – it is a desire to look ill”.
Freeman maintains that the “wan” and “wasted” look kicked off in the 1990s. Yet I was at school in the 70s and waifs were already chic. There existed an ideal image of girl-as-vanishing-act, wrapped in clothes as afterthoughts, thin enough to be beyond fashion, yet paradoxically to be embodying – disembodying – it. Anorexia appeared to be about perfectionism, about a control that would ultimately lead to a lack of it, to mortal helplessness. Anorexia was a form of overachievement requiring the sacrificial zeal of a nun. I used to feel a repelled awe for anorexic girls at school: how did they manage to stay gossamer thin, how did they sustain the superhuman willpower involved in starvation? This rivalry to be the thinnest between young women is one of the more depressing aspects of the illness and Freeman illuminatingly explores the issues of control, sacrifice and competition. But what her book most brutally brings home is the way that anorexia insidiously slides into mental illness. Inevitably, a handful of girls from my school ended up in hospital. In her generation, Freeman was one of those – she spent the years between 14 and 17 on psychiatric wards.
The chapters about her time in hospital are not for the faint-hearted. The ongoing competition between anorexics was toxic: “Do you know what makes you cool on an eating disorders ward? I’ll let you in on that secret – it’s if you’ve been fed intravenously.” Some of the anorexics Freeman knew did not survive. But it was the extremity of hospital experience that led to her own turning point. She was watching a 32-year-old patient throw a tantrum, having been given more butter on her bread than the other anorexics on the ward, and realised she did not want to grow up to become that woman: “Look at them crying over mashed potatoes, hiding bags of vomit under their beds, sneaking in star jumps in the shower. Look at them, because unless you finally do something, this will be you.” Freeman was saved, too, because she had been allowed to continue with her schoolwork and had done well in her exams. And once she – remarkably – had got into Oxford, although her eating there continued to be clandestine and disordered, she was happier.
Freeman lists the “impossible standards” set for women. We are told: “Look perfect, but don’t be vain; don’t age but don’t get plastic surgery; be slim but don’t be obsessed with diets; be smart but not smarter than the men around you; be pleasing, and have no needs of your own.” And she makes a powerful case for a link between the wave of 13- and 14-year-old girls who want to become boys and those who become anorexic. At the same time, she is mindful not to confuse the two, acknowledging that gender dysphoria, unlike anorexia, is not a mental illness, but she is persuasive about the shared longing for transformation and the reasons why becoming a woman might seem uninviting.
Freeman is keenly aware, too, of the suffering faced by the families of anorexics, saying she has yet to meet a mother who does not blame herself for her daughter’s illness. She writes lovingly about her mother and tends to advise the mothers of anorexics: “Get professional help as soon as you can and don’t become her caregiver.” Her book ends with an emotional rallying cry – to give girls an easier time of it. And she implies that, at the heart of the anorexic story, there is a delusion that is dangerous because it can be true in the wrong way: “If we change our bodies, we change ourselves.”
• Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia by Hadley Freeman is published by Fourth Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
