But anorexia has been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It’s tempting to think of anorexia as a modern phenomenon, related in some misty way to fads such as social media and heroin chic. This is grounded in a history of the disease, which turns out to be quite a long one. The book gracefully interweaves sections on the science of anorexia with Freeman’s account of getting ill, as well as stories from other women she met in hospital and has since tracked down. At some points she was so thin that her spine would bleed as she did sit-ups, and so bald that a woman in the street asked her if she had cancer.Īnorexic Tara delighted in discovering how much other patients weighed, and gloating if she was lighter When she was at her illest, a GP told her mother to prepare for her death. Reading it will leave you amazed that Freeman has made such a success of her life. Good Girls looks inwards – or, as she admits in the introduction, at her own belly button – and it’s excellent too, if in a different way. Her previous book, House of Glass, recounted her Jewish family’s experience of the 20th century, and was brilliant. She is now a journalist, formerly at the Guardian, currently at the Sunday Times.

She was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and lived in various psychiatric wards for the next two and a half years.

Within months her weight had plummeted and she was sent by her frantic parents to a doctor. Within weeks, Freeman was monitoring every crumb that entered her mouth, opening the fridge just to smell the food, making her house quake as she did star jumps over and over again. A skinnier classmate at her all-girls school in London told her: ‘I wish I was normal like you.’ But the comment triggered a change that was dramatic in the extreme. In 1992, a few weeks after her 14th birthday, Hadley Freeman stopped eating.

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