There is no need to worry about school work, or what clothes to wear, if your sole responsibility is not to eat.

For Freeman – formerly a Guardian columnist and author of the family memoir House of Glass – anorexia was a way of shrinking and simplifying her world.

Anorexia remains one of the most discussed and least understood mental disorders, so there is no underestimating the value of a former sufferer able to articulate the thought processes behind self-starvation. Good Girls, then, is her clear-eyed, sometimes upsetting but also bleakly funny account of this most slippery illness and what it feels like from the inside. The author has nothing but compassion for those devastated parents who look on helplessly as their child self-destructs At one stage, Freeman’s mother was told to prepare for her death. She would spend the next three years in and out of psychiatric institutions where she and her fellow patients would go toe-to-toe with staff over food. She stopped eating, exercised obsessively and lost her capacity to feel joy.

After that fateful PE lesson, Freeman’s fall was “instantaneous and vertiginous”. They are impossible to predict and, in isolation, cannot be held responsible for the illness taking hold because, as Freeman notes, “anorexia was a bomb inside us, just waiting for the right time, the single flame, the trigger”. Normal was nothing.”ĭoctors often call the moments that set off anorexia in patients the “precipitant”. ‘Normal.’ Not ‘slim’, not ‘thin’ – ‘normal’. “I wish I was normal like you.” At this, Freeman writes, “a black tunnel yawned open inside me, and I tumbled down it, Alice into Nowhereland. Noting Lizzie’s skinny legs, and her own “matronly trunks”, she asked Lizzie if it was hard to find clothes when you’re small. On this particular day, Freeman was in a PE lesson at school, sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, next to a girl named Lizzie. But she struggled to find her place among teenage girls who were embracing bras and boys – “The grown-up world was pressing in, monsters making the door bulge inwards while I frantically tried to push it back.” Three years earlier her family had relocated from New York to London, and she enjoyed the special status that being American conferred on her among her British peers. Hadley Freeman was 14 when a seemingly innocuous comment blew her life apart.

Good Girls by Hadley Freeman