Hadley Freeman is a British journalist and author whose early career in writing about fashion and beauty developed into long-running columns, interviews and opinion pieces in the Guardian and now the Times. Her last book, House of Glass, explores the life of her Jewish family in wartime France with verve and sorrow. Good Girls is a memoir of Freeman’s anorexia in adolescence and early adulthood, told with similar energy and sadness.
Freeman spent most of her teens in and out of hospital, in a cycle of inpatient recovery and outpatient relapse familiar to many people with anorexia. By the second iteration, these cycles lack a narrative arc, which is part of their frustration to sufferers and their families. Time passes, but there is no progress. The patient is still there, ageing but not growing up, not permitted to die and not able to live, emaciated and then thin and then emaciated again. The plot is stuck.
Good Girls’ account of this stasis is vivid, rich in the detail of hospital routines and privations. The world of institutional confinement is similar whatever the reason, and in hospital, as in prison or boarding school, life is lived on a very small scale that invites writerly interest in the shade of paint on the wall, the shape of the trees in the window (if you’re lucky), the texture and sound of the mattress. The moods and dispositions of the nurses who control your life hour by hour matter enormously.
Anorexia further sharpens the writer’s gaze: which fellow patient is winning the self-destruction competition today, who’s been cursed with the corner piece of pie (more pastry, more fat)? How much of your food can you avoid by smearing it around the bowl, or under the table, or into your hair? If you don’t know what it’s like to be mad, or incarcerated, this book will tell you.
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Which brings us to the uncomfortable question of memoirs of addiction and compulsion: who or what are they for? How does the writer manage the risk and temptation of glamorising past excesses? The howl, writing de profundis, is an interesting genre with its own literary rewards and challenges, but Freeman’s crisp prose and thorough research do not come from the abyss.
Good Girls is subtitled “a story and study of anorexia”, and it delivers both, drawing on extensive interviews with specialist healthcare providers and a great deal of spadework in scholarly journals, with a strong interest in biomedical rather than sociocultural investigation. Freeman writes, “I decided to write this book in the hope that it might make some people feel a bit less lonely… I also wrote it for those who love them in order to give them hope, but also to brace them for the reality.”
The problem is that anorexics are well supplied with and usually good at finding company in their distress – pick any woman off the street and the chances are she’ll agree that the road to happiness is through weight loss, that dietary restriction is a moral obligation and eating cake the outward sign of spiritual weakness – so counter-narratives are more useful to most readers.
And while Good Girls explicitly disavows anorexic logic and hierarchies and asserts the benefits of recovery, it repeatedly mentions Freedman’s lowest weights and tends to be dismissive of the kind of disordered eating that only ruins women’s lives rather than threatening them. “Anorexics… know that healthily thin – slim – people eat more than two apples a day, weigh more than five stone, don’t exercise for six hours at a time.” (Anorexics don’t actually know much at all because brains don’t run on empty.)
I’m sure it’s not meant that way, but for some readers, there’s your benchmark, girls. Elsewhere, women locked in a miserable and destructive cycle of yo-yo dieting are “amateurs” compared with those who have come close to death by starvation. Freeman’s powerful announcements of her recovery are counterbalanced if not undermined by these flashes of something uncomfortably like pride and even nostalgia, which could be interesting literary ambivalence if the material weren’t so dangerous to some of its intended readers.
Sarah Moss’s latest novel is The Fell. She lectures in creative writing at UCD.
