“A few weeks after turning 14 I was at school in PE class. And I was sitting next to a girl who was much skinnier than me and I said, without really thinking about it, ‘Is it hard to buy clothes when you’re so small?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I wish I was normal like you.’ And this just completely winded me. Normal to me meant average, boring, nothing I wanted to be – and I just stopped eating that day. Within two months I had been hospitalised for the first time having lost a third of my body weight. I was admitted nine times to hospital over a three-year period.”
Hadley Freeman’s delivery is fast, furious, as if she will run out of breath. It is the beginning of her account of her teenage experience of anorexia, now more than 25 years in the past, but remembered as if it was yesterday.
Anorexia is an eating disorder that results in people, usually young, mostly female, restricting their caloric intake to dangerously low levels. At its most extreme it can kill, as vital organs deteriorate through starvation. But even those who are in its grip for a short time may suffer such long-term consequences as intermittent relapses, damaged mental health, fertility problems and weakening of the heart and other organs.
Even for recovering anorexics it can be a source of great shame. For new friends, colleagues or strangers to learn how weak they had been in the face of this seemingly incomprehensible force can seem an impossible admission. Even in closer friendships the condition may not be directly discussed – it is simply too hard to talk about. Over the years, I have known a small number of people whom I suspect have had periods of anorexia, and yet barely any of them have confirmed it; it is simply too hard.
This is what makes Freeman’s book Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia so powerful. Freeman is a well-known, popular, intellectually impressive, quirkily humorous British media columnist. And this year, more than 25 years after leaving hospital for the final time, she stepped out in the full glare of the public gaze and said, “Yes, I was anorexic.”
I first met Freeman, now 45, about 20 years ago when we were both covering the fashion scene. American born, funny and talented, she struck me as rather neurotic and intense but not ill. As she says in her book, she avoided talking about her hospital years as she didn’t want to be seen as “mad” and thought deeply about whether she was “really willing to cough up my blood in public”.
Freeman does not pretend to understand everything about anorexia, or even her own experience. She says she was encouraged to write Good Girls because friends and colleagues came to her for help with their own adolescent girls shrinking before their eyes. According to Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists, hospital admissions for eating disorders have jumped by 84% over the past five years. Freeman doesn’t think the fashion industry or social media bogeymen are sparking the surge in anorexia but she believes they definitely feed it.
And she also believes that although anorexia can be overcome, those who’ve put it behind them may still stumble. “I strongly recommend to anyone who is recovering from an eating disorder to find a therapist once they stop seeing their eating disorder specialist. You might not be underweight any more but you still need help.”
The causes of anorexia are not clear-cut or particularly modern. The phenomenon of adolescent girls starving themselves has existed for more than a millennium, when often it was intertwined with religious fervour.
Good Girls details current medical thinking about the rise in perfectionism and self-harm and how anorexia can be seen as on a continuum with the burgeoning levels of self-harm. As Freeman writes, “It really isn’t about the food. It’s about trying to say something without having to speak; it’s about fear of sexualisation and fear of womanhood; it’s about sadness and anger and the belief you’re not allowed to be sad and angry because you’re supposed to be perfect; and it’s about feeling completely overwhelmed by the world so you create a new, smaller world with one easy-to-understand rule: don’t eat.”
Understanding anorexia
Metropolitan New York Jews, Freeman’s family had settled in London for her financier father’s job a couple of years before she got ill. A late developer physically and emotionally, she was enrolled at a private girls’ school and was trying to find a way to fit into this cliquey new teen world “when the bowling ball of puberty” smashed into her.
Over the next three years she was hospitalised, weighed constantly, monitored for over-exercising (which she would circumvent by doing hundreds of star jumps in the toilet cubicle) and spent her time surrounded by other young women, all older than her, as they tried as hard as they could not to eat.
As well as telling the story through her pubescent eyes, she talks to contemporary psychiatrists, scientists, therapists and eating-disorder experts, including the woman she credits with getting her over the disorder, Janet Treasure. Freeman asked the psychiatry professor why anorexia happens. “There’s genetic disposition, a bit of brain disorder, some metabolic factors,” Freeman says. She gives a wide smile of self-recognition as she adds, “Then there are things like people being perfectionist, high-achieving, having a few social problems.”
The biology of anorexia is explained too. “Starving your body affects your brain chemistry so that you become more depressed, more emotional and more confused in your thoughts. The knock-on effect aggravates the cause. Anorexia starts as a psychological [problem], becomes a physical one, and the physical problem then exacerbates the psychological one and vice versa. As Professor Treasure put it to me, ‘Not eating damages the organ needed for change.’”
One difference marked Freeman out from the other patients in all of her hospital units: she stayed in education. “Somehow I knew that I mustn’t drop out of school, and my mother helped me stick with that. But the medical thinking at the time was that school wouldn’t help recovery. You were supposed to just focus on getting well and your parents were supposed to do everything to help you do that.”
Freeman finally started to raise her gaze above the dining table around which hospitalised anorexics had to gather at mealtimes when she learned she had done very well in her exams. She knew she wanted to go to university but would need to actually attend school for the sixth form to get there. Finally, the thought struck her, as one of her fellow patients had a full-force tantrum over the distribution of butter on a piece of toast: “I don’t want to be doing that, screaming blue murder over a piece of toast in an eating disorders unit when I am 33.”
It would be wrong to paint her recovery as quick, or even complete. She didn’t eat in public for many years, and until 30 tore or mashed her food into tiny pieces before very slowly eating them. But she did eat, and her weight eventually came within healthy limits, and was maintained. She went to the University of Oxford and edited the student paper, and after graduation got a job on the fashion desk of the Guardian.
The book details some of her risk-taking twenties and thirties behaviour – dating a number of heroin-addicted men, developing a cocaine habit, obsessively steaming and eating kilos of vegetables every day. She also believes that the final push out of anorexia was getting pregnant in her late 30s. She has twin sons and a daughter from her marriage to another journalist.
Ghosted by a Spice Girl
Meanwhile in her professional life, her star was rising. She grew from being the funny, feisty fashion writer into a star interviewer and eventually a columnist. She had her passions – 80s movies and TV shows – which meant she got to meet many of her heroes: Mel Brooks, Keanu Reeves, Michael J Fox, Charlie Sheen. But she was also the ghost writer for Victoria Beckham’s 2006 book That Extra Half an Inch: Hair, Heels and Everything in Between. She recently wrote that she ended up suffering a touch of ghostitis (her own invention, describing the sense that you have actually become friends with the star you are writing about) after going as Victoria’s plus one to the Met Ball one year. Eventually she was ghosted by the former Spice Girl.
In 2020, she published The House of Glass, a brilliantly evocative story of her father’s family. Starting with the discovery of a cache of her chic but remote grandmother’s belongings in a cupboard (which included a Picasso drawing), Freeman investigates and relates the story of the Glahs siblings who were born in Poland but fled to France with their parents after pogroms in their hometown of Chrzanów.
Three of them immersed themselves in the glamorous worlds of art and fashion in the initially welcoming French capital, but none anticipated the coming war and the Holocaust. A microcosm of the European Jewish experience, the story has death- camp murders, years of hiding in Paris apartments, narrow escapes and – for her grandmother, Sala – the chance of marrying an American and escaping the war. The origins of Sala’s lifelong sadness and her surviving one of the most tumultuous periods in modern history were never spoken about in Freeman’s family.
The book took 18 years to research and 18 months to write. It was acclaimed by everyone from Salman Rushdie to Nigella Lawson. In the Times Literary Supplement, Oxford professor of English literature Bart van Es wrote: “As Freeman’s previous books have included The Meaning of Sunglasses: A Guide to (Almost) All Things Fashionable (2008) and How To Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies (2013), this is quite a change of subject matter. Oddly, for much of the time, Freeman’s style does not change all that much from the one used in her previous publications. More oddly, the effect is not crass but joyous, empowering and revealing, even amid the horrors that she confronts.”
It was as if the reception to House of Glass gave Freeman one final, almighty push. She no longer downplayed her passions and hid her fears. Her columns went from kvetching about everyday sexism or some government misstep or other to full-force attacks on British left-wing anti-Semitism or mounting a robust defence of gender-critical women in the culture wars that have enshrouded mainstream and social media in the past six years.
At the Guardian, both of these issues were increasingly contentious and Freeman was eventually told by senior management that she could not write about gender. Although she fought back, saying that there were two sides to every story, she concluded, “It was very hard to go against what you’re told is the mantra for your political tribe.”
And then, when commenting on criticism of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s views on transactivism, she wrote,”I’m old enough to know there’s a difference between denouncing bigotry and demanding everyone march in lockstep with you. If you’re more interested in performing your own purity than understanding people’s plurality, you’re not looking at progress, you’re looking into a mirror.”
Finally, at the end of last year she resigned from the paper and took up a new role as columnist on the Sunday Times where she is writing about anti-Semitism and gender issues, but also Leonardo DiCaprio, the royal family, the Conservative government, why we don’t need a menopause law and anything else that sparks her interest.
The fears and self-destructive tendencies of her youth are well and truly obliterated, as she firmly, even fiercely, states her opinions. When asked if there is anything her years of anorexia gave her, she partially credits the long, brain-fuddled fight to not eat for her bravery.
“It’s made me driven in a funny way. Because I wasted so much time, I refuse to not do the things I want to achieve. I don’t get distracted by things that are a waste of time. I’ve had enough of that.”