Good Girls by Hadley Freeman: Anorexia in all its despair and monotony | Independent.ie
"I remember everything about being ill,” writes Hadley Freeman in Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia. “It was the most formative experience of my life.”
Good Girls starts out as engaging. The columnist and author brings impressive research, critical thinking and clarity to her study of an eating disorder that remains mysterious, widely misunderstood and dramatically undeserved in medical care.
Startling facts emerge, like anorexia’s 60pc rate of inheritability (higher than that of depression and anxiety, but lower than that of schizophrenia, ADHD and bipolar disorder), its high mortality rate and dismal chances of recovery. One third get better, one third muddle through with lasting symptoms and one third go on to develop chronic anorexia.
A chapter on mothers and anorexic daughters is galvanising; Freeman unravels the historically accepted, misogynistic view that unloving ‘refrigerator mothers’ are to blame for their daughters’ anorexia.
However, this book is mostly a memoir, a near-tradition, at this point, for women writing about this subject. Some titles succeed, illuminating hidden experiences with accuracy and dark humour (Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, with its trollish title and cover photo of the author holding an urn, accomplishes this). Others border on trauma porn, showcasing pain that remains unprocessed by its sufferer, even as they write. Others fall flat through their very accuracy, and this happens with Good Girls; it’s a vision of monotony and despair, describing the suffocating, isolating rituals of mental illness at its most severe.
Anorexia is boring — I write this as a former sufferer of both anorexia and bulimia, one who currently falls into the ‘muddling through’, mostly recovered bracket — and Freeman’s book suffers from the belief that her illness is the most interesting thing that has happened to her.
Other parts of her life story, including her early career as a fashion writer, and her 10 years as a habitual coke abuser, having weekly seizures on nightclub floors, are left until the end as an afterthought. This is odd, because elsewhere Freeman states her intention to write about how anorexic people are rarely just ‘cured’ by reaching a target weight, or completing a treatment plan — “the illness lingers alongside them like a faint shadow, unexamined and unacknowledged, sometimes for the rest of their lives”.
The aftermath, here, feels not only interesting but necessary, not least in the context of her life as a journalist, a feminist and a public figure. But instead we’re given more furtive jumping-jacks performed in her childhood bedroom, or memories of Hospitals One, Two, Three and Four, which morph into an institutional blur.
Freeman herself describes these years as being “like an extremely depressing and directionless European arthouse film that goes on for 10 hours with no logical character motivation”. To find fault in these passages is not meant to criticise a teenager for her suffering. It’s to ask the now-recovered, adult writer why she didn’t fill these pages with something else.
Then there’s Freeman’s insistence on a connection between anorexia and gender dysphoria. This won’t be surprising to those who have followed her career. But the idea feels forced, and disingenuous, not least because in the introduction she declares parameters around her study. Out of respect for differences, she won’t write about men with anorexia, who make up 10pc of sufferers, nor will she write about bulimia (despite mentioning at one point that she had the ability to vomit on command should she be made to eat food against her will).
These limits, however, do not extend to trans men. Freeman never comes out and bluntly states that she believes they are in fact confused female anorexics, but she circles this idea relentlessly, and tries to get several doctors to make the point, although none take the bait.
By page 220, when a doctor shuts down Freeman’s comparison between her own delayed puberty, caused by anorexia, and that of children treated with puberty blockers, you wonder firstly why she chose to leave this part in (is it not clear, as Margaret Atwood put it in an exchange with Freeman in the Guardian last year, that trans rights seem to be “your obsession of the day”?).
It’s also unclear why, as JK Rowling has done, Freeman believes she can qualify policing other people’s gender with accounts of her own pain. She argues for person-centred, customised care for anorexia in one chapter, only to go against an equivalent treatment for gender dysphoria in the next. Then she tries to spook the reader with a Google Trends graph detailing a rising interest in the word ‘transgender’, and a declining interest in the term ‘anorexia’. What does this accomplish, other than to spell out her belief that trans people somehow erase, or threaten, women with anorexia in the public eye? It’s a bitter outlook, one that assumes there’s only so much room in the world for sympathy.
There are things to admire about Good Girls. It serves as a casebook for parents, family members and friends of people suffering from anorexia. It’s less recommended, by this reader at least, to anyone experiencing or recovering from an eating disorder, thanks to its inclusion of specific body weights, diet and exercise routines.
At its heart, Good Girls reveals a bewildering lack of established fact, or research, concerning why anorexia happens in the first place. This leaves us reliant on personal narratives like this one, which raise their own questions about both the reader and writer’s intentions, and whether it’s possible to narrativise these experiences without romanticising them in the process.
As a writer, and a former anorexic, I often wonder what our current era of personal narrative will accomplish for problems like this one. Do doctors read autobiographies? How many personal anecdotes must be told before institutional change occurs?"