Book info

• Title Good Girls
• Author Hadley Freeman
• Year 2023
• Genre Non-fiction

From the ages of fourteen to seventeen, Hadley Freeman lived in psychiatric wards after developing anorexia nervosa. For the next twenty years, she grappled with various forms of self-destructive behaviour as the anorexia mutated and persisted. Anorexia is one of the most widely discussed but least understood mental illnesses. In a brilliant narrative that combines personal experience with deep reporting on the issues around the illness, Freeman details her experiences with anorexia, and how she overcame it. Good Girls is an honest and hopeful story that will be profoundly helpful for those who suffer from an eating disorder, and those who desperately want to understand them.

Thoughts

I don’t know a lot about Hadley Freeman’s work, but have seen the occasional article here and there. This book details her own experience of anorexia as a teenager, spending a good few years in and out of eating disorder hospitals, but it also approaches the subject as a journalist might - looking for facts, figures, the development and evolvement of the disorder and how it’s treated, plus catching up with people from her past and seeing how they are doing now. It’s a stark read, brutal in places, but a really important and honest look at a disorder that is misunderstood and often mishandled.

Rating: 5 / 5