GOOD GIRLS

Someone who fought the beast and won uses her own experience and thorough research to explain what anorexia is—and isn’t.

Longtime Guardian columnist Freeman, author of House of Glass, is a talented writer and researcher whose personal history with anorexia as a young woman required numerous hospitalizations. She remembers her trigger moment with absolute clarity. It was just after her 14th birthday when a classmate with very skinny legs said, "I wish I was normal like you." Having reconnected with several women she met in hospitals along the way, she pulls in their experiences, as well, explaining that "anorexia was a bomb inside us, just waiting for the right time, the single flame, the trigger." The author’s thorough explanation of the disease and its treatment completely debunks many myths—e.g., “all that was needed to cure anorexia was for Kate Moss to eat some chips.” A chapter called “The Theories” is a simultaneously hilarious and horrifying three-page poem that lays out “an incomplete list of reasons doctors, therapists and outsiders have given over the years for why I became anorexic.” Freeman is sharp, funny, and literate. In discussing her school reading during that transitional 14th summer, she writes, "I don't blame John Fowles for my anorexia, but he did make an effective soundtrack for it." She also labels Roald Dahl "the Anna Wintour of children's literature when it comes to fatphobia" and shares crucial life wisdom from Spaceballs and Lethal Weapon. With several sources indicating an "epidemic of extreme anxiety among girls"—a 2019 study showed rates of self-harm had tripled since 2000—Freeman's insights are essential. For mothers of daughters in crisis, she offers a wise message: “Get professional help as soon as you can, and don't become her caregiver."

If you need to understand anorexia, look no further. This is the book for you.