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Anorexia has a long history – but are we any closer to understanding it?

Aged 14, Hadley Freeman succumbed to it, and was offered many conflicting explanations. She herself finally attributes it to a fear of approaching womanhood

29 April 2023

9:00 AM

29 April 2023

9:00 AM

Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia Hadley Freeman

4th Estate, pp.288, 16.99

In 1992, a few weeks after her 14th birthday, Hadley Freeman stopped eating. Nothing very dramatic caused this. A skinnier classmate at her all-girls school in London told her: ‘I wish I was normal like you.’ But the comment triggered a change that was dramatic in the extreme. Within weeks, Freeman was monitoring every crumb that entered her mouth, opening the fridge just to smell the food, making her house quake as she did star jumps over and over again.

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