Review: "Good Girls" by Hadley Freeman

Good Girls by Hadley Freeman
Published April 2023 via Simon & Schuster
★★★★

Freeman was barely a teenager when she developed anorexia, and she spent the next few years in and out of—mostly in—hospital. She recovered, but for decades afterward it was a tenuous version of recovery, holding just steady enough to avoid another cycle of downward spirals. In Good Girls, she draws on that experience to both tell her own story and dig a bit deeper into the cultural context and understanding of anorexia, then and now.

I'm particularly interested in Freeman's discussion of the intersections between autism, gender dysphoria, and eating disorders—she's not the first to make the connections, but they're new enough connections that I am only now starting to see some of them in books. Freeman clarifies early on that she neither has questioned her gender nor is on the autism spectrum, but it's still one of the deeper looks at the connections that I've seen in book form, and it makes me wonder whether she has written (or researched) an article or two on the subject.

By and large, Good Girls is not a huge departure from other eating-disorder memoirs. That's less a criticism than an observation that there's a limit to how different stories of repeat hospitalizations can be; if you've read one well-written book on the experience there are probably quite a lot of others you can scratch off the list. (Good thing I'm not good at scratching unread books off the list, I suppose.) I would note that this is definitely not a healthy book for anyone not already healthy or securely in recovery; Freeman makes an effort to step away from specifics, but eating disorders are masters at fostering competition, and even without specific numbers there's quite a lot of competitive material in here.

Freeman's descriptions of the treatment she received as a teenager can be incisive; it is of course impossible to say how things might have been different had she been treated under a different model, but the descriptions of her treatment in the 90s are largely bleak. Much has changed (late in the book she reports visiting one of the hospitals where she spent time and noting markers of more individualized treatment, such as different meal plans), but it will be interesting to see how current treatment is viewed in another ten or twenty years.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.