Hadley Freeman clearly knows what she is talking about and this terrifying memoir feels like an important one to have out in the world, to discuss the trials of disordered eating and how much impact it can have on someone. Big fan of Hadleys work and even though this is somewhat darker in places, and you will certainly shed a tear or ten it is such an important story

I am a huge fan of the author's journalism and in Good Girls she brings this authenticity and openness to telling her own and others stories of their experiences of anorexia. As she says it is not just her story but many women's stories.
Her own anorexia set in during her early teenage years and she tells the story of it's development and her hospitalisations with rawness and honesty. She explores statistics, cultural norms and the impact of social media on mental health. She reflects on how she is now and how recovery means freedom.
This is a compelling and gripping read and really opened my eyes to what it's like to live with anorexia. I would like to thank the author and would highly recommend this book to everyone.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.

This is an important book for anyone who wants to really understand eating disorders, or who has been affected by them. Freeman writes with honesty and brings to light many aspects of anorexia that aren't well understood. She mixes her own story with those of others and statistics. It's a surprisingly easy read for such a harrowing subject and I'm glad I had the chance to read it.

Good girls

The writing was engaging and lyrical, conveying the author’s thoughts and emotions as she told her story.

I have read many books on eating disorders as I have one myself, and one thing I can find is that they can get quite repetitive and not original. However, this one wasn’t like that. The author had a brilliant insight into her illness, reflecting on her journey and adding valuable information.

The brutal and raw honestly the author told their story with had me rapt me attention throughout the entire book. I felt myself nodding and relating to so much from my journey. It actually helped me realise I’m not alone in my battle with anorexia. Thank you to Netgalley, the author and publisher, for a chance to read and review this book.

Good Girls by Hadley Freeman is a brutally honest account of a lived experience of anorexia nervosa and the continuing struggle of the illness. Anorexia is an illness most people have heard of, but few have insight into its debilitating nature. What better way to learn about anorexia than through the experiences of convalescents?
Hadley Freeman's book is thought-provoking, challenging, captivating and heartbreaking as she shares the story of four fellow patients with different outcomes. The influences of literature, films and media and their effect on adolescents can not be overstated. The book has information about the treatments, perceptions and links between anorexia and other conditions like autism and gender dysphoria.
I applaud Hadley Freeman for the research and effort in making the otherwise dispairing illness more sanguine.
This book is a must-read for parents and counsellors alike tasked with guiding their young charges through the many challenges of today's perceived societal expectations.

The story of Freeman's descent into anorexia hell, and climb out via addiction and OCD was fascinating to read but her constant referring to gender dysphoria and her fear of trans people really spoiled the book for me.

Freeman is an intelligent, articulate and insightful writer and this memoir discussing her experiences of growing up with anorexia is compelling and fascinating. I particularly enjoyed her discussions about the female psyche, the pressures females are under and the issues surrounding the rise in gender dysphoria and the similarities it bears to anorexia. This is thought-provoking and challenging. A good read for anyone interested in the subject from afar, but could well be triggering for anyone with personal experience.
This honest review is given with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this book.

Brave, open, honest, illuminating and harrowing yet inspirational. These are the words that immediately spring to mind in these beautifully written but sometimes hard to read account of the author’s attempts to cope with and deal with her anorexia.

I learned so much about both her and this awful condition and I salute her for the journey she took me on.

I like Hadley Freeman's journalism, and I was vaguely aware of her history of anorexia, although I hadn't realised quite how bad it was. Here, as the title indicates, Hadley both tells her story and delves into some of the issues around anorexia in general.

Diving headfirst into anorexia at age 14 following what seemed, to this reader at least, to be a very inconsequential comment from a classmate, Hadley spent the next few years in and out of hospital. Her memoir of this time is brutally honest and lacking in self pity - in seeking to understand her own behaviour, she fully acknowledges the less than flattering thoughts and motivations she had. And she delves into the complexities around anorexia - still largely a female problem which begins in adolescence - and how much it's not about skinny models.

Catching up with some of her fellow in-patients many years later - the ones who, in fact, actually made it this far - is fascinating and heartbreaking. It's also both a testament to the skills and values of the medical professionals who helped, and an indictment of the ones who didn't - either through not really caring, issuing one-size-fits-all (no pun intended) treatment, or through being actively harmful. Vulnerable young women will always be a target for a certain type of person.

A fascinating read.

Memoirs of any sort always fascinate me as i love reading about true life stories and as someone with personal experience of having spent time on an eating disorder ward i knew i had to read this.

Its part memoir and part study of anorexia , written with such honesty that at times i felt myself shouting 'yes' as it was so relatable. Hadley looks at her treatment and recovery and it was these areas i found most compelling as unless you have actually experienced life on these wards you have no idea how bad it can sometimes be. The lengths some go to to avoid food , how you are often treated as a liar , the way food is used a a reward system ( ie if you don't gain weight you cannot see your family), at times it is brutal .

It's one of the best memoirs of living with an eating disorder I have read . It doesnt sugar coat anything and also emphasises how it's not a one treatment fits all illness. The study behind the illness which is part of the book is also written very well and for those who don't know much about the illness it can give a good clear background and maybe help to understand it better.

Highly recommend but tw for anyone who may still be suffering

Without even starting this, you know you’re in safe hands as Hadley Freeman is a great journalist: sharp and witty.
And so it proves. Part memoir, part history and psychology of anorexia, this book is devastating in its honesty but really illuminating.
Who could imagine what goes on on anorexia hospital wards: the lengths some patients will go to to avoid eating.
But Freeman delves deeper - putting this illness into its psychosocial place. Anorexia is about unhappiness and anxiety expressed through the body image.
She revisits her past and some of yhr clinicians, patients and their families that she met on the journey.
I have to say that you’re either fascinated by this topic or you’re not. And I am. So I would say that if you’re interested, it’s a fascinating though terribly sad read.

“Anorexia was in some ways like a security blanket for me because it allowed me to hide from the world, it provided structure and rules, and there was always one simple right answer: don’t eat.”

I love memoirs. Sometimes they make you feel seen through shared lived experience. Other times they invite you into a world that’s unlike what you’ve known. You are given the opportunity to see your struggles in a new light and may discover new ways to cope, survive and maybe even thrive. There are just so many possibilities when you open yourself up to accompanying someone as they do life in their own unique way, even if you only meet one another within the pages.

I have read about eating disorders since I was an early teen. Although never officially diagnosed, I absolutely had one at the time. I was lucky enough to stumble upon the right book at the right time, something that allowed me to change some of my eating habits before the slope got too slippery. That’s not to say that disordered eating didn’t follow me into my adult life. But this book reminded me that Hadley’s story could have very easily been my own.

Hadley stopped eating when she was fourteen and spent several years living in psychiatric wards.

“I had developed, the doctor said, anorexia nervosa. He was right about that, but pretty much nothing else he told me about anorexia turned out to be correct: why I had it, what it felt like, or what life would be like when I was in so-called recovery.”

Hadley’s experience was so different to my own and pretty much everything I’ve ever read about eating disorders. But that’s a good thing. Eating disorders, much life like itself, aren’t one size fits all. (Pun purely accidental but now my brain can’t come up with an alternative.) When we’re only looking for a specific presentation of something, we’re likely to miss more than we see.

“That’s what I remember perhaps most of all: the loneliness. I genuinely didn’t understand what was happening to me, and nor, it often seemed, did anyone else.”

Content warnings include mention of addiction, attempted suicide, death by suicide, eating disorders, mental health and self harm.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins, for the opportunity to read this book.

Hadley Freeman's 'Good Girls' is a harrowing but illuminating exploration of anorexia, drawing on both her own experiences and those of her fellow patients as well as wider research.

Freeman chronicles her own illness, treatment and recovery with painstaking honesty; this frequently makes for raw and deeply uncomfortable reading as she describes the physical symptoms of anorexia, the effects on her mental health and relationships with others, and the treatment methods employed in the early 1990s (including one hospital where she spent months as an in-patient which resembled a 'Victorian asylum'). However, her openness offers us an invaluable insight into the perspective of someone suffering from anorexia and allows us to understand so much of what might otherwise seem totally incomprehensible: how an apparently innocuous remark may serve as the trigger for anorexia; the sense of pride in looking dangerously ill and total dread of 'looking well'; the effects of living alongside other anorexia patients in hospital. I found the chapter on 'anorexia speak' in which Freeman outlined how she would interpret various well-meaning comments from friends and family particularly enlightening. Freeman writes about her experiences with real insight and self-awareness, but also often with the acerbic humour with which devotees of her journalism will already be familiar; this feels necessary in a book which would otherwise become unbearably bleak.

One of the reasons it makes for such bleak reading is that there are still so few answers to this devastating illness. The book is subtitled 'A Story and Study of Anorexia', and the study part is just as important as Freeman's personal story. With a journalist's dogged curiosity, she investigates how treatments have evolved over the last 30 years, speaking to a wide range of scientists and clinicians. Although progress has been made, much remains unknown. Freeman asks a variety of questions, such as why this illness is one that overwhelmingly afflicts white female patients and the links between anorexia and other conditions such as autism and gender dysphoria. She presents the scientific findings in an accessible but authoritative format.

Another key mystery surrounding anorexia is which patients will recover and which won't - doctors still find it difficult to predict how different patients will respond to treatment. This is reflected in Freeman's inclusion of four stories of fellow patients she met during her illness, whose lives followed very different trajectories, including two who died. This underscores the gravity of this illness and avoids turning Freeman's personal story of recovery into a sentimental happy ending; instead, we realise that this is an outcome that is fortuitous but by no means pre-ordained.

More generally, as the title suggests, this is a powerful work of polemic on the social pressures that girls face as they grew up. Freeman writes incisively about the messages conveyed in literature and media, for instance the validation of sick children and the repeated depiction of 'bad children' as fat. The book ends with a final reflection on her hopes for girls in the future; as she observes, "We can't always change the world, and we can't shield girls from every potential influence. But we can equip them with tools to deal with the world as it is. I wish we were better at explaining to girls what growing up involves..."

This is a moving and necessary book on a hugely important topic. Thank you to NetGalley for sending me an ARC to review.

Quite frankly, I am in tears as I write this. I feel like I have just seen exactly what was living inside of my head for so many years captured in the most beautiful words so eloquently and so perfectly, it's heart-breaking.

I should probably explain that I am a recovered anorexic (now an academic) whose anorexia was actually exacerbated by Oxbridge and I was exactly the sort of good little girl Hadley Freeman describes. I can't deny I've been in and out of units and I feel so much fellow feeling for Ms Harman's journey. I am sort of in shock, which probably sounds bizarre but it's been remarkable.

Every word of this book felt like a resonating bell (I may not have discovered drugs but I definitely found my own coping strategies for a time which didn't help either). I still remember the girls no longer here (their names and faces haunt me over a decade on), those lovely, bright, fierce girls who could have been me, the power hungry men who felt they could control me (Ms Freeman is absolutely right, eating disorder services do seem to attract these sorts of men sadly) and just every feeling I struggled to express but which was being screamed so loudly through my emaciated body.

Sorry maybe this is all a bit too personal, but this is the only book that has ever truly captured the way I experienced anorexia and I found it utterly stunning. I think that's exactly what I'm feeling, I feel stunned.

It is also incredibly well researched, combining many contrasting narratives of those who have struggled and survived and those who sadly couldn't, with conversations with incredible experts. Agnes Ayton and Janet Treasure are fantastic and hugely respected authorities in this field and just add further weight (sorry about the word choice) to the testimonies and insight.

I would, however, issue a slight warning. There is one mention of a particular weight in the book and several instances that could be triggering for someone struggling. I know at my most competitive I could have latched onto these details to prove I was even more anorexic than the author. Sorry but I wasn't the most pleasant of people back then. Just to warn you if you are considering reading it, be mindful and look after yourselves.

I do, however, hope that so many people do read this book and really gain a perspective into this world of horrors which is all too often woefully misunderstood. Thank you so much Hadley Freeman, you've made me feel less alone.

Hadley Freeman's Good Girls: A Study and Story of Anorexia is an excellent memoir cum personal investigation into anorexia. The author was hospitalised with anorexia when she was 14 years old, and then struggled with the illness for the next 20 years of her life. This book chronicles her own personal experiences whilst interweaving discussions she has had with doctors and professors into the narrative, as well as conversations with those fellow patients who she met in hospital as a teenager.

I found this to make for an unputdownable read on a topic that I (probably like many others) had very little knowledge about before picking up the book, except for the skewed portrayals of the illness in the media when awareness of anorexia was increasing in the early 00s. Freeman is incredibly candid about her experiences with the illness and later OCD and addiction, and I think this honesty is what makes this book such a compelling read. Not an easy read by any means, but one I would wholeheartedly recommend.

Good Girls by Hadley Freeman gives us a painful insight into how she lost her teenage years to such a cruel illness and chronicles the experiences of some of her peers as well. She admits there are no easy answers or cures but the fact she is now out the other side offers a lot of hope.

Good Girls is a personal account of the author's experiences with anorexia. It goes between scientific and medical information about the history of the illness and memoir. I found it a tough read given the subject matter but it is so important. I think this would be a really valuable book to help someone gain insight to a loved ones illness. A gripping read.