A lasting impact of long-term, self-imposed starvation is the desire for its recognition. I’m aware that this feeling is not unique to me. My true, authentic body looks really ill. I would like people to know, perhaps by means of a badge, a certificate, a flashing neon sign, that the body they see before them isn’t my true, authentic one. There’s a part of myself I’ve never been able to banish, ever since I acquired a body that passes for “normal” (a term which Freeman herself associates with the onset of her disorder - who’d want to be “normal”?). I know how insane this sounds, how petty, how mean. How serious, though? More or less serious than mine? If equal or less, why should hers be memorialised in this way? I knew Freeman’s anorexia had been serious. To be specific, I feared it would make me unhealthily jealous. Yet I worried this book in particular would throw me. Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia, Hadley Freeman (4th Estate, £16.99) I felt it was the kind of thing I should read - I love Freeman’s writing, and I share with her both the experience of an eating disorder and politically inconvenient (for the left, at least) views on sex and gender. For a short while after it was published, I held off reading Good Girls, Hadley Freeman’s anorexia memoir.
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