By Pamela Paul, Photo illustration: Kim Hoeckele/The New York Times, The New York Times, April 20, 2023
She was exposed to toxic substances as a baby. She was too mature for her age. She was too smart for her school. She was not smart enough for her school. Her school was too rigid. Her school was too flexible. She did ballet as a child. She had a hormonal imbalance. She was just unbalanced. She was painfully immature. She wanted attention. She wanted to disappear. She was obsessed with sex. She had an aversion to sex. She wanted to be a boy. She wanted to be Kate Moss. She was part of the zeitgeist.
These are among the 75 explanations given by doctors, therapists and others to Hadley Freeman for her severe anorexia nervosa.
Freeman, the author of a riveting new memoir, “Good Girls: A Study and Story of Anorexia,” became sick during the 1990s, but over the last few years, the incidence of anorexia, which predominantly affects preteen and teenage girls, seems to have gone up. “During Covid, a lot of published data showed increases in eating disorders both inpatient and some outpatient as well,” Joanna Steinglass, the director of research at the Eating Disorders Research Clinic at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, told me. This increase was true not only in the United States, where Freeman was born, but also in other countries, including Britain, where Freeman was given her diagnosis and treated.
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