In a narrative that combines personal experience with deep reporting, Freeman details her experiences with anorexia—the shame, fear, loneliness and rage—and how she overcame it.
Freeman airs some provocative theories, exploring the idea that anorexia can be seen as a feminist rejection of all the womanly roles girls are expected to assume ... While acknowledging that research is nascent and scant, Freeman even goes so far as to wonder whether some percentage of today’s gender-dysphoric girls might have been yesterday’s anorexic girls — whether there seems to be a common root ... Anorexia is narrow and claustrophobic, just as was Freeman’s own life when she was in the grip of the disease. Freeman seems to be aware of this pitfall. She has brought to bear every ounce of her trademark clarity, precision and wit to render her own experience, and that of other women with anorexia, with the utmost specificity and sensitivity. And she has done a service to those struggling with this disorder. Whether anorexia is a compelling subject for a wider audience is an open question, and a subjective one. I personally found myself defiantly fetching a bowl of midday ice cream as I read, and longing for wider horizons, the kind that Freeman, after years marked by desperately seeking smallness, managed, thankfully, to find.
[A] gripping question ... Though there is no shortage of memoirs about anorexia, the sharp storytelling, solid research and gentle humor in Good Girls make it especially appealing.
Freeman evokes the mental processes of anorexia extraordinarily well, and her candor will make a great many people feel less lonely. Because she focuses on her own experience in Good Girls, she mentions male anorexia only in passing. But that doesn’t invalidate what she offers at the end of the book—a summation, over two pages, of all the things she wishes we would impress on girls to spare them the sort of misery she went through ... It’s impassioned, a sort of manifesto, and we should take it to heart.
