In your book, you describe this one hospital that frankly sounds like hell on earth. It's a room of incredibly, incredibly sick girls with a long table in the middle where you're basically forced to eat three meals a day and then three snacks a day. So sure, it's not happening on Tumblr, TikTok or Instagram or whatever, but that same competitive element is still there even among the horrifically sick,. some of whom tragically die from the disease. You know, every time I left hospital, my doctors would always say, not to keep in touch with the girls I'd become friends with in there because you're then locked into that anorexic community mindset.
Shortly after her fourteenth birthday, Hadley Freeman stopped eating. From the age of fourteen to seventeen, she lived in various psychiatric wards with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. And for the next decade, the condition would revisit and interrupt her life in numerous ways. In conversation with journalist Bari Weiss and drawing on her new book Good Girls, Freeman recounts her harrowing account of this complex condition.
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