Finding her voice

Influential British columnist Hadley Freeman releases a book about her years of anorexia.

- LOUISE CHUNN

‘A few weeks after turning 14 I  was at school in PE class. And I was sitting next to a girl who was much skinnier than me and I said, without really thinking about it, ‘Is it hard to buy clothes when you’re so small?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I wish I was normal like you.’ And this just completely winded me. Normal to me meant average, boring, nothing I wanted to be – and I just stopped eating that day. Within two months I had been hospitalised for the first time having lost a third of my body weight. I was admitted nine times to hospital over a three-year period.”

Hadley Freeman’s delivery is fast, furious, as if she will run out of breath. It is the beginning of her account of her teenage experience of anorexia, now more than 25 years in the past, but remembered as if it was yesterday.

Anorexia is an eating disorder that results in people, usually young, mostly female, restricting their caloric intake to dangerously low levels. At its most extreme it can kill, as vital organs deteriorate through starvation. But even those who are in its grip for a short time may suffer such long-term consequences as intermittent relapses, damaged mental health, fertility problems and weakening of the heart and other organs.

Even for recovering anorexics it can be a source of great shame. For new friends, colleagues or strangers to learn how weak they had been in the face of this seemingly incomprehensible force can seem an impossible admission. Even in closer friendships the condition may not be directly discussed – it is simply too hard to talk about. Over the years, I have known a small number of people whom I suspect have had periods of anorexia, and yet barely any of them have confirmed it; it is simply too hard.