Anorexia has a long history – but are we any closer to understanding it?

In 1992, a few weeks after her 14th birthday, Hadley Freeman stopped eating. Nothing very dramatic caused this. A skinnier classmate at her all-girls school in London told her: ‘I wish I was normal like you.’ But the comment triggered a change that was dramatic in the extreme. Within weeks, Freeman was monitoring every crumb that entered her mouth, opening the fridge just to smell the food, making her house quake as she did star jumps over and over again. Within months her weight had plummeted and she was sent by her frantic parents to a doctor. She was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and lived in various psychiatric wards for the next two and a half years.

She is now a journalist, formerly at the Guardian, currently at the Sunday Times. Her previous book, House of Glass, recounted her Jewish family’s experience of the 20th century, and was brilliant. Good Girls looks inwards – or, as she admits in the introduction, at her own belly button – and it’s excellent too, if in a different way.