“Anorexia is not a desire to be thin — it’s a desire to look ill,” she writes. But why? 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. “We don’t want to be sexy, we don’t want to be pleasing, we don’t want to have to say yes all the time,” she writes. “Instead, we’re going to be ugly, we’re going to be difficult and we’re going to say no.” And 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.
In the various hospitals, Freeman learned to sneak situps in bathroom stalls and to pulverize her meals into piles of crumbs, the better to spend laborious hours consuming them. (She would not be able to directly bite into her food until she was 30 years old.)
When Freeman emerged from her final hospitalization and went to a special boarding school known as a crammer to catch up on the lost years of her education, she changed her name in order to be able to eat; for a year, she asked everyone around her to call her “Clare.” And though she made it to Oxford, and maintained her healthier weight, she was plagued for years by self-destructive behaviors, which ranged from the relatively benign — bingeing on pounds of steamed vegetables — to the dangerous: dating a string of heroin addicts, and doing too many drugs herself, despite the epileptic seizures they regularly triggered.
And yet, she recovered, while many — in fact most — do not. The recovery rate for anorexia is less than 50 percent, lower still if hospitalization is required. So while Freeman’s subject is not new, the problem of anorexia remains — and so does the public’s fascination, in her words, with “extremely thin girls and women.”
As Freeman went through her ordeal, she encountered all kinds of doctors, with all kinds of explanations for what might have caused her illness. One told her it was because she was the firstborn child in her family; another that it was due to having been born via C-section, so “you always try to look for the easy way out.” But now, in an age of neuroscientific authority, researchers more commonly cite brain chemistry as explanation: Starvation initially causes a drop in serotonin levels, bringing a state of calm that anorexics continue to chase, just as drug addicts chase their first perfect high.
