Good Girls Quotes

“Sometimes you need to pretend to be someone else for a bit in order to accept yourself.”
― Hadley Freeman, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia

“you’d better be something, and something really special, to justify all you’ve been given, and that can feel terrifying.”
― Hadley Freeman, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia

“I clung to rules like rungs on a ladder: they were reassuring, grounding, and they told me what I was supposed to do and, most important, if I was doing it well.”
― Hadley Freeman, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia

“Extreme self-control and self-denial are how so many girls express anxiety, and anorexia is an extension of that all-too-common female tendency.”
― Hadley Freeman, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia

“But when an anorexic says 'I don't want to be fat. I want to be thin.' They are saying 'I want to be other than I am. And what I am is unhappy. I want to be someone else.”
― Hadley Freeman, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia

“I was a darling / I was a demon / I was a lamb”
― Hadley Freeman, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia

“Life, unfortunately, is not like an ‘80s movie, in which a character has an epiphany, a triumphal rock track plays on the soundtrack, and everyone smiles at one another: roll end credits. If my teenage years were a movie, they were more like an extremely depressing and directionless European art house film that goes on for ten hours with no logical character motivation.”
― Hadley Freeman, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia

“I didn’t die, but I didn’t recover for a long time. I was in a gray fog that no one could explain to me, and so I didn’t understand it.”
― Hadley Freeman, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia

“Even beyond princesses, the popular image of an anorexic today has hardly changed since medieval times: she is upper-middle class, white and privately educated. This is why anorexia tends to get much more coverage in the media than, say, schizophrenia, as the former is easier to illustrate with photos of thin, pretty girls. The downside is that it is more likely to be dismissed as a silly rich girl's problem, like tennis elbow or Daddy issues.”
― Hadley Freeman, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia