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Hadley Freeman on Anorexia and Finding the Will to Live, With Bari Weiss

Hadley Freeman talks to Bari Weiss about her struggles with mental health and the insights she has gained

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.

Now, decades later, the award-winning Sunday Times columnist has written a book, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia, about her struggles with mental health and the insights she has gained. And in April 2023 she came to Intelligence Squared to address the complexities and misunderstandings surrounding anorexia. As she argued, it isn’t really about the food. It’s about the fear of becoming a woman; it’s about the belief that you are supposed to be perfect; and it’s about creating a new, smaller world which has one simple rule: don’t eat. 

In conversation with journalist and author Bari Weiss, Freedman shared her message that the present doesn’t have to be a life sentence and that ultimately life can be enjoyed.

Praise for Hadley Freeman’s Good Girls

‘For parents of girls with eating disorders, this is vital, revelatory, and deeply moving.’  – Caitlin Moran

‘Breaking the silence around eating disorders with piercing honesty.’ – Hugo Rifkind, Times columnist

 


Speakers

Speaker

Hadley Freeman

Staff writer at The Sunday Times and author of Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia


Staff writer at The Sunday Times who was previously at The Guardian for more than two decades. Her last book, House of Glass, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Her next book, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia, will be published in the US and UK in April 2023.  
Chair

Bari Weiss

Journalist, founder and editor of The Free Press, and host of the podcast Honestly


 Founder and editor of The Free Press and host of the podcast Honestly. From 2017 to 2020, Weiss was an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times. Before that, she was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet Magazine. Weiss is the winner of the LA Press Club's 2021 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. She is also the winner of the Reason Foundation’s 2018 Bastiat Prize, which honours writing that ‘best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence.’ In 2019, Vanity Fair called Weiss the New York Times's ‘star opinion writer.’ Her first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, was the winner of a 2019 National Jewish Book Award.