What We Are Reading Today: Good Girls by Hadley Freeman

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Updated 23 April 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: Good Girls by Hadley Freeman

Hadley Freeman’s “Good Girls” is an excellent memoir cum personal investigation into anorexia. 

The author was hospitalised with anorexia when she was 13 years old, and then struggled with the illness for the next 20 years of her life. 

This book chronicles her own personal experiences whilst interweaving discussions she has had with doctors and professors into the narrative, as well as conversations with those fellow patients who she met in hospital as a teenager.

Freeman is an intelligent, articulate and insightful writer and this memoir discussing her experiences of growing up with anorexia is compelling and fascinating, said a review on Goodreads.com.

“This book was really good but also heartbreaking all at the same time,” it added.

There is an enormous amount of personal revelation, both to the author herself and to us, about the dynamics of anorexia.

There is a great deal of research information combined with true stories.

Anorexia “is not a desire to be thin — it’s a desire to look ill,” Freeman writes.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Novel Relations’ by Alicia Mireles Christoff

Updated 11 January 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Novel Relations’ by Alicia Mireles Christoff

“Novel Relations” engages 20th-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory.

Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read.

These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too.