Hadley Freeman Quotes

Anorexics tend to be unreliable witnesses when in the grip of the illness and, at times, there is an oddity about this book, a curious sense of separation between the suffering younger self and the aloof older self, but Freeman is a brave, illuminating and meticulous reporter and uses her experience wisely.

I felt so hated for saying things — things that are scientifically, biologically and factually true — and so unsupported by people who I know secretly agree with me but are too scared to say so out loud.

[From management at The Guardian.] I was told I wasn't to write about gender, and that actually women shouldn't write about gender, and suddenly things became very tricky for me.

On Monday I went to the Jewish Vigil for Israel opposite Downing Street. It was nice, but it was also strange, because everyone I could see there was clearly Jewish: the men wore kippahs and tallits, and everybody knew the words to Hatikvah, Israel's national anthem. Across town a pro-Palestinian rally was happening. I looked at the photos in the papers in the next day and was struck by what a mixed crowd it was. Young Muslims, older white people, everyone marching together in defence of — what? Pogroms? Meanwhile, the Jews just had themselves. Now we know.

And speaking of wealthy, scary people, who should arrive but [Harvey] Weinstein himself. "Mr Weinstein, Hadley Freeman from the Guardian. What would you say are the essential ingredients of a good party?" I cry out like a drowning woman. Weinstein walks over to me and – slightly menacingly, one might say – takes my elbow.
"Hadley," he says, his voice heavy with condescension, "enjoy yourself."
The two men next to him laugh obediently. I decide to follow big Harvey's instructions. And so, with a final glimpse at the dancefloor, where Jessie J is dancing with one friend to Prince's Kiss, I take my leave and go home.

I appreciate that both of these men – or, more accurately, devoted fans of both of these men – will argue that these are not stylistic tricks; rather, these men have worn these items for decades because they're as true to their values as they are to their clothes. But that is precisely the point: their clothes have communicated this, and these men undoubtedly know that. After all, being anti-fashion is as much a style statement as being on trend. Now, personally, some of us think that [Jeremy] Corbyn could consider updating his ideas as much as his wardrobe, but I know how much criticism of St Jeremy upsets some sensitive readers, so let's not go there so soon after such a nice long weekend.
So the style for leftwing politicians now (and, indeed, always) is to look as if you don’t care about your look while very much cultivating a look.

[On a meeting discussing an editorial stating feminists had the right to query gender self-identification.] I was defending the editorial and various people, whom I considered friends, were being quite personally abusive and saying it was transphobic, like people saying a gay teacher shouldn't teach children.

There is a sense in which Hadley Freeman's Good Girls has been written by two authors: the anorexic teenager she once was and the recovered 44-year-old journalist with three children she now is.

I know some people think I'm on the wrong side of history because I believe my gender is a feeling and my biology is a fact. This is known as a gender-critical belief and it is protected under the Equality Act. Nonetheless, I've lost at least a dozen friends over this – mainly from the US, but also in the UK, friends who have told me my beliefs are transphobic, even when I tell them that I support everyone's right to live the way they want. It's always heartbreaking, but also bewildering. Most of us are in the same political tribe, so when did differences of opinion become so unacceptable to so many liberals and lefties? Many of my friends supported Jeremy Corbyn, and even though I found his frequent proximity to antisemites truly upsetting, I didn't drop them from my life. I'm old enough to know there's a difference between denouncing bigotry and demanding everyone march in lockstep with you. If you're more interested in performing your own purity than understanding people's plurality, you're not looking at progress, you're looking into a mirror.

There's clearly some bias on my part. I'm drawn to Jewish comedy because it's part of my cultural shared language, which is a fancy way of saying that it feels familiar: the neuroticism, the self-deprecation, the self-aware hyper-verbosity. These are all family traits, because they're Jewish traits.
But why *are* so many Jews comedians, given how relatively few of us there are? I’ve collected theories over the years.
The most common one, inevitably, is that comedy is the natural response to all those centuries of persecution, which I guess is possible, although I don't remember hearing about too many comedy clubs in Auschwitz.
Another popular one is that because Jews study the Talmud for meaning, we are used to looking at things from a different perspective, which is the most important quality to a comedian.
I personally suspect it has something to do with our natural lack of athleticism: if you can't be fast in the playground, you'd better be funny. Hey, no one ever saw Mel Brooks jogging, right?
And what has brought more joy to people’s lives, Blazing Saddles or running? We naturally brilliant Jews know the answer to that one.

The relationship between Britain and America, from Britain's perspective, has always reminded me of the one between Frasier Crane and his brother Niles: there's the big, brassy, embarrassing, famous and attention-seeking brother who hogs the spotlight, and then there's the smaller, sharper, more self-aware and overly self-conscious brother who is both scornful of his sibling's shallow fame but also faintly jealous of it and hides the latter beneath snarky jibes. Of course I get it: having lived in America and Britain I can see all too well how America's cheerful, unabashed tendencies towards arrogance, superficiality and shameless ambition grate against Britain's preference for self-effacement, awkwardness and grim failure. What I don't get is why folk in Britain bother getting wound up about it. Any hint of an American tradition coming to Britain – high-school proms, Daily Show-a-like nightly talkshow, will.i.am – and Radio 4 programmes and newspaper articles sprout up most self-righteously debating whether America is "taking over British culture". Come on, Britain, you're better than this. Make like Niles and take out your handkerchief, wipe away the germs and walk on past. It'll probably go away soon.

I understand it's a subject that gets very heated. I've tried to be very calm and measured and look at both sides of it. And what you get from the other side, if you’re just trying to defend what is literally the law in this country, is to be told you're killing children, you're a bigot – this very violent way of talking.

An eating disorder is a mental illness. It is characterised by the sufferer's belief that they are too fat, that to survive on 500 calories a day is the norm, that doctors are trying to make them fat, that weighing more than seven stone is obese and unacceptable. So far, so paranoid.
Yet the current culture of skinniness legitimises the anorexic's beliefs. That is where the danger lies. Once a person becomes severely anorexic, they are usually too locked into their own little world to care if Jennifer Aniston is now a size six, or to read about Jodie Kidd's protruding hip bones. But when they try to recover, it is very difficult to shake off these old beliefs when every other magazine cover seems to validate them.

What a strange, Alice-through-the-looking-glass time it is to be a liberal American Jew in Britain. When I was growing up in New York, it was a given that one supported Israel. Israel, like America, was a country made from desperate immigrants. It was where my great-grandmother lived after seeing two of her sons go to the concentration camps, and where the memorial for my great-uncle Jakob, who was murdered in Auschwitz, was erected. Israel was the Holocaust's happy ending, and you only have to look at Hollywood to know how much America loves simple happy endings. Israel = good, Israel’s enemies = evil antisemites. But to be honest, I always resented this. I dislike being told what to think, or people making lazy assumptions about where my loyalties should lie.

Obviously there have been some men in this argument who have lost work — most obviously Graham Linehan [...] But the vast, vast majority are women. It’s the women journalists who write about this who get singled out, whether it's myself or Sonia Sodha or Catherine Bennett or Helen Lewis. There are men who write about this — James Kirkup, David Aaronovitch, Matthew d'Ancona — but they've had nothing like the abuse that Julie Bindel has had or Suzanne Moore has had. It's totally a gendered thing. Which just goes to show that some people really do know what a woman is.