Hadley Freeman

Hadley Freeman is a journalist (ex Guardian, now The Times), and as a teenager spent 2-3 years living in psychiatric wards being treated for anorexia nervosa. In this open account of her mental health struggles, she gives the 'insider's' view of this heartbreaking illness both from her own experience and that of others treated at the same time as her in some of the hospitals, as well as examining how treatment has / hasn't changed since the 1990s.

Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of show more any mental health disorder, with up to 10% dying within 10 years of diagnosis and up to 20% within 20 years. 20% of deaths are due to suicide.

Although desperately sad I found this an engaging and really informative book. Parts that stuck out for me included how seemingly innocuous some of the triggers to this dreadful illness were (her own trigger was a thinner girl in PE telling her she wished her legs could look 'normal' like her's), and how the drastic food reduction is a symptom rather than the issue itself, with the real issue being poor self-esteem and mental health often triggered by the onset of puberty. 90% of sufferers are girls, with many struggling to cope with the confusing transition from girlhood to womanhood, and as the average age of puberty is getting younger, so too is the age girls are developing anorexia.

As Freeman describes it, calorie counting and excessive exercising is a control mechanism for young girls terrified of all the things that feel so out of control in their lives. In her view it's not triggered by skinny models or even really about wanting to be thin, but is a mental disorder than shares commonality with traits of obsession (OCD is common for many sufferers) and addiction (ditto higher rates than normal of alcohol or drug abuse in later life). In the recent past it was thought that there was a strong correlation between autism and anorexia, and while this has been mostly debunked there is again a lot of crossover in traits and behaviours, although with different causes,

The author is also very honest about how she came to see extended hospital stays as a safe retreat from the world, somewhere where she didn't have to worry about anything beyond restricting her calorie intake and where life could be put on pause.

Another area that was thought provoking was the struggle of living life after so-called recovery; how anorexia food controls can be quickly replaced by other obsessive and/or destructive behaviour, and how difficult it is to develop a normal relationship with food after so many years of self-sabotage. Also how the body often keeps the score of the damage done to it in those years of self-starvation.

The bleak reality for any parent trying to help a child with anorexia is that in Freeman's view the only constructive thing a parent can do is to hand the child over to specialist in-patient help. No amount of cajoling, tough love or eggshell stepping will have any impact on a child with such serious mental health issues.

4 stars - not a sunny read, but an honest and well-written insight into such a grave mental illness. show less

“When you grow up your heart dies.” - The Breakfast Club (John Hughes)

I am a 80’s tragic.. the music, the fashion, the movies... (just joking about the fashion). If asked, The Breakfast Club and Dirty Dancing are my two all time favourite movies, so when I saw Life Moves Pretty Fast by Hadley Freeman mentioned on booksaremyfavouriteandbest, I added it to my TBR list.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from Life Moves Pretty Fast, apart from an entertaining stroll through my adolescent show more memories, but I found it much more thought provoking than I was anticipating. Part personal reminisce, part analysis, Hadley enthusiastically examines many of the 1980’s movies (English speaking) Gen Xers will remember fondly from their youth.

While Freeman’s obsession with Ghostbusters and Bill Murray eludes me, as does the inevitable, and in my opinion inexplicable, (American) preoccupation with The Princess Bride, a variety of movies rate in depth discussion from Freeman like Ferris Bueller‘s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, Back to the Future, When Harry Met Sally, Beverly Hills Cop, and my aforementioned favourites, The Breakfast Cub and Dirty Dancing, others rate only a few lines, like Mannequin, Blue’s Brothers, and Cant Buy Me Love. It should be noted that the author’s attention is heavily skewed in favour of teen movies and ‘chick flicks’, so there is little mention of whole swathes of cinematic genres like action blockbusters.

There is a strong feminist slant to Freeman’s analysis, and I think she, and several of the people whom she interviewed, like Melissa Silverstein, made some excellent points about movies then, and movies now, that I’d never given much thought to, especially in relation to Dirty Dancing and Pretty in Pink. However, I also thought that at times her position was a little thin, and contradictory.

Surprisingly I actually enjoyed Freeman’s footnotes, which I’d usually dismiss, and I loved Freeman’s dozen or so ‘Top’ lists, including ‘The Top Five Movie Montages’ and ‘The Ten Best Rock Songs on an Eighties Movie Soundtrack’. Though I didn’t always agree with her opinion, I very much enjoyed the nostalgia they evoked.

I believe you need to have seen, and enjoyed, a good number of 80’s movies to enjoy Life Moves Pretty Fast, which shouldn’t be a problem if you are aged between say forty and fifty. I’ve tried to introduce (ie. force) my teen daughters to more than one but haven’t been terribly successful. Honestly, several of them don’t hold up well, but they will all nethertheless have a place in my heart. show less

Okay. Well. I rarely finish a non-fiction book these days, even the ones I think are amazing, so the fact that I made it to the last page is saying something.* I think the reason I was able to finish this one is that it accomplished something hardly any book ever does anymore: it made me really think about why I agreed or disagreed (and I did disagree, sometimes quite strongly) with what it was saying. I kept having to put the book down to consider questions like:

- When was the last time I show more actually identified with any woman in an American movie?
- Is the original Ghostbusters as sexist as I think it was? (Yes, I've seen it recently; and yes, despite the author's considered defense of Venkman's creepy behavior, I still think it's gross and sexist.)
- WHAT THE HELL HAS HAPPENED TO FEMINISM IN THE LAST 30 YEARS, AND HOW DID I MISS IT HAPPENING?
- Was I too old for John Hughes movies when they came out, and if so, what does it say about me that I loved them anyway?

That last one came up every time the author mentioned that she was 9 when she saw Sixteen Candles (I was 18, and only saw it because I had worked with Deborah Pollack--who played Lumberjack, the Girl Who Didn't Even Get an Actual Name in that movie--at a full-time adult JOB that summer, and found out through the grapevine that she had been in "some teen flick" that just happened to still be at the drive-in as a double feature with Weird Science the week before I went back to college) or that she was 10 when she saw The Breakfast Club (which I saw on HBO at a fraternity house).

Now, this is a book of essays, so the fact that much of it is about her particular experience watching these movies as a middle-class child in New York doesn't bother me; she doesn't insist that everyone else see it from that specific point of view (except for her odd insistence that nobody actually wore baggy clothes and blouses buttoned up to the neck. We most certainly did--my favorite outfit in 10th grade was Calvin Klein jeans with an oxford shirt, buttoned up with a men's tie or a grosgrain ribbon tied in a bow, with a corduroy jacket, tennis shoes, and a plaid newsboy hat, and partly that was because BOYS LOVED THAT OUTFIT. At least, the boys I liked did, although in retrospect, perhaps that should have clued me in to certain things). But in fact, the biggest reason I found for disagreement throughout the book had to do with her point of view. She remembers the 80s from a child's point of view; I remember them as a teenager and an emerging adult. Her fantasy of adult life as being just like Baby Boom (a movie I had never seen until I read this book and then found the movie on Amazon Prime) wasn't too different from mine, although my role model was Joan Wilder from Romancing the Stone, sitting in her beautiful (but not pretentious) New York apartment, crying as she tapped out the last scene of her novel on her trusty typewriter.

The big difference is that while my friends and I graduated from college in the late 80s and were tossed out to make our way in the middle of a recession, she was going off to junior high, where she got to weather it out--and come out in a much more opportune time for our generation (we are in the same generation, but early GenXers like me had a vastly different situation in early adulthood than late GenXers). I did think it was interesting to see some of those differences in how we saw the world, and the era, and the pop culture of the time, and I really appreciated her research. I learned a lot of fun trivia as well as some depressing statistics about Hollywood and the movie industry.

And that brings me back to my first question. When was the last time I saw a woman I could identify with in an American film? I can't remember. As much as I enjoy Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig, I certainly didn't identify with their characters in either Ghostbusters or Bridesmaids (seriously, how could anybody identify with Melissa McCarthy's character in Bridesmaids?), or MM's in Spy, either--although, again, I really liked her performance.

Then there's my third question: What the hell has happened to feminism? I've seen Baby Boomers accuse my generation of "dropping the ball" or getting complacent because we didn't see how hard they had to fight for everything. But that's not accurate. We saw our mothers, who were brought up to be homemakers, having to go into a workforce that didn't want them and did very little to help them succeed (and did much to make sure they didn't). Pre-Title IX, we saw our softball and basketball teams have to fund-raise to buy uniforms, and carpool to games--while the boys' teams got money from the school for uniforms... and transportation... and freakin' PIZZA. We were very aware of these things, and we made a lot of noise about them, and we worked in our high schools and colleges to get them changed. We stood up at meetings and suggested (very nicely, in our most agreeable voices) that instead of the women in the office having to WASH EVERYONE'S DISHES IN THE BATHROOM, while even lower-ranking men didn't have to, that people could perhaps wash their *own* dishes, and it became policy. ** As the author points out (many reviewers think she points it out too often, but I think she points it out just often enough), women standing up for equal treatment was a staple in 80s movies, from 9 to 5 all the way up to Working Girl, and it has all but disappeared in modern movies. She does point out in the epilogue that a lot of this has shifted to TV, and I agree. TV is the place to find strong women who aren't caricatures these days.

As many others have noted, the proofreading on this book was not top-notch, and I say that as a professional proofreader. This particular edition (a paperback) was cheaply made, which doesn't bother me; but the cheap design does. The asterisks were so tiny I missed most of the footnotes and had to keep going back after reading each note to figure out what it referred to. The lists look like somebody used a stock template to produce them--they're just ugly. But I thought the lists were pretty pointless anyway, and quit reading them after a while.

Overall, I found this to be a fun and nostalgic read, but also a thought-provoking one. It made me remember who I was in the 80s, and who I wanted to be, and question why that's not who I became. I think that makes it a pretty damn good book.

* Okay, I skipped the lists at the end, because I found all of the lists superfluous. But the footnotes were infectious, obviously.
** True story. Me, 1994. show less

Important: don't read this if you'd rather not be overwhelmed by the desire to binge-watch all your favorite old 80s movies, plus a few more you somehow missed! I only wish this came with a curated Youtube playlist of video clips and soundtracks...

Anyway, it sounds like a fun, frothy topic, right? Eighties movies and why we love them! And it IS a fun topic. I was reminded of how many eighties movies are still irresistible classics, but Freeman also talks about the ones that haven't stood show more the test of time.

This book isn't frothy, though -- it's got real substance. In fact, I wonder if it was adapted from a particularly fun thesis, because there's smart, cogent analysis of several films, plus interviews with directors (many of whom say they wouldn't be able to get their most famous movies made today), and interesting, thoughtful commentary on how and why movies today are so different from their 80s counterparts. Some of that is pointed criticism of today's focus on blockbuster superhero movies with huge budgets, and it had been awhile since I stopped to consider what that means for filmmakers who want to do something *other* than that.

All in all, if you love Princess Bride or Ferris Bueller's Day Off or When Harry Met Sally (or, or, or ... there are so many!) I think you'll have a really good time reading this book, AND feel smarter/more well-informed about the movie industry.

I received a copy of this ebook from the publisher in exchange for my honest review. Thanks! show less