Good Girls: a Story and Study of Anorexia by Hadley Freeman

Author:Hadley Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10 Fritha’s Story

I met a lot of girls during my various hospital admissions, and I remember the faces of many, the names of some. But Fritha Goodey stayed spotlit in my mind brighter than the rest, with her low, gravelly voice, her long, thick blond hair. I met her during my second admission to Hospital One, in the spring of 1993. She was, like most of the girls there, several years older than me, and I described her in my diary as “the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in real life.” She also had the most beautiful name—who could resist someone called Fritha Goodey?—and it suited her, her ethereal elegance matching her breathy name, chosen by her parents in honor of the girl in Paul Gallico’s elegiac The Snow Goose. She was tall, taller than the rest of us, and she had bright glittering eyes but a frequently distracted air; while the rest of us shrank ourselves to fit into the shrunken world, embracing our own institutionalization, she was often looking out the window, seeking elsewhere. She knew she did not belong in hospital with us.

There were more girls on the ward than there had been during my first admission and inevitably there were cliques. But everyone wanted to be friends with Fritha, even though she never seemed to notice. I went into the TV lounge one day and a bunch of the girls were in there, one group planning to go sit outside, the other wanting to watch a movie in the lounge. Both groups were asking Fritha to join them, but she didn’t even hear them. Instead, as usual, she was lost in her own thoughts, completely uninterested in petty ward politics. To me, who was so desperate for anyone to ask them to join them anywhere, this struck me as deeply aspirational. Fritha was not playing it cool, she was—as she often was—in her own world, a world I desperately wanted to join her in, because I adored her. She was gentle, she was kind and she was beautiful. To me, she was perfect.

We didn’t stay in touch—I was too shy—but over the past decade I’ve occasionally corresponded with her parents, Glenn and Sally, and one hot spring day I went to the family house in Southwest London to talk to them. As I arrived, they were packing up the home they’d lived in for several decades because they were moving closer to Fritha’s older sister, Tabitha, to help her with their grandchildren. I mentioned that I was also about to move and told them my new neighborhood. “Oh, Fritha and I used to go there on our daily walks!” said Sally with a smile. Surrounded by photos of Tabitha and Fritha, I didn’t need to prompt them for their stories about Fritha, because they were right on the surface for both of them.

“We lived down in Teddington when Fritha was born. She did horse riding, played the piano, did drama, dancing. Just a very full, happy childhood,” said Glenn with an audible “So why?” beneath his words.

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