Audiobooks by Hadley Freeman

Good Girls: A story and study of anorexia

"A BEST BOOK OF 2023 IN THE TIMES, GUARDIAN AND WALL STREET JOURNAL From Hadley Freeman, bestselling author of House of Glass, comes a searing memoir about her experience with anorexia, and her long journey to full recovery. From the ages of fourteen to seventeen, Freeman lived in psychiatric wards after developing anorexia nervosa. For the next twenty years, she grappled with various forms of self-destructive behaviour as the anorexia mutated and persisted. Anorexia is one of the most widely discussed but least understood mental illnesses. In a brilliant narrative that combines personal experience with deep reporting on the issues around the illness, Freeman details her experiences with anorexia, and how she overcame it. Good Girls is an honest and hopeful story that will be profoundly helpful for those who suffer from an eating disorder, and those who desperately want to understand them."

Hadley Freeman (Author), Hadley Freeman (Narrator)

Audiobook

House of Glass: The story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family

"The Sunday Times bestseller ‘An utterly engrossing book’ Nigella Lawson ‘Remarkable and gripping’ Edmund de Waal 'A near-perfect study of Jewish identity in the 20th century … I don’t hesitate to call it a masterpiece’ Telegraph After her grandmother died, Hadley Freeman travelled to her apartment to try and make sense of a woman she’d never really known. Sala Glass was a European expat in America – defiantly clinging to her French influences, famously reserved, fashionable to the end – yet to Hadley much of her life remained a mystery. Sala’s experience of surviving one of the most tumultuous periods in modern history was never spoken about. When Hadley found a shoebox filled with her grandmother’s treasured belongings, it started a decade-long quest to find out their haunting significance and to dig deep into the extraordinary lives of Sala and her three brothers. The search takes Hadley from Picasso’s archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island and to Auschwitz. By piecing together letters, photos and an unpublished memoir, Hadley brings to life the full story of the Glass siblings for the first time: Alex’s past as a fashion couturier and friend of Dior and Chagall; trusting and brave Jacques, a fierce patriot for his adopted country; and the brilliant Henri who hid in occupied France – each of them made extraordinary bids for survival during the Second World War. And alongside her great-uncles’ extraordinary acts of courage in Vichy France, Hadley discovers her grandmother’s equally heroic but more private form of female self-sacrifice. A moving memoir following the Glass siblings throughout the course of the twentieth-century as they each make their own bid for survival, House of Glass explores assimilation, identity and home – issues that are deeply relevant today. This audiobook includes an exclusive interview between Hadley Freeman and her editor, in which they discuss the themes of the book and illuminate further on some of the extraordinary events detailed within."

Hadley Freeman (Author), Hadley Freeman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them fro

"Hadley Freeman brings us her personalised guide to American movies from the 1980s – why they are brilliant, what they meant to her, and how they influenced movie-making forever. For Hadley Freeman, American moves of the 1980s have simply got it all. Comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future and Trading Places; all a teenager needs to know – in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action – Top Gun, Die Hard, Young Sherlock Holmes, Beverly Hills Cop and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex – in 9 ½ Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, Bull Durham; and family fun – in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood and Lean On Me. Born in the late 1970s, Hadley grew up on a well-rounded diet of these movies, her entire view of the world, adult relations and expectations of what her life might hold was forged by these cult classics. In this personalised guide, she puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decades key players, genres and tropes, and how exactly the friendship between Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi influenced the evolution of comedy. She looks back to a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, despite this being the decade of Wall Street, where children are always wiser than adults, and science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with excitement. She considers how the changes between movies then and movies today say so much about pop culture’s and society’s changing expectations of women, young people and art, and explains why Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles should be put on school syllabuses immediately."

Hadley Freeman (Author), Cassandra Harwood (Narrator)

Audiobook

Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies

"Hadley Freeman, Guardian features writer and author of the popular ‘Ask Hadley…’ column, presents the modern lady with twenty-three essays that remind us to BE AWESOME. ‘Being single is often awesome. You can leave a party when you want to, whether that be 9pm or 9am; you don't have to live in fear of ever hearing yourself described as “my better half”; and you can spend all day lying on the sofa in your pajamas watching Murder She Wrote and eating peanut butter straight out of the jar’ ‘Don't, if you are over the age of 18, refer to yourself as a “girl” or your friends, if they are over 18, as “the girls.” You are a woman and so are they. And you know what? That's just brilliant.’ Covering topics vital for any modern woman to consider (from ‘How to read women’s magazines without wanting to grow a penis’ to ‘Beyond the armpit: a guide to being a modern day feminist’), Be Awesome tackles body image, sex, dating and feminism head on. With an attitude that is unfalteringly funny, smart and surprisingly heartwarming, Hadley Freeman is a voice of sanity that every woman should hear."

Hadley Freeman (Author), Hadley Freeman (Narrator)

Audiobook