Hadley Freeman


Hadley Clare Freeman is an American British journalist based in London.

Early life

Freeman was born in New York City to a Jewish family. Her father worked in finance. The family moved to London when Freeman was 11. She has dual British and American citizenship.
Freeman suffered from anorexia and was treated in a psychiatric unit during six different periods between ages 13 and 17. After taking her A-level examinations while boarding at the Cambridge Centre for Sixth-form Studies, she read English Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford and edited Cherwell.

Career

After a year in Paris, she worked on the fashion desk of The Guardian for eight years. Freeman is a columnist and features writer for The Guardian newspaper and contributes to the UK version of Vogue. Following an article for The Guardian in July 2013 criticising misogynistic behaviour, Freeman received a bomb threat on Twitter.
Freeman books include The Meaning of Sunglasses: A Guide to All Things Fashionable, in 2009 and Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies in 2013, which was described by Jennifer Lipman in The Jewish Chronicle as "a detailed attack on how women are both portrayed and conditioned to act in public life". Life Moves Pretty Fast, appeared in 2015.
In March 2020, House of Glass: The story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family, was published. It is an account of the lives of her grandmother Sala Glass and her three brothers Alex, Jacques, and Henri in Poland, France, and the United States during the course of the twentieth century. Karen Heller wrote in The Washington Post of Freeman being "an exacting historian" who "tackles anti-Semitism, Jewish guilt and success.

Views

In June 2018, Freeman denounced the treatment of undocumented child immigrants arriving in America, drawing parallels with her grandmother's experience of escaping from the Holocaust. Freeman described it as deliberate cruelty by the Trump administration, and a reflection of latent racism amongst its supporters.
In November 2018, U.S. journalists from The Guardian published an opinion piece criticising a Guardian editorial about the Gender Recognition Act, claiming it was transphobic. Freeman defended the editorial.

Personal life

Freeman often discusses cinema, particularly from the 1980s, in her articles and occasionally in broadcasts. She has said that her favourite film is Ghostbusters. and that she has a collection of related books and articles.
She has twin sons and a daughter.