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3 Things We Learned About Zayn Malik in His New Book, Zayn

Zayn Malik’s debut book, Zayn, dropped today, and the internet is abuzz with the revelations surrounding the ex-One Directioner. “There are things I address in the book that are very personal to me,” read an Instagram he posted last night. “Things that I have never told anyone, things I still find hard to talk about.”

Here, three major things we learned about the 23-year-old singer.

He’s grateful for his time with One Direction

In an excerpt published on Teen Vogue, the singer opens up about his time in One Direction. “I got to meet amazing fans, and I can never thank all of them enough for the love and support they gave me during the good times, and the bad,” the singer writes. “I can honestly say I’m proud of a lot of stuff from the One Direction days. I’m not sure people realize that, but I am.” Cue the awws.

He developed an eating disorder a few months before leaving One Direction

“Something I’ve never talked about in public before, but which I have come to terms with since leaving the band, is that I was suffering from an eating disorder,” Malik wrote in an exclusive excerpt published by The Sun. “It wasn’t as though I had any concerns about my weight or anything like that, I’d just go for days—sometimes two or three days straight—without eating anything at all. It got quite serious, although at the time I didn’t recognise it for what it was,” he wrote. “I think it was about control. I didn’t feel like I had control over anything else in my life, but food was something I could control, so I did.”

He suffers from anxiety

Malik reveals that he struggled with anxiety during his time with One Direction, but that it became more difficult to cope with once he went solo. “As a solo performer, I felt much more exposed, and the psychological stress of performing had just gotten to be too much for me to handle—at that moment, at least,” he wrote in an exclusive excerpt published by Time. “Anxiety is nothing to be ashamed of; it affects millions of people every day.”

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