Hollow: A Memoir of My Body in the Marines

In this harrowing debut, former U.S. Marine Williams discusses the relationship between her eating disorder and the military’s treatment of female troops. Raised Mormon in West Virginia, Williams desperately wanted to leave her hometown and find meaningful work. At 18, she enlisted in the Marines and started training to become a linguist. Initially enchanted with the Marines, she soon learned that the military mirrored her Mormon upbringing in its propensity for secrecy: Williams and her fellow women service members were told it would be better to grow thick skins rather than to report sexual innuendos and overtures from commanding officers. Williams pushed her body to extremes to prove her strength, and in the process fell back into disordered eating habits she’d overcome as a teenager. Soon, Williams was starving herself, then bingeing and purging, which caused damage to her esophagus. Meanwhile, her superiors ignored her cries for help because she “didn’t look sick.” Eventually, on the brink of suicide, she secured an honorable discharge. Williams’s unflinching recollections of self-harm and institutional misogyny are illuminating and infuriating, and she sounds a welcome note of optimism in the book’s final pages (“I’ll sleep with confidence in the hard-won knowledge I can and will fight like hell if something surprises me”). It’s a staggering achievement. Agent: Julie Stevenson, Massie & McQuilkin Literary. (Nov.)