Hollow: A Memoir of My Body in the Marines

A powerful debut memoir exposing the all-too-common reality of women in the Marines

In 2008, Private Bailey Brett Williams bolted from her strict Mormon upbringing to a Marine recruiting office to enlist as a 2600--a military linguist. But the first language the Marine Corps taught her wasn't Arabic, Farsi, or Dari. It was how Marines speak to, and about, women. There are only three kinds of women in the Marine Corps: you can be a bitch, a dyke, or a whore.

Determined to prove she's not whatever it is the men around her believe a woman to be, Williams turned to an eating disorder. As she ran mile after mile on an increasingly Spartan diet, she was forced to reckon with the limitations of her beliefs. To embody the Marines is to lose something, but Williams wasn't yet sure what it was she's losing, along with a third of her body weight. Pushed to the brink time and time again by a culture that demands women torture themselves in order to possibly deserve the right to take up space, Bailey began to show the cracks; desperate to be free, she marked her calendar - either by this date, she'dbe honorably discharged, or she'd kill herself.

Informed by ten years of rehab and the wisdom of hindsight, Hollow is a story for anyone whose identity has been prescribed to them--and has dared question if there is another way to live.