Empty: A Memoir

"Susan Burton is ready to come clean. Happily married with two children, working at her dream job, she has lived a secret life of compulsive eating and starving for twenty-five years. This is a relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent narrative of living with binge-eating disorder. When Burton was thirteen, her stable life in suburban Michigan was turned upside down by her parents' abrupt, hostile divorce, and she moved to Colorado with her mother and sister. She seized on this move west as an adventure and an opportunity to reinvent herself from middle-school nerd to popular teenage girl. But she hadn't escaped unscathed, and in the fallout from her parents' breakup--including her mother's intensifying alcoholism--an inherited fixation on thinness went from "peculiarity to pathology." She entered into a painful cycle of anorexia, or "iron purity" and feral binge eating that formed the subterranean layer of her sunny life. This is the story not only of loosening the grip of her compulsion but of moving past her shame and learning to tell her secret. In tart, soulful prose Susan Burton strikes a blow for the importance of women's stories, brings to life an indelible cast of characters and tells a story of exhilaration, longing, compulsion and hard-earned self-revelation"--