Empty

Susan Burton is thirteen and living a settled life in suburban Michigan when her parents divorce without warning. She moves to Colorado with her mother and sister, and treats the move as a chance to remake herself, from middle-school nerd into a popular teenager.

Under that bright surface, a fixation on thinness that runs in her family hardens into something worse. She falls into a repeating cycle of anorexia and binge eating, and she keeps it hidden for almost thirty years.

From the outside, her life looks like a run of wins. She attends Yale, lands a job at a magazine straight out of college, and marries her college boyfriend.

In college the bingeing intensifies: she swears each episode is the last, then repeats it hours later. After graduation she slides into anorexia, an attempt to quit food altogether.

This memoir by an editor at This American Life covers life with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, the shame that kept her silent, and her slow move toward telling the secret. It also makes a case for more storytelling about binge eating, which is more common than anorexia or bulimia yet far less studied. The prose is tart and candid.