hollow: a memoir of my body in the marines

＂Illuminating and infuriating . . . A staggering achievement.＂ (Publishers Weekly starred review)

A powerful coming-of-age memoir of one girl’s struggle, adrift in warrior culture

At eighteen, Bailey 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, she was told: 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, Private Williams turned to an eating disorder, intending to show her discipline through the visible testament of bone. She ran endurance distances on an increasingly Spartan diet, shoving through her own body’s resistance.

Pushed to the brink by a leadership and a culture that demands women shrink themselves, she finally looked to the women around her, and began to wonder what else she was losing. Quietly but inexorably, the power of other women’s stories whispered an alternative path to what it means to be a woman, and a warrior.

Hollow is a story for anyone whose identity has been prescribed to them--and has dared question if there is another way to live.

Bailey Brett Williams holds a master’s degree in environmental policy from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. They have published essays and short stories on feministing.com and One Green Earth, and they work at the Public Library in Juneau, Alaska. As a lover of nature, they have also worked as a ranger and backpacking guide. They served in the United States Marine Corps from 2008-11. Brett Williams currently lives in a dry cabin in Southeast Alaska, or Lingít Aaní--lands of the T’aaku Kwáan and A’akw Kwáan Tlingit peoples.